Maly Trostenets Extermination Site:

History and Remembrance

Between 1942 and 1944 Maly Trostenets was the largest extermination site on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union. Until a few years ago, this site was virtually unknown. The touring exhibition “Maly Trostenets Extermination Site: History and Remembrance”, the result of a German-Belarusian pilot project, honours the victims as well as showing how and where they are commemorated.

Introduction

Warning sign at Maly Trostenets camp. Photo taken by the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary State Commission in July 1944. In early 1945 the sign was given to the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk, where it has been on display ever since.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Maly Trostenets, today a suburb of Minsk, was the largest extermination site on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union in the period between spring 1942 and summer 1944. In order to conceal the traces of their crimes, in late 1943 the murderers had the bodies of the victims exhumed and burnt. In August 1944 the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate National Socialist Crimes estimated the total number of victims to be around 206,500 – most of them Belarusian, Austrian, German and Czech Jews, civilians, partisans, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war. After 1945 a number of small-scale Soviet monuments were erected on the site and a large memorial complex was inaugurated in 2015. This exhibition – produced as part of a German-Belarusian pilot project – honours the victims and at the same time demonstrates how and where those murdered are commemorated in Belarus, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. In addition, it documents the topography of the murders and addresses the role of the perpetrators. The exhibition aims to raise public awareness of Maly Trostenets as a European site of Nazi crimes and of remembrance.

TERROR AS GOVERNMENT POLICY

Hanover, 10 November 1938: the synagogue in flames in the Calenberger Neustadt area.

HAZ-Hauschild-Archiv, Historisches Museum Hannover, Wilhelm Hauschild

TERROR AS GOVERNMENT POLICY

Directly after the National Socialists came to power on 30 January 1933, thousands of political opponents – above all communists and social democrats – were arrested, killed or expelled. Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and in particular Jews became targets of the state’s campaign of terror. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism for the first time became government policy in a modern state. Jews were gradually stripped of their rights. The development culminated in the anti-Jewish violence during the so-called Reichskristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) on 9/10 November 1938, when SA and SS units and sympathisers destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues and wrecked thousands of shops. A total of 30,000 Jewish men were arrested with the intention of forcing them to emigrate. The systematic transport of Jews from the German Reich to ghettos and extermination sites in Eastern Europe began in mid-October 1941.

THE RUN-UP TO WORLD WAR TWO

Prague, 15 March 1939: the arrival of German troops provoked dismay and anger among the local population. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was now inevitable.

Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo, Josef Mucha

THE RUN-UP TO WORLD WAR TWO

From the outset, Hitler’s foreign policy aimed to regain the German territories lost after World War One and to conquer “Lebensraum (‘living space’) in the East”. In early 1933 the Nazis were already starting to make preparations for war. In 1938 Austria was annexed to the German Reich. In signing the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, the heads of the French and British governments agreed to the partition of Czechoslovakia and the country was subsequently dismembered by the German Reich. On 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany concluded a  non-aggression pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union. The two states additionally determined their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. A week later Germany invaded Poland, marking the start of World War Two. In spring and summer 1940, the Wehrmacht conquered large swathes of Northern and Western Europe. In April 1941, German troops invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. (This explanation was added later.)

AUFTAKT ZUM VERNICHTUNGSKRIEG

Ostrów Mazowiecka, 11 November 1939: members of Police Battalion 4 shoot all of the 364 Jewish residents of this small Polish town. This was the first total annihilation of a Jewish community during World War Two.

Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu

PRELUDE TO THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION

Immediately after entering Poland in September 1939, the German occupiers began to wage war against the country’s civilian population. Within a few months, tens of thousands of Poles – among them members of the intelligentsia, Catholic dignitaries and Jews – fell victim to mass shootings carried out by the Wehrmacht, SS and police as well as local volunteers. Hundreds and thousands of Poles and Jews were brutally expelled to other parts of Nazi-controlled Poland. From the end of 1939, the SS established ghettos throughout Polish territory, where Jews were forced to live together in cramped and inhumane conditions. The deportations of Jews to the death camps commenced in December 1941. By 1945 a total of five million Poles had died a violent death, among them around three million Jewish children, women and men.

PLANMÄSSIGER MASSENMORD

Hadamar (Hessen), 1941: a plume of smoke from burning bodies rises into the air above this killing centre. Between 13 January and 24 August 1941, doctors killed around 10,000 physically or mentally disabled patients here with carbon monoxide gas in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. The killings were part of Operation T4.

Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen, Wilhelm Reusch

SYSTEMATIC MASS MURDER

The concept of the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) was a central component of the National Socialists’ world view. Anyone deemed not to belong to it or who was to be excluded was persecuted or killed. Along with Jews and Sinti and Roma, the groups concerned were primarily disabled people and social outcasts. After the outbreak of war in 1939, the first systematic programme of murder in the German Reich was implemented. Operation T4 was named after the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin. By August 1941 doctors had murdered more than 70,000 physically or mentally disabled patients in gas chambers. After the programme was officially terminated in response to public protests, the killing personnel were transferred to Poland and in 1942–1943 organized Operation Reinhard, which resulted in the murder of more than 1.6 million Jews in extermination camps in occupied Poland. The so-called euthanasia programme in Europe claimed an estimated 300,000 victims.

WAR OF EXTERMINATION AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION

Germany’s War Against the Soviet Union – Operation Barbarossa

22 June 1941: Wehrmacht troops enter the Soviet Union

Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Bild-Nr.: 30018917, Herbert Hoffmann

In 1933 Adolf Hitler declared that a racist war of extermination against the Soviet Union would be his main foreign policy objective in future. His world view was dominated by anti-communism and a fanatical hatred of Jews. For Hitler, the Soviet Union embodied “Jewish Bolshevism” that was to be eradicated. From late 1940 preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union were fully under way. The intention was to conquer the European part of the USSR and subsequently to murder the Soviet executive personnel, but also to enslave the local population, expel them on a mass scale, or allow millions to die of starvation.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht crossed the border into the Soviet Union all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Arriving at the rear of the combat troops were SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units) and other special units, which started off by murdering male Jews and political functionaries, but soon extended their killing activities to women and children, so-called Gypsies and patients with physical or mental disabilities. By the end of 1941, half a million Jews had fallen victim to the mass shootings carried out on occupied Soviet territory. In spring 1942 alone, around two million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or perished as a result of starvation or neglect – many of them on Belarusian soil.

line 1

Military Operations from 22 June until December 1941.

The German offensive against the Soviet Union initially resulted in major territorial gains for the Wehrmacht. In the autumn the campaign began to falter and in December it came to a standstill as the troops approached Moscow

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Line 2

Brest, June 1941: women and children in German captivity. Brest was the first major city to be attacked on 22 June 1941 when Germany launched its offensive against the Soviet Union. Some defenders held out in parts of Brest Fortress for several weeks. Civilians were caught up between the two fronts.

Austrian State Archive, Vienna, Wechtler collection, Michael Wechtler

Element 3

Mass shooting of Jewish children, women and men carried out by SS-Einsatzkommando 12 b and Romanian gendarmes on 14 September 1941 in Dubossary (Moldova). Dubossary was one of hundreds of places where the Nazis committed murder in the occupied Soviet Union.

Imperial War Museum, London

Element 4

Map accompanying Einsatzgruppe A’s report showing the numbers of Jews shot in Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia between July 1941 and the end of January 1942.

Latvijas Nacionālais arhīvs, Rīga

Element 5

Camp for Soviet prisoners of war in Glubokoye (Belarus), autumn 1941. Thousands of people had to live out in the open and received barely any food.

HIS Archiv, QUE 278,04

Element 6

Leningrad (St Petersburg), January 1942: residents of the city extract water from the frozen Neva River. Between 800,000 and one million people died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, which lasted nearly 900 days.

Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Nikolaj Chandogin

Element 7

Illustration “Greater Germany in the Future”, 1943. It shows the racist principles behind the Generalplan Ost (‘Master Plan for the East’). The intention was to subjugate the European part of the Soviet Union (the “Vorfeld” [preliminary area]); in the long term, millions of Slavs were to be killed, expelled, or left to starve. In the case of Belarus, the expulsion or extermination of up to 75 per cent of the population was envisaged; around 25 per cent were earmarked for “Germanisation”. The East was to be populated with Germans and to supply Germany (the “Reichsraum” [Reich area]) with industrial and agricultural products.

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, S. Ahlers

Political commissars […] are to be separated from the prisoners of war immediately, i.e. already on the battlefield. […] these commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. when they have been separated, they are to be finished off.”

Hitler’s so-called Commissar Order of 6 June 1941, which was only permitted to be communicated verbally to commanders. Translation from EUH 3033 History of the Holocaust Professor Geoffrey J. Giles Barbarossa documents (ufl.edu)

“There is no obligation to prosecute actions committed by members of the Wehrmacht and its retinue against enemy civilians, also in the case when the action is at the same time a military crime or offence.”

“Führer Decree on Regulation of Conduct of Troops in District "Barbarossa" and Handling of Opposition”, 13 May 1941, BArch MA, RW 4/v. 577, fols. 72–74. Translation from EUH 3033 History of the Holocaust Professor Geoffrey J. Giles Barbarossa documents (ufl.edu)

“1) The war can only be continued if food supplies for the entire Wehrmacht come from Russia in the 3rd year of the war.

2) Many millions will doubtlessly die of starvation in the process if we take what we need from the land.”

