Background

On 28 June 1941, a few days after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Minsk was taken by the Wehrmacht and largely destroyed. Immediately thereafter, the systematic murder of Jewish people, the intelligentsia and opponents of the National Socialist system on the territory of Belarus began.

Warning sign in front of the Malyj Trascjanec camp, 1944

The declared war aims of the German occupiers were the "conquest of living space in the East", the "subjugation" of the Slavic population and the murder of all Jews.¹ The Wehrmacht units were followed by task forces of the Security Police and the SD as well as other special units: the perpetrators continued seamlessly the methods used to suppress Jews in Poland, which had been occupied since 1939. Many Jews were murdered, around 85,000 were taken to the ghetto established on 19 July 1941 and coerced into forced labour. By the end of 1941 they murdered around half a million Jewish women, children and men on Soviet soil.²

In April 1942, the former "Karl Marx" kolkhoz near the village of Maly Trascjanec was converted into a camp and in the forest of Blahaǔščyna an execution site was set up. By 1944, up to 60,000 Jewish people, members of the intelligentsia and opponents of Nazi ideology were shot in the woods of Blahaǔščyna and Šaškoǔka or murdered in gas vans. From October 1943 the "Sonderkommando 1005' under the leadership of SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel started to remove the traces of the mass murders at Maly Trascjanec and to exhume and burn the bodies of thousands of people. Only at the end of June 1944, when the Red Army recaptured Minsk, the German occupiers were forced to withdraw.

Responsible for content: Frank Wobig

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_{¹ Cf. Hillgruber, Andreas, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegführung 1940 - 1941, Frankfurt am Main. 2. Auflage 1982, p. 519f.
² IBB Dortmund; IBB Minsk; Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas: Vernichtungsort Maly Trostenetz. Geschichte und Erinnerung, Dortmund 2016, p. 44.}