According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Kyiv’s Jewish population numbered 175,000 when German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. They captured Kyiv in mid-September. The Nazis rounded up 34,000 of the city’s Jewish population and took them to a ravine in the suburbs, Babyn Yar, where they shot them over a period of two days on 29 and 30 September. An article by David Stahel in the New Republic described this as “the largest single anti-Semitic mass extermination of the war to date.” In a speech on the 50th anniversary of the massacre, the Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk apologized to Ukraine’s Jewish community.