Minutes of the meeting between state secretaries from various ministries and Wehrmacht representatives, 2 May 1941

Occupation policy in Belarus

Minsk, 10 July 1941: the building of the Supreme Soviet a few days after the start of the occupation

Deutsch-Russisches Museum Karlshorst, Albert Dieckmann

From 24 to 26 June 1941, German air raids caused considerable damage to Minsk. Two days later, the Wehrmacht occupied the city. Males over the age of 15 were forced to register with the German military administration, which held them in Drosdy camp for days without providing anything to eat or drink. Jews were segregated from the other prisoners and many of them were murdered. The Wehrmacht interned prisoners of war in places like Stalag 352.

On 1 September 1941 Minsk became the headquarters of the newly established General Commissariat White Ruthenia. The civil administration and police assumed control. The population had to undertake forced labour; tens of thousands of men and women were transported to the German Reich as Ostarbeiter (“workers from the East”). The Germans also exploited local agricultural supplies. While one in two Belarusian children died of starvation, the Wehrmacht fed their horses with rye and wheat. Partisan resistance continued to grow. In retribution the German occupiers annihilated entire villages, above all in 1943/44.

According to Belarusian data, 1,547,000 civilians and 810,000 prisoners of war were killed during the occupation period.

Photo 1

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler visits a prisoner of war camp near Minsk on 15 August 1941. The Germans consciously violate international law; they let the soldiers to starve and, in winter, to freeze to death. Commissars, political functionaries and Jews are murdered straight away.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München/Bildarchiv, Heinrich Hoffmann

Photo 2

Minsk, 1942: execution of partisans

Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-127-10A

Photo 3

Pinsk area, 1943: village residents provide partisans with bread.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk, Michail Trachman

Chess 1

Army map showing partisan activity in the occupied territories, drawn up in 1943 for the Wehrmacht’s General Staff

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., Sig. RG-30.004_0007

Belarus was the most important theatre of the Soviet partisan war. The Germans never succeeded in bringing this territory completely under their control. They took incredibly brutal measures against the partisans and their supporters. In addition, thousands of uninvolved civilians were murdered in the course of so-called punitive measures.

Photo 4

In 1942/43 resistance against the German occupiers continued to increase. Up until his arrest and execution, the communist Mikhail Gebelev (1905–1942) organised the resistance in the Minsk ghetto. This group helped a number of Jews to escape the ghetto and join the partisans.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 5

On 22 September 1943, the resistance fighter Yelena Mazanik (1914–1996) succeeded in assassinating Wilhelm Kube, the General Commissioner for White Ruthenia, by planting a bomb. She was later awarded the title “Hero of the Soviet Union”.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 6

Minsk, around 1942: women in an overcrowded cell at the central prison in Volodarskogo Street. The German occupiers established a network of prisons and camps throughout the city. Murder and torture were a day-to-day occurrence. Many of the victims were civilians arrested at random.

Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg/Abt. Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, LKA-Ermittlungsakten StAL EL 48/2 I Bü 322; Bild Nr. 11

Photo 7

During the occupation, and above all as they retreated in summer 1944, German troops set fire to houses in more than 9,000 settlements. A total of 628 villages including their residents were annihilated by fire.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

The Minsk ghetto

On 19 July 1941 Jews in the Minsk area were ordered to move into a ghetto. Up to 80,000 people were now crammed together in an area measuring two square kilometres. The German occupiers installed a Judenrat (“Jewish Council”) to administer the ghetto. There was no electricity or drinking water and food and medical facilities were in short supply. Diseases spread. The dead were hastily buried in mass graves.

In November and December 1941, around 7,000 Jews from the German Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were deported to Minsk. Prior to the deportees’ arrival, the Security Police cleared sections of the ghetto and shot thousands of local Jews. The Jews from the Reich were assigned the housing that became vacant as a result. This Sonderghetto (“special ghetto”) was sealed off and contact with Belarusian Jews was forbidden.

By the end of 1941, the Germans had murdered around 30,000 Jews in Minsk. On 2 March 1942 alone, they shot up to 5,000 ghetto residents. In 1946 the Yama (meaning “Pit”) Holocaust memorial was erected to remember the victims of this killing operation. Up until the liquidation of the ghetto in October 1943, special units repeatedly carried out wide-scale murder operations.

Map 1
  1. “Yama”
  2. Jewish graveyard
  3. Prison in Volodarskogo Street
  4. Sonderghetto (“Special ghetto”)
  5. Opera
  6. Main railway station
  7. Goods station
  8. Stalag 352 (Masyukovshchina)
  9. Camp on Shirokaya Street
Photo 8

The ghetto was sealed off from the rest of the town with barbed wire. There were two entrances, located in the streets Respublikanskaya and Opanskogo.

Kurt-Wafner-Album, Wafner collection

Photo 9

November 1941: in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brno and Bremen, the authorities forced Jews to report to assembly points. From there, they were deported to Minsk in trains provided by the German Reichsbahn, each carrying around 1,000 people. Along with cities such as Lodz, Riga and Kaunas, Minsk was one of the main deportation destinations in Eastern Europe.

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Photo 10

Minsk, February 1942: Jews clearing snow at the station. Jews had to undertake forced labour including road building or work in factories. Several enterprises such as Daimler-Benz had factories in Minsk.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B07892, Herbert Donath

Photo 11

The German authorities systematically robbed Jews of their possessions and stored these at Minsk Opera House. Jewish forced labourers were made to sort through the confiscated clothing, money, valuables and furniture. The German occupiers traded the stolen goods on the black market.

Kurt-Wafner-Album, Wafner collection

“They took Father away and we were moved into the ghetto; we now lived behind barbed wire. Our house was on the street and there were beatings in our yard every day. I saw a fascist at our garden gate when a group was being led away to be shot, he beat them with truncheons.”

Genya Savolner

MALY TROSTENETS

The Extraordinary Commission and the Topography of the Extermination Site

The Extraordinary Commission found a total of 34 mass graves in Blagovshchina. The graves were covered over with sand and brushwood. Countless personal items such as combs, cooking pots, wallets and photos lay on the ground.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

What we know about Maly Trostenets is largely based on the reports of the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate National Socialist Crimes. The commission arrived in Maly Trostenets on 14 July 1944, around two weeks after the Red Army had regained control of the area. In the burnt-out shell of a barn on the edge of the former “Karl Marx” Soviet kolkhoz, members of the commission examined the charred remains of hundreds of children, women and men.

After making enquiries with local residents, they discovered 34 mass graves full of human remains and ash in Blagovshchina forest, a few kilometres away. In addition, they found another extermination site at Shashkovka, where the bodies of thousands of victims had been burnt. The commission concluded that Maly Trostenets was the largest National Socialist extermination site on the territory of the Soviet Union.

Map 1
  1. Arrival point for trains
  2. Assembly point for deportees
  3. Gates to the camp
  4. Watchtower
  5. Barracks
  6. Shashkovka
  7. Blagovshchina
  8. Barn

Maly Trostenets extermination site consisted of three sections: the forced labour camp on the grounds of a former farm estate, the mass shooting site in Blagovshchina forest, and a facility in Shashkovka forest that was used to incinerate bodies on a mass scale. The complex was run by the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (KdS) in Minsk. This post was under the authority of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin.

Photo 1

Maly Trostenets, July 1944: members of the Extraordinary Commission examine a corpse in the grounds of the extermination site.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 2

First page of the Extraordinary Commission’s first report on “the inspection of sites of German atrocities in the Maly Trostenets area”, dated 14 July 1944.

Gosudarstvennyy arkhiv Minskoy oblasti, Minsk

Chess 2

Maly Trostenets: members of the Extraordinary Commission question villagers.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

The Extraordinary Commission 

The “Extraordinary State Commission to Ascertain and Investigate the Atrocities of the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices and the Harm they Caused to the Citizens, Kolhozes, Public Organisations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR” (ChGk: Chrezvychaynaya gosudarstvennaya komissiya) was established as early as 2 November 1942. Its purpose was to investigate war crimes, gather documents and debrief the local population. It produced a total of 27 reports which formed the basis for the charges brought by the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/46.

The commission commenced its investigations at Maly Trostenets on 14 July 1944 under the command of Major General Vasily Koslov. Two forensic pathologists (I. M. Stelmashonok and L. E. Taranovich), a secretary (G. N. Mashkov), a topographer (M. F. Volodko), two Belarusian writers (M. Lynkov and K. Krapiva) and residents of Maly Trostenets village were among those who participated in the investigations.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
  • 1 Water mill
  • 2 Dam
  • 3 Pond
  • 4 Road from Minsk (left) to Mogilev (right)
  • 5 Turning to Maly Trostenets village
  • 6 Location of the camp commandant’s residence
  • 7 Location of the grain silo
  • 8 Location of the rooms in which the prisoners were held. The command post was also situated here.
  • 9 Location of barns used as agricultural buildings
  • 10 Location of the barn where the prisoners’ stolen belongings were stored
  • 11 Location of the greenhouses
  • 12 Location of the rooms used by the former guards
  • 13 Location of the barn containing agricultural implements
  • 14 Location of a construction site for additional accommodation
  • 15 Location of the former fortified bunker for the camp command
  • 16 Location of the barns in which prisoners were held in 1943
  • 17 Location of the “German” graveyard
  • 18 Direction of the shooting site

Forced labour camp in Maly Trostenets

View of Maly Trostenets farm estate. The photo was taken by a member of the Volksdeutsche unit deployed to guard the camp.

Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Best. 213-12 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Nationalsozialistische Gewaltverbrechen Nr. 597 Band 66

When the mass shootings in nearby Blagovshchina forest began in spring 1942, the Germans took over the former “Karl Marx” Soviet kolkhoz in Maly Trostenets in order to set up a prison camp. This camp supplied the German occupiers in the Minsk area with food, tools and other items. At the same time, it supported the process of mass murder: forced labourers had to clean the gas vans and sort through the belongings of the murdered. The camp was initially guarded by Latvian volunteers, later also by Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans from outside the borders of the Reich), Ukrainians and Belarusians. The 200 to 900 inmates – most of them Jews – were skilled labourers, craftsmen and farmers. They had to undertake up to 15 hours of forced labour per day; arbitrary punishments, including murder, were part of everyday routine in the camp.

Shortly before the arrival of the Red Army in summer 1944, the remaining prisoners in the camp, more than 100 in total, were murdered in a barn along with over 6,000 other victims.

Photo 1

Agents were trained to spy on partisan groups, and SS units were also stationed at Maly Trostenets village. This is probably why the camp was repeatedly attacked by partisans. The village was therefore declared a Wehrdorf (“fortified village”) in January 1944.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 2

View of the fencing around the camp as it looked when the Extraordinary Commission arrived in July 1944

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

“Anyone fit for work and with any kind of skilled trade had a better chance of surviving than a person who was old or frail. It was best to work without stopping. If you took even the shortest break, you’d be put on the list and shot the next day at the latest.”

Isak Grünberg was deported from Vienna to Minsk in 1942 and survived the camp.

“It would be too much to recount what we went through there. I simply want to mention that people were brought and taken away from there every day, that a number of shootings took place every day, entirely at random, and that we always had to fear being next in line. You can say that we stared death in the face every hour of the day.”

Julie Sebek was deported from Vienna to Minsk on 6 May 1942; she managed to flee the camp shortly before it was liquidated in June 1944.

Fyodor Shuvayev
1921–1989

Fyodor Shuvayev in 1960. The photo was taken when he was interviewed as a contemporary eyewitness at the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Fyodor Shuvayev was born in the Arkhangelsk region in the north of Russia. From 1940 he served as a soldier in the Red Army; he was stationed in Belarus at the time when the German Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union. In December 1941 Shuvayev was arrested near Minsk and interned in the prison in Volodarskogo Street.

At the end of April 1942, Shuvayev was brought to Maly Trostenets with around 20 other prisoners and was one of the forced labourers deployed to construct the camp. Soon afterwards he was witness to the mass murders in Blagovshchina: he had to mend items of clothing belonging to the Jews murdered there and he regularly had to clean out gas vans. In autumn 1943, he managed to escape. It was during this period that he met his future wife, Elena Shcherbach, in the village of Shabany. He joined the partisans. From October 1944 he served again in the Red Army.

After the end of the war, he remained in Minsk and worked in a car factory. Shuvayev, who had two daughters, became one of the most well-known survivors of Maly Trostenets and spoke publicly about his experiences. He died in 1989 in Minsk at the age of 68.

Photo_1

CV written by Shuvayev in 1948 for his job at the car factory. He made only indirect reference to his time as a prisoner at Maly Trostenets: “From 1941 to 1943 I was in the occupied territory of Minsk, lived in the settlement of Trostenets and was an agricultural labourer in the village of Shabany.”

Arkhiv Minskogo avtomobilnogo zavoda

Photo_2

Minsk, mid-1960s: Fyodor Shuvayev with his wife Elena (left) and their daughters Elena and Tamara.

Private collection of the Shuvayev family

Photo_3

Fyodor Shuvayev in 1975. The photo was taken at a school in Bolshoi Trostenets where he talked about his experience of Maly Trostenets.

Trostenezkaya Srednaya Shkola

“These vans returned to the camp and we prisoners were instructed to clean them. [...] I noticed a grille in the centre of the [back] compartment, through which exhaust fumes must have come. [...] The vans were often smeared with blood, with clumps of hair, torn pieces of clothing and false teeth inside.”

On cleaning the gas vans

“On 9 May, the public holiday, he took me with him to the monument. There was still a small grave there. He showed me where the camp had once been [...] That was really hard for him. [...] He often spoke at schools, in Bolshoi Trostenets too. [...] Apart from on public holidays, we never spoke about this topic.”

Shuvayev ‘s daughter Elena in 2015

Hanuš Münz
1910–2010

Hanuš Münz at a parade in Minsk in summer 1944. After escaping from Maly Trostenets, he joined “Shturmovaya”, a Belarusian partisan brigade, and participated in numerous acts of sabotage.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Hanuš (Hans) Münz was born in Prague in 1910; his family were Czech Jews. During the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938/39, Münz made plans to flee to Norway. In autumn 1941, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and deployed in forced labour.

The following year, on 25 August 1942, Hanuš Münz was among a group of 1,000 Jews who were deported from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets. The journey took three days. On arrival, virtually all of the deportees were murdered in gas vans or shot dead in Blagovshchina forest; only 22 prisoners were selected to undertake forced labour in Maly Trostenets camp. These prisoners included Münz, who claimed to be a metalworker and was put to work in a factory in Minsk.

In 1943, Münz managed to escape. He joined the partisans and fought among their ranks until July 1944. He then served in the Red Army until the end of the war. In 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he later married and opened a dental surgery. Hanuš Münz died in 2010, shortly before his 100th birthday.

Photo_1

Hanuš Münz (1910–2010), Miloš Kapelusz (1920–1942), Max Töpfer (1912–1942) and Leo Kraus (1921–1944). The four men were forced labourers at a mine in Kladno and were later deported together from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets. Kraus and Münz were assigned to the camp as forced labourers, while Kapelusz and Töpfer were murdered in a gas van immediately after their arrival. When Münz asked a German where his friends had been taken, the answer was, “Oh, they’ve been finished off already; they’re already up in heaven.”

Národní archiv Praha, Hanuš Münz, 13.4. 1910, PŘ 1941-1950, M 2953/8; Miloš Kapelusz, 1.3. 1920, PŘ 1941-1950, K 736/4; Max Töpfer, 15.6. 1912, PŘ 1931-1940, T 342/29; Leo Kraus, 9. 10. 1921, PŘ 1931-1940, K 4302/21

Photo_2

In late 1940, Hanuš Münz attempted to emigrate from occupied Prague to Shanghai. However, Europe was in a state of war and he was unable to flee. Just a few months later, Münz was imprisoned in Theresienstadt.

Národní archiv Praha, Policejní ředitelství Praha – všeobecná spisovna, 1941-50, sign. H 2481/1, kart. 3294

Photo_3

Deportation list for the train Bc 25, 25 August 1942. Of the 1,000 Czech Jews on board, 978 were murdered immediately upon arrival at Maly Trostenets.

Národní archiv Praha, Okupační vězeňské spisy, sign. Transporty, Transport Ak Praha – Terezín, 24.11.1941.

“And so the train set off. I don’t know for how long we were travelling. At the Polish-Soviet border the train stopped, they chased us out of the carriages, and we had to get into goods wagons. […] There were 70 or 80 people in each goods wagon. We had to stand. There was no water or food. The old people suffered the most. But the worst thing was that there were no toilets. That was the worst thing of all.”

Hanuš Münz on the deportation from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets Židovské muzeum v Praze

“A makeshift railway station was set up for the arriving transports. We only noticed [the arrival of a new transport] when trucks full of suitcases turned up at the barn again and we […] had to sort through the contents. […] Adjacent to us in the yard was a special repair workshop for the gas vans. And when the gas vans were made ready for use again, I knew that a new transport was due to arrive.”

Münz on his time in Maly Trostenets camp Interview with Dieter Corbach, 1992

Blagovshchina extermination site and Operation 1005

At the age of 46 Richard Hirsch from Prague was deported together with 1,000 other Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Maly Trostenets on 25 August 1942. He was murdered in Blagovshchina forest upon arrival three days later. In summer 1944 the Extraordinary Commission found Richard Hirsch’s suitcase at the site of his murder.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

On 11 May 1942 the Germans for the first time had deportees arriving on a transport from the Reich – in this case 1,000 Jews from Vienna – brought directly to Blagovshchina forest, three kilometres northwest of the village of Maly Trostenets. There they were shot dead in a pit around 50 metres long and three metres wide; their clothing and luggage were sorted through in Trostenets camp.

There were afurther 15 transports to Maly Trostenets up until October 1942, each carrying around 1,000 deportees. Only few of the deportees were initially left alive through being selected for forced labour.

Above all at the end of July 1942 and during the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto in autumn 1943, Jews from the ghetto and prisons in Minsk were brought on a regular basis to Blagovshchina to be murdered. In addition, the Germans and their Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries killed partisans and resistance fighters, but also uninvolved civilians, with the aim of inciting fear among the population. In summer 1944 the Extraordinary Commission estimated that 150,000 people had been murdered in Blagovshchina.

Today, it is no longer possible to establish the names of most of the victims. While lists were usually drawn up for the deportations from Western Europe, in the occupied Soviet territories German units committed murder without documenting their crimes. As they retreated from Minsk, the perpetrators destroyed most of the incriminating documents so that no evidence would be left behind.

Photo 1

Richard Hirsch

Národní archiv Praha, fond Policejní ředitelství Praha II., 1941-1950, H- Hirsch

Photo 2

From mid-May to early October 1942, a series of transports from the German Reich arrived in Maly Trostenets

Linksbündig

Photo 3

Page from an advertising brochure for the company "Gaubschat" in Berlin-Neukölln. The RSHA commissioned the firm to manufacture the bodywork for the gas vans .

Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Historisches Archiv, Berlin

Photo 4

This 1944 painting by Ibrahim Gembitskiy (1900–1974) depicts the murder of civilians in a gas van. The Germans operated up to six gas vans in and around Minsk. The victims suffocated during the journey. Their corpses were hastily buried in Blagovshchina and their clothing sorted through in Maly Trostenets camp.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk, Ibrahim Gembitskiy

Operation 1005

After the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, the German occupiers began to erase the traces of their crimes at the principal sites of mass murder. Between late October and mid-December 1943, Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte was stationed at Maly Trostenets for this purpose. Inmates of the prisons in Minsk were forced to dig up the mass graves in Blagovshchina. They had to pull out the decaying corpses with iron hooks, pile them up and burn them. The human ashes were sieved in order to retrieve gold fillings and jewellery. upon completion of Operation 1005, the forced labourers were murdered.

Map 1
  1. Fork in the road. Path to the shooting site
  2. Shooting site
  3. Stopping point for the trucks transporting prisoners
  4. Location of the guards
  5. Place where Saukitens stood guard in the morning

“The digging up of the mass graves was undertaken solely by Russian prisoners, who were brought from the SS labour camp in Minsk. […] My task was to open up the graves together with some of the Russians, to get the bodies out, pile up the wood, put the bodies on it in layers and to burn them. […] The Russian prisoners who dug up the graves were murdered at intervals so that no one who had witnessed the operation would be left alive.”

Adolf Rübe, head of the labour detail of Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte in Blagovshchina Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg: ZSt 202 AR-Z 22/60 (Goldapp), Bd. 1, Bl. 50f. In: Paul Kohl: Der Vernichtungslager Trostenez. Augenzeugenberichte und Dokumente, Dortmund 2003, p. 77.

Photo 5

“The defendant SAUKITENS points out the place where citizens of Jewish nationality were shot and buried.”

In 1962 the Soviet authorities investigated Albert Saukitens, a former member of a unit of Latvian collaborators which was deployed to assist with mass shootings in Blagovshchina. The pictures were taken during a site visit with the defendant.

Latvijas Nacionālais arhīvs, Rīga

“At the end of 1943 […] the executioners began burning the bodies of the people they had murdered in order to erase the traces of the crimes they had committed in Blagovshchina forest. For around two months, the stale smell of burning flesh was emitted from the forest and thick plumes of dark smoke could be seen rising into the air. During this time, I saw the executioners in German military uniforms and with a skull and crossbones on their caps bring 30–40 people at a time – men in plain clothes – by truck to Blagovshchina. These trucks came from the direction of Minsk. The trucks then travelled back to Minsk empty. Every evening the sound of shots could be heard coming from the forest.”

Road maintenance manager S. Romanovets, in 1942-1943 responsible for this section of the Minsk–Mogilev road KGB-Archiv, Akte 26571, Bd. 19, Bl. 96.

Tsyra Goldina
1902–1942

There are no surviving photos of Tsyra Goldina or her family.

Before the war, Tsyra Goldina (née Milenkaya) and her husband Efim Goldin (1906–1974) worked in the “Oktober” textile factory in Minsk. The couple had three children: Rahil (born in 1928), Lazar (1931–1982) and Aron (1936–1942). The family were of Jewish origin but did not practise their religion. They spoke Russian at home. When the war broke out, Efim was evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union along with other factory workers. Tsyra remained behind with the children. In July she had to move with them into the ghetto, and from then on they lived at her sister Ida’s house in very cramped conditions. Tsyra’s two oldest children, Rahil and Lazar, had to undertake forced labour at a goods depot; they were at least able to barter items of clothing for food and thereby to feed the family.

On 28 July 1942 the SS and their auxiliaries forced around 10,000 ghetto residents out of their homes – a total of 6,500 local Jews and 3,500 German Jews from Sonderghetto (“special ghetto”) 2. Most of them were children, women and elderly people. They were either brought by truck to Blagovshchina, where they were shot, or they were murdered in gas vans on the way there. Their bodies were then hastily buried. The operation took three days. Among the victims were Tsyra Goldina, her five-year-old son Aron and Tsyra’s sister Ida.

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Before the war, the family lived in a house with a large yard at Revolution Street 24. There are no surviving photos of this building either.

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The former choral synagogue in Minsk, 1932. Following the October Revolution in 1917, heavy restrictions were placed on practising religion, including Judaism. This synagogue was at first used by the Jewish State Theatre and then converted into a cinema.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk

Photo_4

Tsyra Goldina’s daughter, Rahil Perelman, in 1946 and 1997. She lives in New York. Her daughter Tatyana Tsukerman (born in 1949), who lives in Moscow, states:

“My mother Rahil and her brother Lazar left the ghetto every day to go and work at the railway station. One day in July 1942 they were detained at work and not allowed to go home. […] Rumours circulated immediately about a pogrom in the ghetto. When they returned to the ghetto, there was no one left. It was the largest pogrom in 1942. They were told that their mother and their brother Aron had died, that they had been taken to Trostenets. […] My mother and Lazar later attempted to join the partisans, but they were arrested on the way and put in prison in Minsk. My mother was later taken to Auschwitz.”

Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles

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Tsyra Goldina’s daughter, Rahil Perelman, in 1946 and 1997. She lives in New York. Her daughter Tatyana Tsukerman (born in 1949), who lives in Moscow, states:

 

“My mother Rahil and her brother Lazar left the ghetto every day to go and work at the railway station. One day in July 1942 they were detained at work and not allowed to go home. […] Rumours circulated immediately about a pogrom in the ghetto. When they returned to the ghetto, there was no one left. It was the largest pogrom in 1942. They were told that their mother and their brother Aron had died, that they had been taken to Trostenets. […] My mother and Lazar later attempted to join the partisans, but they were arrested on the way and put in prison in Minsk. My mother was later taken to Auschwitz.”

Private collection of the Perelman family

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Tatyana Tsukerman (left) with her second cousin Shalhevet Sara Ziv, who lives in Israel. Their grandmothers were sisters.

 

The recollections of her mother Rahil inspired Tatyana to work as a teacher in the field of Holocaust education. She regularly recounts her family’s story to school groups. In 2015 she took part in a seminar for teachers at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial site in Jerusalem. By coincidence, she found out that she has relatives living in Israel.

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Lili Grün
1904–1942

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Pf 41.644: C (1), retouched by Bronia Wistreich

Lili Grün was born on 3 February 1904 in Vienna and was the youngest of four children. Her parents died when she was young. In her youth, Lili Grün was interested in theatre, drama and literature. She performed at a number of theatres, for example at the new theatre of the Socialist Workers’ League in Vienna. In 1931 Lili Grün moved to Berlin. She wrote articles and poems and her work was published in magazines such as Tempo and newspapers including the Berliner Tageblatt and the Prager Tagblatt. She was among the artists who founded the cabaret Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). After time spent living in Prague and Paris, she returned to Vienna in 1933; her first novel was published in the same year.

Because she was Jewish, from 1938 she was banned from publishing her work. She became destitute and suffered from tuberculosis. The authorities forced her to vacate her apartment, probably in 1940. Her final residence was in mass accommodation for Jews in Vienna’s 1st District. On 27 May 1942 she was deported to Minsk on a transport that departed from Vienna’s Aspang railway station. She was murdered in Blagovshchina on 1 June.

Photo_1

Lili Grün was 29 when her first novel, Herz über Bord (“Heart Overboard”), came out. The book was soon translated into Hungarian and Italian. He second novel, Loni in der Kleinstadt (“Loni in the Small Town”), was published by a Swiss publishing house in 1935.

Public domain image

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The Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin was a favourite haunt of writers, journalists, artists and actors. The economic crisis and mass unemployment had a major impact on the artistic community. For Lili Grün, Berlin’s coffee houses were important venues to find new commissions and contacts.

akg-images, Bildnr. 947655

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Berlin, 7 May 1931: report from the Vossische Zeitung on a performance by “Lilly” Grün and her “amusing, sentimental poetry”. As a co-founder of the Die Brücke cabaret, she performed alongside actors such as Ernst Busch (1900–1980). She worked in a cake shop by day in order to make a living.

Public domain image

Photo_4

In 1935 Lili Grün spent time in the spa town of Merano in South Tyrol in an attempt to cure her tuberculosis. Her publisher collected donations to fund her stay in a sanatorium; Grün was short of money on account of her publication ban.

Public domain image

Photo_5

Deportees’ luggage being loaded in front of the assembly camp in Kleine Sperlgasse. Lili Grün was deported to Minsk on 27 May 1942. Around 10,000 of the 50,000 Jews living in Vienna shared the same fate. Maly Trostenets was the site with the greatest number of Austrian Jews murdered.

Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna

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In 2007, a “Stone of Remembrance” was placed outside 4 Heine Street in Vienna in memory of Lili Grün as well as three other Austrian writers: Oswald Levett, Alma Johanna König and Ber Horowitz. They were murdered in 1942 in Maly Trostenets or in Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine).

Stiftung Denkmal

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As the result of a citizens’ initiative, in 2009 a square near Augarten Park in Vienna’s 2nd District was named after Lili Grün. At the naming ceremony there was a reading of her reprinted novel Alles ist Jazz (“Everything’s Jazz”).

Stiftung Denkmal

Erich Klibansky
1900–1942

Girls’ class at Jawne School, around 1935

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

Erich Klibansky (1900–1942) grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. He studied history, German and French. In 1928 he married Meta David (1902–1942) from Hamburg. The couple moved to Cologne, where Erich Klibansky became headmaster of Jawne Grammar School in 1929.

Founded in 1919, Jawne was the first Jewish grammar school in the Rhineland region. After Jewish pupils were excluded from German state schools in the 1930s, Jawne School had its highest ever number of pupils. Klibansky tried to prepare his pupils for emigration. After the November pogroms in 1938, he decided to relocate the entire school to Britain. The following year, he arranged for 130 pupils to leave for Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue effort.

