The Holocaust in Belarus

The Holocaust in Belarus is the term that refers to the systematic discrimination and extermination of Jews living in the former Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic which was occupied by Nazi Germany after August 1941 during World War II. It is estimated that roughly 800,000 Byelorussian Jews (or about 90% of the Jewish population of Byelorussia) were murdered during the Holocaust. However, other estimates put the number of Jews killed between 500,000 and 550,000 (about 80% of the Belarusian Jewish population).

Background

The Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany in the territory of Byelorussia began in the summer of 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Minsk was bombed and taken over by the Wehrmacht on 28 June 1941. In Hitler's view, Operation Barbarossa was Germany's war against "Jewish Bolshevism". On 3 July 1941, during the first "selection" in Minsk 2,000 Jewish members of the intelligentsia were marched off to a forest and massacred. The atrocities committed beyond the German–Soviet frontier were summarized by ''Einsatzgruppen'' for both sides of the prewar border between BSSR and Poland. The Nazis made Minsk the administrative centre of '' Generalbezirk Weißruthenien'' in the '' Reichskomissariat Ostland''. As of 15 July 1941 all Jews were ordered to wear a yellow badge on their outer garments under penalty of death, and on 20 July 1941 the creation of the Minsk Ghetto was pronounced. Within two years, it became the largest ghetto in German-occupied Soviet Union, with over 100,000 Jews.

The southern part of the modern-day Belarus was annexed to the newly formed ''Reichskommissariat Ukraine'' on 17 July 1941 including the easternmost Gomel Region of the Russian SFSR, and several others. They became part of the ''Shitomir Generalbezirk'' centred around Zhytomyr. The Germans determined the identities of the Jews either through registration, or by issuing decrees. The Jews were separated from the general population and confined to makeshift ghettos. Because the Soviet leadership fled from Minsk without ordering evacuation, most Jewish inhabitants were captured. There were 100,000 prisoners held in the Minsk Ghetto, in Bobruisk 25,000, in Vitebsk 20,000, in Mogilev 12,000, in Gomel over 10,000, in Slutsk 10,000, in Borisov 8,000, and in Polotsk 8,000. In the Gomel Region alone, twenty ghettos were established in which no less than 21,000 people were imprisoned.

In November 1941 the Nazis rounded up 12,000 Jews in the Minsk Ghetto to make room for the 25,000 foreign Jews slated for expulsion from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. On the morning of 7 November 1941 the first group of prisoners were formed into columns and ordered to march singing revolutionary songs. People were forced to smile for the cameras. Once beyond Minsk, 6,624 Jews were taken by lorries to the nearby village of Tuchinka (Tuchinki) and shot by members of ''Einsatzgruppe'' A. The next group of over 5,000 Jews followed them to Tuchinka on 20 November 1941.

Holocaust by bullets

Resulting from the Soviet 1939 annexation of Polish territory comprising the Soviet Western Belorussia, the Jewish population of BSSR nearly tripled. In June 1941, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, there were 670,000 Jews in recently annexed Western Belorussia and 405,000 Jews in the Eastern part of present-day Belarus. The territories of Western Belorussia in 1941 and modern day Western Belarus are not exactly the same, since the Soviet annexation of Polish territory of 1939 included less land than the annexation of 1945. On 8 July 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, gave the order for all male Jews in the occupied territory – between the ages of 15 and 45 – to be shot on sight as Soviet partisans. By August, the victims targeted in the shootings included women, children, and the elderly. The German Order Police battalions as well as the ''Einsatzgruppen'' carried out the first wave of murders.

In the Holocaust by bullets, no less than 800,000 Jews perished in the territory of modern-day Belarus. Most of them were shot by ''Einsatzgruppen'', ''Sicherheitsdienst'' and Order Police battalions aided by ''Schutzmannschaften''. Notably, when the bulk of the Jewish communities were annihilated in first major killing spree, the number of Byelorussian collaborators was still considerably small, therefore the ''Schutzmannschaft in'' Byelorussia consisted in most part of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Latvian volunteers. Historian Martin Gilbert wrote that the General-Commissar for ''Generalbezirk Weißruthenien'', Wilhelm Kube, personally participated in the 2 March 1942 killings in the Minsk Ghetto. During the search of the ghetto area by the Nazi police, a group of children were seized and thrown into deep pit of sand covered with snow. "At that moment, several SS officers, among them Wilhelm Kube, arrived, whereupon Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the shrieking children. All the children perished in the sand."

Saving Jews

As of 1 January 2017, the Yad Vashem in Israel recognized 641 Byelorussians as Righteous Among the Nations. All of the awards were granted after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many of the distinguished individuals came from Minsk, and are already deceased. ''See:''

Postwar research

In the 1970s and 1980s historian and Soviet refusenik Daniel Romanovsky who later emigrated to Israel, interviewed over 100 witnesses, including Jews, Russians, and Byelorussians from the vicinity, recording their accounts of the "Holocaust by bullets". Research on the topic was difficult in the Soviet Union because of government restrictions. Nevertheless, based on his interviews Romanovsky concluded that the open-type ghettos in Byelorussian towns were the result of prior concentration of the entire Jewish communities in prescribed areas. No walls were required. The collaboration with the Germans by most non-Jews was in part a result of attitudes developed under the Soviet rule; namely, the practice of conforming to a totalitarian state, sometimes pejoratively called Homo Sovieticus.The Kings And The Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II, Leonid Rein, Berghahn Books, 15 October 2013, pages 264-265, 285

See also

* Bielski partisans
* ''Defiance'' (2008 film)
* The Holocaust in Lithuania
* The Holocaust in Poland
* Judenfrei
* Operation Ostra Brama
* Reichskommissariat Moskau
* Reichskommissariat Ostland
* Ukrainian-German collaboration during World War II
* Vitsyebsk gate
* Timeline of Jewish history in Belarus
* Come and See

References

Further reading

{{Authority control

1941 establishments in Belarus
1944 disestablishments in Belarus
Belarus–Germany relations
Belarus in World War II
Generalbezirk Weißruthenien
Belarus


Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union