Places of Persecution & Process of Extermination

Introduction

Just a few days after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Minsk was occupied by the German Wehrmacht on 28 June 1941. Just a month later, the occupied area was organized with its four general commissariats of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and White Ruthenia (Belarus). Minsk became the administrative center.

How many people lost their lives at the Maly Tracjanec extermination site is still uncertain today. The Minsk department of the Soviet Investigative Commission, which was the first to examine the crime scene, gave a total of 206,500 people in 1944. Of these, about 150,000 had been murdered in Blahauščyna, about 50,000 in Šaškouka and about 6,500 at the Tracjanec estate. However, these are not reliable data, as the estimates are likely to have been made provisionally and also under political pressure to calculate high numbers of victims for the Soviet Union. In fact, fewer victims are assumed today.