Jawne School was closed down on 1 July 1942. Just a few weeks later, Erich Klibansky was deported to Minsk along with his wife; their three sons Hans-Raphael (1928–1942), Alexander (1931–1942) and Michael (1935–1942); and around 100 pupils from Jawne School. The SS deported a total of 1,164 people from Cologne and the surrounding area on Transport Da 219 on 20 July 1942. After four days, the transport arrived in Minsk. Upon arrival, the deportees were either brought by truck to Blagovshchina, where they were shot at pits dug in advance, or they were murdered in gas vans on the way there.

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Erich Klibansky, around 1930. Klibansky was just 29 when he was appointed headmaster of Jawne Grammar School. He sought to strengthen the pupils‘ sense of Jewish identity without isolating themselves in German society.

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

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Klibansky’s wife Meta with the couple’s three sons Hans-Raphael, Michael and Alexander, around 1936.

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

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The synagogue of the Orthodox “Adass Jeschurun” community was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943 and the ruins demolished in the late 1950s.

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

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In the 1930s St.ApernStreet was a centre of Jewish life. The four-storey building (left) housed the teacher training facility, “Moriah” Primary School and, from 1919, Jawne Grammar School. 

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

Photo_5

English lesson in the playground of Jawne School, 1938. In order to make life easier for pupils who emigrated, the school placed particular emphasis on language learning: “[Frau Lüthgen, the teacher] taught us to speak French and English really well […] later […] in France I had to go into hiding and no one could tell from my accent that I wasn’t French.” (Anni Adler, former Jawne pupil)

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

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After the November pogroms in 1938, Jewish organisations arranged the evacuation of around 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers from the German Reich to Britain. Four Kindertransport departures were organised specifically for 130 pupils from Jawne School. Klibansky accompanied these evacuation transports.

Lern- und Gedenkort Jawne, Cologne

Photo_7

Cologne Messe/Deutz railway station, the starting point for the deportation on 20 July 1942. Helmut Lohn, who assisted the synagogue community as the deportation train was prepared for departure, recalls: “I’ll never forget this transport. They were all young, strong people who could look after themselves. This was the one transport where the mood was not overwhelmed by sorrow, where people were one hundred per cent certain: We’ll be back!”

Public domain image

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Photo_9

Postcard that Meta Klibansky threw out of the train near Berlin on 21 July 1942. In it she said farewell and thanked the Jakobys, who were friends of the family.

NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln

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Erected in 1997, the Löwenbrunnen (Lion Fountain) in front of the former site of Jawne School remembers the 1,100 murdered Jewish children and young people from Cologne, but also the rescue of 130 children organised by Erich Klibansky. The lion sculpture was created by Hermann Gurfinkel (1926–2004), who was one of those rescued. The square is named after Erich Klibansky.

Christian Herrmann

Lea and Pinkas Rennert
1896–1942, 1894–1942

The picture shows Lea Dlugacz Pinkas Rennert, both from the province Bukovina, on their engagement in 1920.

Private collection of the Rennert family

Biography prepared by the Austrian House of History

Lea Dlugacz and Pinkas Rennert were both from the Austrian province of Bukovina, which became part of Romania after World War One. They got engaged in 1920. After their marriage the couple moved to Vienna, where their daughter Silvia was born in 1922 and their son Erwin in 1926. Lea Rennert was a housewife, while Pinkas Rennert worked as a metalware salesman, primarily for the galvanising company “Brunner Verzinkerei” run by the Bablik brothers. After the “Anschluss” (Austria’s annexation to the German Reich), Pinkas Rennert was initially able to continue working within the company as a welder, but then lost this job too on account of his Jewish origins. He was subsequently employed by the Israelite Religious Community. On 31 October 1939 the couple’s two children were able to emigrate to the USA. Lea and Pinkas Rennert’s final residence was in a building in Odeongasse 5/9 designated as collective accommodation for Jews expelled from their homes. On 5 October 1942 they were deported to Maly Trostenets, where they were murdered.

Photo_1

Family photo from October 1938. The Rennerts with their son Erwin (centre) and daughter Silvia (right).

The Rennerts had desperately sought ways for themselves and their children to emigrate. As the couple were from Bukovina, they were subject to the emigration quota for Romanians, which meant that they would be on a waiting list for several years. They finally managed to secure a guarantee of financial security – a so-called affidavit of support – and a visa for the USA for their children. Erwin (1926–2009) and Silvia (married name Rivera, 1922– 2011) left Vienna on 31 October 1939 and travelled via Trieste to the USA.

Private collection of the Rennert family

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On 7 August 1939 Pinkas Rennert wrote to his cousin Benja­min Dlugacz (Ben Duglas) in New York, asking him to approach Jewish organisations to arrange accommodation for the children, as the Duglas family were not well off themselves. Ben Duglas asked a Mr Freezer from his synagogue congregation to act as guarantor for the affidavit. Mr Freezer agreed, but was not able to look after the children himself. Mr and Mrs Duglas ultimately took both children in.

Private collection of the Rennert family

“What platform [at Vienna’s Südbahnhof station] is the train on? My father and I find our carriage, our compartment, and meet Mr. Weissmann, a friendly stranger; my mother looks at him as if he were our guardian angel. The platform is dimly lit. However, I can see her tears and how she is biting her lip. My father helps us to get our suitcases on board. It reminds me of the luggage in old Perl [a car] and of our trip to Bukovina. My mother also steps briefly into the compartment; she takes a look at our seats as if wanting to see how our futures will turn out. A final hug, she strokes my hair, gives me a kiss, then she has to get off. The train now departs slowly. Silvia and I lean out of the window to wave to our parents. I can still see my mother’s pale, tearstained face and my father holding her arm. They both wave, and then they are gone.”

Erwin Rennert, Der Welt in die Quere. Lebenserinnerungen 1926–1947, Vienna 2000, p. 125

Photo_3

"When the affidavit goes off, Silvia should be sure to telegraph that it has gone off, that is very important."

In their letter of February 17, 1941, to their cousin in New York, Lea and Pinkas Rennert wrote about their hopes of receiving the affidavit soon and made plans for their future. Pinkas Rennert wanted to work as an electric welder, Lea Rennert wanted to make wafers; she already had some machines that she wanted to take with her to the United States. They sent again their exact birth dates so that there would be no mistakes in the affidavit. "... one is just very nervous," Pinkas Rennert noted - two days earlier the first deportation transport had left Vienna for Opole (General Government).

Private family collection Rennert

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Excerpt from the list for the deportation transport from Vienna’s Aspang station to Minsk/Maly Trostenets on 5 October 1942

Archiv IKG Wien (Leihgabe im VWI), Bestand Wien, A / VIE / IKG / II / DEP / Deportationslisten

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On 19 October 1942 police officer Johann Peter wrote a report on the deportation of 549 Jewish children, women and men on 5 October 1942, among them Lea und Pinkas Rennert. He gave a detailed account of the “boarding” at Aspang station, which took more than 5 hours. He listed the individual stops during the journey and recorded that in Vawkavysk in Belarus the deportees had to get out of the passenger carriages and board cattle wagons. Four days later, on 9 October, the transport arrived in Maly Trostenets, where the Viennese guards handed over the deportees to the SD men.

Yad Vashem Archives, DN/27-3, fol. 27f.; Yad Vashem Archives/DÖW microfilm 58

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Fritz (Siegfried) Kneller (1924–1942)

Fritz Kneller, a childhood friend of Erwin Rennert, the son of Lea and Pinkas. On 30 October 1939, the day before Erwin’s departure for the USA, Fritz gave his friend this photo. It was captioned: “To remember your friend Fritz”. Fritz Kneller was deported with his parents Abraham and Pesie Kneller on 27 May 1942 to Maly Trostenets, where he was murdered. Erwin Ren­nert kept this picture in his photo album for decades.

Private collection of the Rennert family

Murder at Shashkovka and in the barn

Photo taken by the Extraordinary Commission during its inspection of Shashkovka extermination site in July 1944.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

In late 1943 a cremation facility was built in Shashkovka forest, to the south of the labour camp. It was surrounded by a timber wall and could not be seen from the outside. “Selected” prisoners and forced labourers were murdered here, as were civilians suspected of having contact with partisans. The bodies were piled up on a metal grate and incinerated. The Extraordinary Commission estimated that there were 50,000 victims.

The history of Maly Trostenets extermination site ended with a massacre on 29–30 June 1944, a few days before the arrival of the Red Army. Around 6,500 inmates of the prisons in Minsk and the remaining prisoners from the labour camp were brought by truck to a large barn at the southern edge of the camp, where they were shot; the barn was then set on fire to burn the bodies. Women and children were among the victims. Two people managed to escape and later testified at the investigation run by the Soviet authorities.

Photo 1

In 1962 the eyewitness Vladimir Garanskiy points out the former location of the cremation facility.

Latvijas Nacionālais arhīvs, Rīga

“I didn’t see how this ‘oven’ was set up on the inside. I only saw it from the outside. It was surrounded by a high timber wall and barbed wire. In the north section a gate had been put in the wall, through which vehicles entered, some uncovered and some covered at the back; vans carrying people who were alive and people who had been shot dead. When a vehicle went in, the gate was closed and you couldn’t see what happened in the ‘oven’. Shots were heard only occasionally, when there were shootings of people who had been brought in alive. In the northern section, next to the road, about twenty metres from the oven, the sign ›No entry‹ had also been nailed to a pine tree. I saw the smoke rising from the ‘oven’ when [the corpses of] people were being burned.”

