On October 21, 1943, the Nazis killed about 22 thousand prisoners of the Minsk ghetto. The total number of people killed here is estimated at 80-90 thousand. Along with Lvov and Kiev, the capital of the BSSR became the site of one of the most massive killings of the Jewish population in the territories occupied by the Nazis. Historians note that in Belarus there was a rather low level of collaboration - due to the lack of local "personnel", the Nazis had to rely on the help of accomplices recruited in the Baltics and Ukraine. About the tragedy of the Minsk ghetto.
Belorussia, which in the summer of 1941 found itself at the forefront of the Nazi offensive against the USSR, became a trap for hundreds of thousands of local Jews who did not have time to evacuate deep into the territory of the Soviet Union.
“During the tsarist Russia, the Belarusian provinces were part of the so-called Pale of Settlement, where Jews were allowed to settle without restrictions. In many small townships, Jews accounted for more than 50% of the total population,”said historian and writer Konstantin Zalessky in an interview.
There were no pogroms
From the western regions of the BSSR, which were the first to be attacked by the Wehrmacht and were captured already in June 1941, only 11% of the Jewish population was evacuated. From the areas left by the Red Army in mid-July, 43-44% of Jews left for the east, and about 60-65% from the eastern part of the republic.
It should be noted that even after the retreat of the Red Army, the Belarusians, despite the danger that threatened them, behaved loyally towards the Jews, in contrast to the inhabitants of the Baltic States and Western Ukraine. According to historians, only a few hundred citizens of the BSSR were noticed in manifestations of aggression towards their fellow Jews.
“To the credit of the Belarusian people, there were no pogroms on the territory of the republic, especially within the borders of 1939. This was all done by special German units, Lithuanian auxiliary units, a Latvian company formed in Minsk, and a fairly multinational local police. But in any case, these were organized special forces. There was no explosion of popular anger of Belarusians against Jews,”the news agency Sputnik Belarus quotes the words of the Israeli historian, employee of the National Institute for the Memory of Victims of Nazism and Heroes of the Yad Vashem Resistance Aaron Schneer.
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The massacres of Jews were carried out by Sonderkommando and Einsatzgruppen with the aim of "cleaning up the rear" of the advancing German troops. It was in Belarus that not only the SS, but also the Wehrmacht were most often involved in the murders of Jews. In the deeper rear, the Nazis formed Jewish ghettos - there were more than 200 of them on the territory of Belarus. The largest was the ghetto in Minsk.
Minsk ghetto
By the beginning of August 1941, about 80 thousand Jews were herded into the Minsk ghetto, both from the capital of the BSSR itself and from other settlements of the republic. In autumn, the number of ghetto prisoners reached 100 thousand people. In size in all occupied territories, it was inferior only to Lvov.
The area allocated for the Minsk ghetto was not designed to accommodate 100 thousand people, so several Jewish families lived in one room. The area norm for one adult was 1.2-1.5 square meters.
According to the historian-methodologist of the Victory Museum, candidate of historical sciences Dmitry Surzhik, the Minsk ghetto had a number of peculiarities.
“It consisted of several parts: a large and a small ghetto - for Jews living in the Minsk region, and also two sondergettos - for Jews from Germany and Western Europe. During the period from November 1941 to October 1942, from there to Minsk were deported, according to various sources, from 22 to 35 thousand Jews. Another feature of the Minsk ghetto was that, unlike Latvia and Lithuania, after the decision to liquidate the ghetto was made, their prisoners on the territory of Belarus were destroyed, and not transferred to concentration camps. Therefore, only a few survived to be released,”the expert noted.
Destruction of Jews by Sonderkommando.
Barbed wire fences were erected along the perimeter of the ghetto. Jews were prohibited from leaving its territory without permission or walking without identification marks sewn onto their clothes on pain of death. German Nazis and collaborators who helped them killed ghetto residents for entertainment, robbed passers-by with impunity and raped girls. The Hitlerite administration imposed "indemnities" on the inhabitants of the ghetto, confiscating money, gold and silver from them. In addition, the black market has been fine-tuned.
