war from the Syrets concentration camp were forced to build funeral pyres out of Jewish gravestones and exhume the bodies for cremation. Trials In the aftermath of the war, several SS commanders who had planned and supervised the massacre were arrested and put on trial. Paul Blobel, the overall commander of the SS unit responsible for the massacre, was sentenced to death by the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged on 7 June 1951 at Landsberg Prison. Otto Rasch was also indicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial but his case was discontinued for health reasons, and he died in prison in 1948. Friedrich Jeckeln was convicted of war crimes by a Soviet military tribunal in the Riga Trial, sentenced to death, and hanged on 3 February 1946. Kurt Eberhard was arrested by US authorities but committed suicide while in custody in 1947. In January 1946, 15 former members of the German police (including Paul Scheer) were tried in Kyiv over their roles in the massacre and other atrocities. Twelve of them were sentenced to death (Fritz Beckenhof, Karl Burckhardt, Georg Heinisch, Wilhelm Hellerforth, Hans Isenmann, Emil Jogschat, Emil Knoll, Willi Meier, Paul von Scheer, Eckart Hans von Tschammer und Osten, Georg Truckenbrod, and Oskar Walliser). The other three received prison sentences. Those condemned to death were publicly hanged in the town square of Kyiv on 29 January 1946. Erich Koch, who had been Reichskommissar of Ukraine at the time, was tried and sentenced to death by a Polish court for his atrocities in occupied Poland. However, he was never tried for his crimes in occupied Ukraine. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1986. Two additional perpetrators were given prison sentences at the Nuremberg Trials. In 1967, 11 men were charged for participating in the massacre in a German court in Darmstadt. After a 14 month trial, seven were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging between four and fifteen years. In 1971, three more former German police officials were put on trial in Regensburg. The vast majority of the perpetrators were never tried for their roles in the massacre. Remembrance After the war, specifically Jewish commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the Soviet Union's policies. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins "Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("Over Babi Yar there are no monuments"); it is also