Excerpt from the transcript of the witness interview with A. Kareta, a villager from Maly Trostenets, 17 July 1944 NARB, f. 845, op. 1., d. 64, ll. 17-22. In: Lager smerti Trostenez. Dokumenty i materialy, Minsk 2003, pp. 64-70.

Barn

Photo 2

Photo taken by the Extraordinary Commission of the remains of the barn with hundreds of charred corpses.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

“When ordered to do so […] the other policemen and I led the Soviet prisoners out of a building that stood by itself; it was fenced in on all sides and its walls were half submerged into the ground. The other policemen and I brought the Soviet prisoners in groups of 50 and more to a barn on a slope around 300–400 metres away, led them inside, and shot [them] there […] The bodies of those who had been shot were piled up, the items found in the barn were thrown on top of the bodies […] Once the barn was full of bodies, we began to shoot the people in front of the outside walls of the barn as well as on the beams lying next to the barn.”

Quote from I. Kasatchenko, a Belarusian collaborator KGB-Archiv, d. 26571, t. 7, ll. 135-138.

Photo 3

Stepanida Savinskaya, 1945

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

“In mid-May my husband and I were transferred to the SS concentration camp in Shirokaya Street, where we were held until 30 June 1944. On that day I was loaded on to a vehicle with around 50 other women and driven to an unknown destination. When the vehicle was about 10 kilometres away from Minsk, it stopped in front of one of the barns by Maly Trostenets village. At that point it became clear to us all that they had brought us there to shoot us. […] On the order of the German executioners, the female prisoners got out of the vehicle in groups of four. […] Soon it was my turn too. Along with Anna Golubovich, Yuliya Semashko and another woman, whose name I don’t know […] I climbed on to the pile of bodies. […] Shots rang out, I sustained a slight head wound and fell down. I lay there wounded under the pile of bodies until late in the evening. […] Then I wanted to escape from the barn; I saw two wounded men and the three of us decided to flee. The German guards noticed and shot at us; the men were dead and I managed to hide in the marsh. I stayed there for 15 days, not knowing that Minsk had already been liberated by the Red Army.”

Stepanida Savinskaya, born in 1915, after the war a nurse in Field Hospital 3 in Minsk NARB, f. 759, op. 1, d. 64, l. 70-73. In: Lager smerti Trostenez. Dokumenty i materialy, Minsk 2003, pp. 99-100.

Yevgeniy Klumov
1876–1944

Yevgeniy Klumov, then a student, with his future wife Galina, 1895

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Yevgeniy Klumov was born in Moscow, where he studied medicine until 1904. In World War One he served as a medical officer in the Russian Army. From the 1920s Klumov headed the gynaecological department of a hospital in Minsk and taught midwifery and gynaecology at the city’s Medical University.

Right from the first few days after the German attack on the Soviet Union, he operated on wounded soldiers in his hospital and had them moved farther away from the front line. In early 1942 Klumov established links with resistance groups in Minsk. He provided them with surgical instruments, medicines and bandages. He treated the wounded and made sure that they were able to get to the partisans. He hid young people in his hospital to protect them from being transported to Germany as forced labour.

In October 1943, Klumov, his wife, and fellow doctors were arrested, interrogated and tortured in the hospital. They were brought to the camp in Shirokaya Street. In February 1944, the SS murdered Klumov and his wife Galina in a gas van on the way to Trostenets. Their corpses were then presumably burnt in Shashkovka.

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Yevgeniy Klumov (centre) in a hospital during World War One

Muzey istorii meditsiny, Minsk

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Minsk, 1940: Yevgeniy Klumov (first row, second from right) with colleagues from Soviet Hospital No. 1

Muzey istorii meditsiny, Minsk

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In Belarus, Klumov is one of the most famous victims of Trostenets. In 1965 he was awarded the posthumous title “Hero of the Soviet Union”. A hospital and a street in Minsk are named after him. This postage stamp was brought out in 2001 to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

“Towards evening on 8 February 1944, a group of prisoners was brought from Minsk prison to the camp [in Shirokaya Street]. There were many doctors among them, and I recognised Yevgeniy and Galina straight away ... Prof. Klumov looked terrible, he was seriously ill [...] The camp doctor Gurevitch, himself a prisoner, had the Klumovs placed in the sick bay; he gave them his bed [...] I spent five days with them in the sick bay. Yevgeniy told me about the interrogations [...] He felt extremely unwell on account of his diabetes [...] Galina was completely exhausted too; she could barely get out of bed … At around nine in the morning, all of the prisoners had to assemble in the centre of the camp [...] The gas vans drove up a few minutes later.”

From the memoir of the doctor Lyudmila Kashetchkina, a former member of the resistance movement in Minsk

Nikolay Valakhanovich
1917–1989

Nikolay Valakhanovich at a meeting with schoolchildren in the 1980s.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

Nikolaj Valakhanovich was a train controller at Negoreloye station, 50 kilometres from Minsk. From April 1943 he compiled reports on the traffic of freight transports and passed these on to contacts within the Soviet intelligence.

On 20 June 1944 – shortly before the liberation of Minsk – Valakhanovich was betrayed and the SD arrested him and a number of other villagers on suspicion of being partisans. He was brought to the prison in Volodarskogo Street in Minsk, where he was tortured. On 29 June the SS then brought him and other prisoners by truck to Maly Trostenets, where they were to be shot. Valakhanovich was taken into a barn in which countless dead bodies were already piled up and he was shot, losing an eye in the process. He lay between the bodies for almost a day and a half before creeping outside – the shootings were still under way – and finding a place to hide. Shortly afterwards the barn was set on fire by the guards.

In the early 1960s the authorities invited him to Moscow to give a witness statement as the Soviet Union was gathering evidence for a trial against members of the SS in Koblenz. Well into old age, Valakhanovich continued to take part in commemorations at Maly Trostenets, where he recounted his experiences to school groups.

Photo_1

Photo from the pre-war years: Nikolay Valakhanovich (right) and a friend in their railway workers’ uniforms.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

Photo_2

Nikolay with his wife Serafima (centre), sister Tamara (left) and brother Alexander, around 1938.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

Photo_3

Nikolay Valakhanovich with his wife Serafima (right), daughter Galina (second from left) and son Leonid (second from right) in the 1950s. Galina later said of her father: “He told [his story] to the grandchildren, too. [...] He wanted us children to know what he had experienced. [...] We were to commit it to memory for all time.”

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

Photo_4

Nikolay Valakhanovich with his wife Serafima (first row, right) and friends in the village of Negoreloje in the 1970s. Nikolaj Valakhanovich lived his whole life in the village.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

“And so we were brought to Trostenets, to the camp previously designated for Jews. We did not come across any people there, but there were shreds of clothing, crockery and scraps of bread and potato lying everywhere […] The vehicle drove right up to this barn, or more precisely, up to the door. The first five prisoners had to get out straight away. They entered the barn and shots were heard immediately. [...] Soon it was my turn. [...] I jumped out of the vehicle and went to the barn. There was straw on the floor inside. To the left of the entrance, three or four men from the penal commando were standing in a row. I raised my hands, turned around so that my back was facing the guards and went to stand by the wall; they commanded us to do so using hand gestures. When I turned around and took a step, they opened fire. [...] I soon realised that I was still alive, but I couldn’t understand why […] The shooting went on until late in the evening [...] At around six or seven the following morning, 30 June 1944, the shooting continued. [...] It was just at that time that a vehicle arrived with the next group of prisoners who were condemned to death. The penal commando surrounded the vehicle, the barn door was out of their sight for a short space of time. It was then that I was able to creep out of the barn. [...] I soon managed to get to a field of rye, where I hid and fell asleep.”

Nikolay Valakhanovich

Photo_6

Minsk, 3 July 1962: Nikolay Valakhanovich (foreground, wearing a hat) with his son Leonid (to his right). The group is pictured on the way to lay a wreath at Bolshoi Trostenets on Liberation Day.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

Photo_5

Nikolaj Valakhanovich‘s identity card from 1970, which states that he was a former partisan.

Private collection of the Valakhanovich family

“My mother was told that Nikolay had been taken to hospital [...] We had a horse [...] Mother put me in the cart and said, ‘We’re going to see Father.’ [...] All I can remember is that I didn’t recognise the father who was in the hospital. His face was completely bandaged up. I was even afraid to approach him.”

Daughter Galina

ADDRESSING AND REMEMBERING THE PAST

Criminal proceedings after the war

Sentencing Minsk Trials

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk, still from the film The People’s Tribunal, 1946

As early as 1941 the Allies declared the prosecution of National Socialist crimes to be one of their most important wartime objectives. The Nuremberg Trials (1945/46) were the first time in history that the political and military heads of a state were indicted and tried by an international court for violating international law and for crimes against humanity. The International Military Tribunal sentenced twelve of the 24 defendants to death.

Subsequent judicial confrontation with the crimes reflected the contemporary political climate. In many countries Nazi crimes were repressed and a large proportion of the perpetrators managed to avoid being brought to account. It was only from the late 1950s that the Nazis’ crimes in Minsk were dealt with by German and Austrian courts.

Minsk Trials

Images of the Minsk Trial of members of the Wehrmacht, police and SS in January 1946. This was a public trial. One of the 18 defendants was former SS-Oberführer Eberhard Herf, who was also accused of numerous crimes in Maly Trostenets. On 29 January, 14 of the defendants were sentenced to death. Tens of thousands of people came to watch the execution at Minsk hippodrome the next day.

