Dr. Martin Dean, Historical Consultant at Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, will give a talk on “Babi Yar and the Holocaust in Ukraine,” at Ramapo College of New Jersey.  The program is rescheduled from last March after having been postponed because of inclement weather. It is free and open to the public.

Dr. Dean will peel back the multiple layers of the infamous massacre in a ravine outside Kiev, comprising the story of Babi Yar.  Approximately 1.5 million Jews were murdered on the territory of modern Ukraine – where more than 750 camps and ghettos existed. Romanians, Hungarians, and local collaborators participated in the killing alongside the Germans. After the war, Babi Yar, representing the “Shoah by Bullets” – the Nazi mass shootings of Jews on occupied Soviet territory — itself inspired artists and refuseniksto break the silence which the Soviet authorities had imposed on the Holocaust. The struggle for this site of historical memory continues today.

Martin Dean, born in London, received a Ph.D. in European History from Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1989. He worked from 1990 to 1992 for the Australian Special Investigations Unit and then from 1992 to 1997 as Senior Historian for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London. From 1998 to 2016, he was Applied Research Scholar at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. His publications include Collaboration in the Holocaust (2000), Robbing the Jews (2008) and he was also Volume Editor of The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (2012). He is currently a member of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center’s Scientific Committee.