People existed in the ghetto on the verge of starvation. Jews involved in public works were given once a day 200 grams of bread and a liquid stew. The rest tried to establish an exchange trade with their jailers or local residents who approached the fence. The usual "dishes" in the ghetto were potato peel pancakes and fat scraped off old skins found at the leather factory.
Victims and executioners
The extermination of the inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto took place in several stages. 18 thousand people were killed in early November 1941, another 15 thousand - at the end of November, 8 thousand - in March 1942, 30 thousand - in July. The Nazis killed about 22 thousand people on October 21, 1943 during the final liquidation of the ghetto.
Jews were shot or driven into gas chambers. The Nazis systematically walked the streets in search of Jewish children, whom they immediately killed. On March 2, 1942, the Nazis threw the children of the orphanage into a pit and covered them with earth alive. At the same time, the General Commissioner of the occupied Belarus Wilhelm Kube was personally present, throwing sweets to the children doomed to painful death. According to historians, about 300 children died in this way, along with educators and medical personnel. In December 1942, the Nazis killed all the patients in the ghetto hospital.
Wilhelm Kube in Minsk.
“There were seven children in the children's department. Ribe, the police chief, put on white gloves and stabbed all the children with a knife. I got out of there, threw off my white gloves, lit a cigarette and ate a chocolate bar,”the words of an eyewitness to the tragedy are quoted in the book“Archive of Hasi Pruslina”.
In addition to the Wehrmacht and SS forces, three Belarusian schutzmanschaft battalions, auxiliary police battalions from Lithuania and Latvia, and the 41st battalion, staffed by Ukrainian nationalists, were involved in the actions to exterminate Jews in Minsk.
This is how an eyewitness of the mass executions of Rai Chertov describes the deeds of “fighters for a strong Ukraine”, whose memoirs are given in the book “Topical Issues of Studying the Holocaust on the Territory of Belarus during the Nazi Occupation”: “Armed teams of policemen and Nazis, volunteer army. The thugs grabbed the first they met, regardless of age and gender, including the elderly and children. Those who could not move were killed on the spot. Others were loaded into cars and taken to who knows where. The smallest children were torn to pieces, taking these crumbs by the legs. Cut with daggers. Choked. Some were buried alive."
Dmitry Surzhik said that the head of the security police and SD in Minsk was SS Obersturmbannführer Eduard Shtraukh. All the military actions against the prisoners of the Minsk ghetto took place under his command.
After the war, during the Nuremberg trials in the Einsatzgruppen case, Strauch was sentenced to death. However, just retribution did not overtake all the executioners. One of the leaders of the massacres, the commander of the 2nd Lithuanian police battalion (later renamed the 12th police battalion of the Schutzmannschaft.) Major Antanas Ludviko Impulevičius, nicknamed the Minsk Butcher, fled to the United States after the end of the war. The American authorities refused to extradite him to the USSR despite the fact that he personally gave orders to kill 46 thousand people, including prisoners of the Minsk ghetto.
Antanas Ludviko Impulevičius.
Back in 1941, a ramified underground emerged in the Minsk ghetto, which included 22 organizations of fighters against Nazism. They committed acts of sabotage and sabotage, and also secretly led people out of the ghetto.
In total, the underground rescued about 5 thousand people, who were then delivered to the Soviet partisan detachments operating around Minsk. 25 prisoners were taken out of the ghetto in a truck by the captain of the Luftwaffe, who worked as a quartermaster after being wounded, Willie Schultz, who had an affair with a Jewish girl. Schultz spent several months with the partisans, and then was transferred to Moscow, where he received training at the Central School of Anti-Fascists.
Memorial Yam in Minsk. Here, on March 2, 1942, about 5,000 prisoners of the Minsk ghetto / AFP / Viktor Drachev were shot by the Nazis.
A number of ghetto prisoners during its final liquidation were able to hide in underground premises and wait for the liberation of Minsk by Soviet troops. In general, according to experts, the survival rate of the prisoners of the Minsk ghetto was one of the lowest in the occupied territories.
Svyatoslav Knyazev