Photo 1

The defendants await their sentences. First row, second from right: Eberhard Herf (1887–1946)

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk, still from the film The People’s Tribunal, 1946

Photo 2

A few seconds before the execution.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk, still from the film The People’s Tribunal, 1946

Photo 3

An officer on horseback gives the signal to carry out the sentence.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk, still from the film The People’s Tribunal, 1946

Photo 4

The gallows at Minsk hippodrome

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk, still from the film The People’s Tribunal, 1946

Photo 5

Defendants at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg. Front row, from left: Hermann Göring (1893–1946), second-in-command of the Third Reich; Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess (1894–1987); Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) and Wilhelm Keitel (1882–1946), Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command. Göring committed suicide, Ribbentrop and Keitel were executed and Hess died after more than 40 years in jail.

Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, A 65/II Nr. RA-262-D

Photo 6

Eduard Strauch (1906–1955), one of the defendants at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, which was held by an American military tribunal in Nuremberg in 1947. As head of an Einsatzkommando and Commander of the Security Police (KdS) in Minsk, Strauch was responsible for a large number of mass murders, also at Maly Trostenets. He was given a death sentence, which was later commuted to life in prison. He died in jail.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., Sig. 09944

Photo 7

Koblenz, 16 October 1962: the former head of Einsatzkommando 14, Georg Heuser, in a police vehicle on the way to be tried by jury.

In the 1960s around ten cases dealing with Nazi crimes committed by Germans in Minsk were brought to trial in West Germany. A total of 30 people faced charges. Twenty-three of them received lengthy jail sentences; five of these were life sentences. The trial of Georg Heuser (1913–1989), who was arrested in 1959, attracted particular attention. At the time of his arrest, this former departmental head at the office of the Commander of the Security Police (KdS) in Minsk was head of the Regional Criminal Investigation Office in Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1963 he was found guilty in 11,103 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but he was granted early release and left prison in 1969.

picture-alliance/dpa, Sig. 3375838

Photo 8

Moscow, 1963: press conference on the Georg Heuser trial, which also made headlines in the USSR. The Soviet authorities presented new incriminating evidence against the former German occupiers. Survivors from Maly Trostenets were also questioned.

picture-alliance/dpa, Sig. 3375898, TASS

Photo 9

In 1962/63 the Soviet authorities investigated Albert Saukitens (1910–?). As a member of a Latvian unit, he participated in mass shootings in Maly Trostenets. The photo was taken during an inspection of the site in September 1962. Saukitens was sentenced to 15 years in a prison camp.

Latvijas Nacionālais arhīvs, Rīga

Photo 10

West German investigators repeatedly uncovered information relating to suspects in Austria. The Austrian authorities were often delaying the process so much that some trials resulted in acquittal due to a lack of incriminatory evidence.

The only Austrian trial against a member of the staff of the Commander of the Security Police (KdS) in Minsk was that of Josef Wendl, one of the drivers of the gas vans. He was acquitted in 1970 because the jury found that he had been acting under “superior orders”.

Arbeiter-Zeitung, Austria

Photo 11

Simon Wiesenthal (1908–2005) at a rally in Vienna in 1979.

For decades, Wiesenthal fought to secure the punishment of perpetrators involved in the Holocaust. He traced documents and witnesses, tracked down perpetrators and passed on his findings to the public prosecutors. His research was instrumental in the reconstruction of the events at Maly Trostenets in court and in raising awareness of these events in the German-speaking world.

picture-alliance/dpa, Sig. 2288559, Simon Wiesenthal Institut für HolocaustStudien, Vienna

Photo 12

letter sent from Wiesenthal to the Jewish survivor Johann Noskes in 1962 with reference to Maly Trostenets.

picture-alliance/dpa, Sig. 2288559, Simon Wiesenthal Institut für HolocaustStudien, Vienna

Arthur Harder
1910–1964

Arthur Harder, around 1942

Bundesarchiv (BArch R9361-III/66590)

This text was prepared by Institute for the History of Frankfurt

Arthur Harder was born in 1910 in Frankfurt. From September to November 1943 he headed Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte, which was responsible for removing evidence of the crimes committed in Maly Trostenets. During this period, Harder also participated in the murder of Jewish and Russian prisoners used as forced labour. In November 1943 he carried out the execution of three Jewish prisoners on the orders of the Reich Security Main Office by having them burnt alive.

Most members of the commando recalled Arthur Harder as a tall, powerful man with a loud and brutal demeanour. According to their reports, he would say, “I want to see figures!” (he used the term “figures” (Figuren) to describe the corpses as well as the prisoners) and climb on to the piles of bodies in Blagovshchina forest, and he would beat the forced labourers with whips or cudgels to get them to work faster.

After leaving school (“Volksschule”) and completing a commercial apprenticeship, Arthur Harder initially worked as an employee, but he had already joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1929 and the SS in 1930. From 1938 he worked full time for the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS. In 1942 he was called up for the Waffen-SS and was awarded the rank of Hauptsturmführer in 1944.

In May 1945 Arthur Harder was initially held captive by the British forces, who then handed him over to the Americans. As a member of the SS, he was held in Darmstadt internment camp. On 2 July 1948 a denazification tribunal categorised him as a “minor offender”, put him on probation for two years and issued him with a fine of 200 Reichsmarks.

After returning to live in Frankfurt-Eckenheim, he was a salaried employee at the Krupp vehicles firm. In the 1950s the Frankfurt public prosecutor investigated him for allegedly singing antisemitic songs during a meeting of the “Aid Association of Former SS Members” in a Frankfurt pub. During the investigations, he attacked and seriously injured a prosecution witness and was consequently given a two-month suspended sentence by a Frankfurt court.

In 1963 Koblenz Regional Court found him guilty of the murder of the three Jews whom he had burnt to death in November 1943 and sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in prison. The Federal Supreme Court repealed the sentence. Arthur Harder died on 3 February 1964 in Frankfurt.

“I was a soldier and led a unit and I had no political foresight either and had to believe that we would win the war. I don’t know about any atrocities or crimes committed by the SS, and during the war I didn’t hear about anything like that either.”

Arthur Harder on his role in the Waffen-SS HHStAW, Spruchkammerakte von Arthur Harder (Abt. 520/Da Z Nr. 517804)

Remembering Maly Trostenets

Since 2010 the Austrian association IM–MER chaired by Waltraud Barton has been organising commemorative trips to Maly Trostenets. Many participants affix yellow signs to the trees in Blagovshchina forest with the names and photos of the Jews murdered there. Schoolchildren from Bolshoi Trostenets have since then put up signs with the names of Belarusian victims too.

IM-MER, Waltraud Barton

Directly after the liberation of Minsk, simple memorials were put up at Maly Trostenets and ceremonies organised to commemorate the victims. Belarus had been ravaged by the war and there was initially a lack of funds to construct a memorial site. Nonetheless, in the decades after the war, Maly Trostenets featured in many aspects of commemorative culture, including public commemorations, monuments, works of art and school curricula.

Although Maly Trostenets was one of the Nazis’ main extermination sites, for a long time the name was virtually unknown outside the Soviet Union. It was above all sites such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen which came to symbolise Nazi atrocities.

It was only with the opening up of the borders of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s that Belarusian initiatives were able to begin to research the names and biographies of the victims. The individual efforts of a number of people, including Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in Austria and the German journalist Paul Kohl, also set change in motion. Memorials, publications, films and exhibitions were produced in Belarus, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, many of them a result of international cooperation. In 2014 the foundation stone of a new memorial at the historic site was laid.

Photo 1

During the war there were already reports in the Soviet press, for example the Minskiy Bolshevik of 2 November 1943, that the “German bandits” or “fascist barbarians” were shooting thousands of women and children in Maly Trostenets and throwing them into pits.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 2

Excerpt from the Soviet War News, dated 22 September 1944, produced by the Press Department of the Soviet Embassy in London. The Soviet Union endeavoured to raise international awareness of the scale of the German crimes and of the findings of the Extraordinary Commission.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C.

Photo 3

Maly Trostenets, 3 September 1944: gathering to mourn the victims. The first commemorative markers were gradually replaced by memorial stones.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Original items from Maly Trostenets have been on display in the museum since it opened in October 1944. The top picture shows the diorama of the camp in 1946. Below is the same display, photographed in 2014.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Original items from Maly Trostenets have been on display in the museum since it opened in October 1944. The top picture shows the diorama of the camp in 1946. Below is the same display, photographed in 2014.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

For over 70 years the exhibition contained a glass display case with the ashes and bones of victims of Maly Trostenets. On 18 March 2016 these remains were transferred formally to the crypt of All Saints Church in Minsk, where they were interred.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk; Minsk-Novosti, Minsk

For over 70 years the exhibition contained a glass display case with the ashes and bones of victims of Maly Trostenets. On 18 March 2016 these remains were transferred formally to the crypt of All Saints Church in Minsk, where they were interred.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk; Minsk-Novosti, Minsk

Photo 8

“Were you in Trostenets?... in the death camp?... You’ve got no idea!” – yells the 12-year-old hero of the film Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, 1962). Ivan wants to fight at all costs to avenge the murder of his family. The film was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and brought international recognition to its director, Andrey Tarkovskiy (1932–1986).

Mosfilm, Moscow: still from the film Ivan’s Childhood, 1962

An obelisk (first) commemorating the victims of Maly Trostenets camp was erected in 1963. It is located in the village of Bolshoi Trostenets, a few kilometres from the historical site of the mass shootings in Blagovshchina, which was used as a military training ground in the post-war period.

The other pictures show Maly Trostenets around 2005. For decades there have been small-scale memorials to remember the victims at the historical sites of the barn (second), the cremation facility at Shashkovka (centre) and where the mass shootings took place in Blagovshchina (last).

