Posted: 21.04.2022 10:30:00

Real genocide

International mass grave

The investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Great Patriotic War is ongoing. New facts and circumstances are being discovered, a gloomy picture of the inhumanity of the Nazis and their regional henchmen is emerging more and more clearly. But behind the new facts, one should not forget the old, well-known ones. The Belarus Segodnya Publishing House, with the support of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus, continues the Real Genocide project, which combines both well-known episodes of the largest crime against humanity and materials that were inaccessible until recently (or even inaccessible at all). Today you can read a story about Trostenets, which became the largest place of extermination on the territory of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War.

Objectively speaking

Trostenets became the largest place of extermination on the territory of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War. It ranks fourth after such notorious Nazi death camps in Europe as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka in terms of the number of victims. Soviet prisoners of war, Jews of Belarus and Western European countries, underground fighters and partisans, residents of Minsk, who were arrested as hostages, perished here. According to official figures, 206,500 people died in Trostenets. According to other sources: 546,000 people died here...


Witnesses testified that the victims of the executions were both peaceful Soviet citizens and foreign Jews who were brought to Minsk by special transport. The first echelon arrived from German Hamburg on November 10th, 1941. It delivered 990 people, most of whom were just immediately killed, the rest were placed in the Minsk ghetto, where there were about 80,000 local Jews since the summer of 1941. Until the end of November of the same year, six more trains arrived from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. In the spring of 1942, the deportation of Jews from Western Europe resumed. According to some reports, another 16 trains (about a thousand people each) arrived in Minsk before the onset of winter.
The anti-Semitic policy of Nazi Germany called for the extermination of 11 million Jews in Europe. Plans for the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ began to be shaped in the summer of 1941, and on January 20th, 1942, the leaders of Nazi Germany adopted the Wannsee Protocol: ‘Europe is to be combed through from West to East in the course of the practical implementation of the final solution.’ The programme was provided for the creation of a ghetto for the concentration and isolation of Jews and their subsequent deportation to extermination camps, a chain of which was organised in Eastern Europe: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek. The easternmost point in this chain was Minsk and its suburb Maly Trostenets.

Firewood for people...

In the fall of 1943, the Nazis  began work to remove the traces of their crimes. A special SD (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) intelligence agency, using the labour of Minsk prison inmates, dug up and burned in November-December the bodies of about 100,000 people who were shot in the tract of Blagovshchina. Residents of nearby villages had to deliver several thousand cubic metres of firewood to the designated place. It should be noted that the delivery and destruction of crowds of people from Minsk continued during this work.


The investigation conducted in July 1944 has determined that, some of the pits reached a length of 50 metres. During partial opening of random graves at a depth of three metres, charred human bones and a layer of ash with a thickness of 0.5 to 1 metre were found, and under the layer of ash — a dark brown liquid. Charred logs and rails were found along with bones in some pits at the bottom. Around the pits were many combs, dentures, wallets, bowlers and other items for personal use.

To tell young generations. And also show them

In June 2018, President of Belarus Aleksandr  Lukashenko, together with the Federal Presidents of Germany and Austria, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Alexander Van der Bellen, visited the Trostenets Memorial Complex, where a requiem rally dedicated to the memory of the victims of Nazism was held.


In addition, Aleksandr Lukashenko and the Austrian Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz opened a monument to Austrian citizens who died during the Second World War in the Trostenets Nazi death camp in March 2019. During the ceremony, the Head of State noted, “Our common duty is to tell young generations about the horrors of the war and its victims, so that things like that will never happen again. I am convinced that our joint efforts to commemorate the Nazi victims will help strengthen friendly relations between our countries and peoples.”

Igor Marzalyuk, corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Deputy of the House of Representatives: 
“It is known that Lithuanian death-squads were involved in carrying out operations on the territory of Belarus and Ukraine. They were also noted in Latvia and Poland. The 15th Lithuanian battalion was involved in the destruction of people in the Trostenets camp: according to very approximate estimates, the Lithuanians directly killed more than 1200 people here. Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions located on the territory of Belarus were an obedient and high-quality machine of genocide.”


Where did people come from in Trostenets
• Germany
• Czechoslovakia
• Austria
• France
• East Prussia
• USSR

Konstantin Kostyuchenko, sculptor of the Trostenets Memorial Complex: 
“At first, my project was based on the theme of the royal gates — these are the main gates of the iconostasis in an Orthodox church, which lead to the altar and symbolise the gates of heaven. Subsequently, the idea arose to create a ‘Memory Gates’. I studied archival information about the Trostenets death camp and was just horrified. I understood that the idea of the memorial should be comprehensive. I have to reveal many aspects of those terrible years, conveying pain and tragedy, and at the same time make the work concise so that it harmonises with the landscape.”


Chronology of events

• September 1941 — in the course of implementing the decision to exterminate European Jews, Minsk became one of the main points of deportation.

 
• November 11th, 1941, — about 1,000 Hamburg Jews arrived in Minsk with the first train. They were placed in the Minsk ghetto.


• August 1941, March 1942 — Reichsführer SS Himmler, responsible for ‘Jewish question’ in the RSHA Eichmann, and one of the organisers of the ‘final solution’ Heydrich visited Minsk in turn in order to discuss the extermination programme.


 • Spring 1942 — the German Security Police created a camp to ensure their activities in the tract Maly Trostenets on the lands of the former collective farm named after Karl Marx, where prisoners were involved in forced labour. Blagovshchina, a tract nearby, was chosen as the site for the murder of Jews.


 • June 1942 — Documents recorded the use of several gas vans (‘gas chambers’): prisoners died on the way to Blagovshchina.

 • August 10th, 1942, — a special railway line was launched, trains with ‘Jews from the Reich’ could move directly to the place of execution.


  • October 1943 — ‘Sonderaktion 1005’ secret special operation to remove the traces of the Nazi crimes amid the approaching Red Army took place. The corpses of the victims were exhumed from 34 ditches in the forest of Blagovshchina. They were piled on woodpile and burned.


  • End of October 1943 — a ditch was dug up to burn the bodies in order to replace Blagovshchina a few hundred metres from the Maly Trostenets estate, in the Shashkovka tract . Executions were also carried out here from March 1944.


• June 28th, 1944, — a decision was made to liquidate the prisoners of the SS joint camp. Since the crematorium-pit in Shashkovka was ‘too small’, people were taken to a barn in Maly Trostenets, where they were shot and set on fire. According to various estimates, up to 6,500 people died. There were only 5 days left before the liberation of Minsk...
(According to the materials of the Trostenets Death Camp in European memory collection)


By Maksim Osipov
Open source photos