Kohl Visits Memorial to Victims of Nazis in Ukraine : Diplomacy: German leader’s trip includes call for Kiev to ratify nuclear disarmament treaties. He also promises aid for dismantling warheads.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl laid a wreath at a memorial to victims of the Nazi Holocaust here Wednesday during a visit aimed at atoning for Germany’s war crimes and stressing its Ostpolitik in the former Soviet Union.

Kohl, on his first visit here since Ukraine’s independence, called on the nation’s leaders to ratify nuclear disarmament treaties and promised financial aid in dismantling atomic warheads on its territory.

With ethnic tensions in Germany mounting after the murder of five Turks in Solingen late last month, Kohl’s visit to the Babi Yar memorial held as much significance in his own country as in Ukraine.

“Particularly in these days, we are reminded that the history of our peoples holds a dark and dreadful chapter,” the chancellor said in a speech at a state dinner. “We Germans are aware of our history and take the responsibility that derives from that very seriously.”

At Babi Yar, the German leader stood for a minute in front of an imposing concrete and stone memorial, bowed his head and left.

The memorial commemorates events that began a week after the Nazis arrived in Kiev in September, 1941: Nazi death squads set about ridding the area of its Jewish population. Between 1941 and 1943, up to 200,000 people, mainly Jews, but also Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Gypsy residents, were shot and flung into communal graves. Although it was not the methodical genocide of the concentration camps, Babi Yar was one of the first Nazi attempts to liquidate an entire Jewish population.

Soviet authorities never recognized the tragedy as mainly Jewish. The memorial, towering 100 feet above the burial pits, was built as much in homage to Soviet power as to the dead. Thirty-foot-high figures meant to depict the victims look more Slavic than Jewish.

Only in the dying days of Communist power could Jews officially share in the bereavement. In 1991, Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk, eager to unite his country on the eve of independence, acknowledged the Jewish claim to the site. Shortly afterward, a large bronze menorah, the ceremonial seven-branched candelabrum that is an emblem of Judaism, was placed there.

Referring to the breakup of the Soviet empire, Kohl told Kravchuk and other guests at a dinner Wednesday: “The same historical processes that allowed Ukraine to achieve independence allowed the German people to find their unity.”

The chancellor made it clear that he had come to resolve two other legacies of the past. He added his voice to an international effort to persuade Ukraine to rid itself of 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles inherited from the Soviet Union. And he called for the return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans to Ukraine from Central Asia, where they had been banished by Soviet authorities during World War II.

“For global stability, the acceptance of the START I and START II (nuclear arms reduction) treaties are of extraordinary importance,” he said. “The same applies to Ukraine’s accession to the (Nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he said.

Ukraine’s reluctance to ratify START I and the non-proliferation treaty is a source of tension between Ukraine and Russia, which is eager to gain a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.

Kohl’s visit to Ukraine was an effort to show that he is not playing favorites with Moscow, which he has visited twice this year. He also made it clear that Germany is watching both rivals cautiously.