Stiftung Denkmal

An obelisk (first) commemorating the victims of Maly Trostenets camp was erected in 1963. It is located in the village of Bolshoi Trostenets, a few kilometres from the historical site of the mass shootings in Blagovshchina, which was used as a military training ground in the post-war period.

The other pictures show Maly Trostenets around 2005. For decades there have been small-scale memorials to remember the victims at the historical sites of the barn (second), the cremation facility at Shashkovka (centre) and where the mass shootings took place in Blagovshchina (last).

Stiftung Denkmal

An obelisk (first) commemorating the victims of Maly Trostenets camp was erected in 1963. It is located in the village of Bolshoi Trostenets, a few kilometres from the historical site of the mass shootings in Blagovshchina, which was used as a military training ground in the post-war period.

The other pictures show Maly Trostenets around 2005. For decades there have been small-scale memorials to remember the victims at the historical sites of the barn (second), the cremation facility at Shashkovka (centre) and where the mass shootings took place in Blagovshchina (last).

Stiftung Denkmal

An obelisk (first) commemorating the victims of Maly Trostenets camp was erected in 1963. It is located in the village of Bolshoi Trostenets, a few kilometres from the historical site of the mass shootings in Blagovshchina, which was used as a military training ground in the post-war period.

The other pictures show Maly Trostenets around 2005. For decades there have been small-scale memorials to remember the victims at the historical sites of the barn (second), the cremation facility at Shashkovka (centre) and where the mass shootings took place in Blagovshchina (last).

Stiftung Denkmal

Photo 14

In the 1970s a school in the neighbouring village of Bolshoi Trostenets produced an exhibition on the history of the extermination site. It is still on display at the school today. Subsequent generations of schoolchildren are also engaged in preserving the memory of the victims. Maly Trostenets death camp is an important curriculum topic in Belarusian schools and universities.

Aliaksandr Dalhouski

Photo 15

Brochure of the Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, 1986

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 16

Trostenets Death Camp, a collection of documents from the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War and the main archives in Belarus, was published in 2003. A new, expanded edition followed in 2016. Historical research into Maly Trostenets is carried out above all at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 17

In 1994 the “Trostenets” historical and memorial foundation was founded in Minsk with the aim of establishing a memorial site at the historical location. A large number of artists, historians and political representatives joined the initiative.

Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk

Photo 18

In 2003 the History Workshop opened in Minsk as a joint German-Belarusian project. It carries out historical research, educational activities and supports victims of the German occupation. One of its main projects is the archive of eyewitness testimony, which documents the experiences of Germans, Austrians and Czechs.

Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk

Photo 19

The site of the former camp has been redeveloped. On 22 June 2015 the first completed section was unveiled by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. At the heart of the memorial complex is the sculpture “Gate of Memory” by Konstantin Kostyushenko (*1980).

Stiftung Denkmal

Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue dating from the 16th century has served as a memorial site to the murdered Jews from Bohemia and Moravia since 1954. Alongside the bema are the names of the main murder sites, including Minsk and Maly Trostenets.

Židovské muzeum v Praze

At Terezín Memorial, containers with earth from the murder sites – including Maly Trostenets – have been on display since 2001 in commemoration of the victims deported from the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Památník Terezín, Radim Nytl

In 1967 the German League for Human Rights put up commemorative signs at two prominent locations in West Berlin to recall “sites of horror which we must never forget”. They were conceived in response to contemporary plaques commemorating cities such as Breslau und Königsberg that Germany had lost in the war. In 1995 Trostenets and Flossenbürg were added to the list.

Stiftung Denkmal

The names of 41 sites where Austrian Jews were murdered are engraved into the plinth of the Memorial to the Austrian Victims of the Shoah, which was designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread and inaugurated in 2000. Most of the Austrian victims of the Holocaust perished at Maly Trostenets.

Lukas Meissel

The names of 41 sites where Austrian Jews were murdered are engraved into the plinth of the Memorial to the Austrian Victims of the Shoah, which was designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread and inaugurated in 2000. Most of the Austrian victims of the Holocaust perished at Maly Trostenets.

Lukas Meissel

Between 1991 and 2015 memorial stones were placed in the grounds of the former Jewish cemetery in Minsk to remember the murdered Jews from Bremen, Hamburg, Cologne/Bonn, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Brünn (Brno).

Stiftung Denkmal

A memorial plaque at what used to be the Nordbahnhof (North station) in Königsberg is dedicated to the 465 Jews who were deported on 24 June 1942 to Maly Trostenets and murdered there. The memorial was the result of a joint initiative between former residents of Königsberg and citizens of what is now Kaliningrad.

Stiftung Denkmal

April 2011: opening of the touring exhibition Berlin-Minsk. Unvergessene Lebensgeschichten (Berlin-Minsk. Lives not Forgotten) at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. The exhibition was produced by students from Berlin’s Humboldt University. The exhibition features biographies of Jews from Berlin who were deported to Minsk and Maly Trostenets. It was later also displayed in Minsk.

Stiftung Denkmal

In 2005 the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in the heart of Berlin. It is Germany’s central Holocaust memorial. Maly Trostenets is one of eight principal extermination sites of the Holocaust featured in the underground Information Centre.

Stiftung Denkmal

Commemorative culture in Belarus

Minsk after liberation, July 1944. Photo by the Soviet war correspondent Ivan Shagin (1904–1982).

Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Ivan Shagin

Of all the countries of Europe, Belarus suffered the greatest amount of war damage and the highest percentage of victims, with more than a quarter of its population losing their lives. The memory of this loss, the partisan resistance and, in particular, the commemoration of the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany are fundamental to the country’s national identity. More than 75 years after the end of the war, veterans of the Great Patriotic War continue to be honoured as heroes.

Commemorative culture in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic assumed many diverse forms and involved all parts of society. The main objective was to transmit memory from one generation to the next. The state placed great emphasis on measures designed to instil a sense of military patriotism in young people. This tradition continues today.

The suffering of the civilian population was also acknowledged to a greater extent than in other parts of the former Soviet Union. During the Soviet era, there was barely any specific public remembrance of the murdered Jews. In the countries of the USSR, Jews were remembered alongside other civilian victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens”. After Belarus gained independence in 1991 memorials to the Jews were erected in many parts of the country.

Photo 1

Minsk, July 1969: Aleksandr Romanov (1918-1994), the former commander of the partisan brigade “For Soviet-Belarus”, talks to schoolchildren at the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 2

War veterans regularly took part in the ceremony to inaugurate members of the Pioneer Organisation, as here in 1982 in the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 3

Victory Day celebration on 9 May 1972 in Minsk with Pyotr Masherov (1918–1980), chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. Today, the country’s main national holidays are still Victory Day as well as Independence Day on 3 July, which marks the liberation of Minsk in 1944.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 4

The Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War opened three months after the liberation of Minsk in 1944 and has been the country’s most important museum of military history ever since. The museum’s new building, completed in 2014, was one of the biggest national construction projects of recent years.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 5

Seminar for students of the High School for Culture and Art in the museum’s exhibition space in March 2016. Since its founding the museum has played a central role in the education of young Belarusians along military-patriotic lines.

Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 6

Already in the Soviet era the defenders of the Belarusian fortress at Brest were regarded as heroes. Since 1965  Brest Fortress has been known as “Hero Fortress”. In 1974 Minsk was designated a “Hero City”.

Fotochronika Belta, No. 2393, W. German

Photo 7

Orsha, eastern Belarus: exhibition at the museum that opened in 1948 in tribute to the regional partisan commander Konstantin Zaslonov (1910–1942). Belarus is often described as a “Partisan Republic”. Literature, monuments and museums keep memory of the resistance fighters alive.

Christian Ganzer

Photo 8

Novogrudok Museum of History and Regional Studies has a section dedicated to the history of the Jewish partisans under the command of Tuvia Bielski (1906–1987). They operated in the nearby forests and saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews. In September 1943 more than a hundred Jewish prisoners escaped the Novogrudok ghetto through a tunnel they had dug themselves and made their way to the partisan group.

Muzey evreyskogo Soprotivleniya, Novogrudok

Photo 9

Around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity, yet there are barely any visible forms of commemoration dedicated to them. One exception is the Stalag 342 memorial site at Molodechno, established in 1995.

Christian Ganzer

Photo 10

Still from the film Come and See (USSR 1985) directed by the Russian Elem Klimov (1933–2003). The screenplay was by the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich (1927–1994). Set in 1943 in Belarus, the film depicts the horrors of war from the perspective of Flyora, a boy who has joined the partisans. It is still regarded as one of the best war films of all time.

Mosfilm, Moscow: still from Come and See, 1985

Inaugurated in 1969, Khatyn Memorial Complex remembers 628 Belarusian villages that were annihilated along with their residents. In the centre is a six-metre-high statue of the survivor Yozif Kaminskiy holding his dead son. The memorial site was designed by Yuri Gradov, Leonid Levin, Valentin Sankovich and the sculptor Sergei Selikhanov. In 1970 they were all awarded the Lenin Prize, the highest award in the Soviet Union.

Stiftung Denkmal, Christian Dohnke

Inaugurated in 1969, Khatyn Memorial Complex remembers 628 Belarusian villages that were annihilated along with their residents. In the centre is a six-metre-high statue of the survivor Yozif Kaminskiy holding his dead son. The memorial site was designed by Yuri Gradov, Leonid Levin, Valentin Sankovich and the sculptor Sergei Selikhanov. In 1970 they were all awarded the Lenin Prize, the highest award in the Soviet Union.

Stiftung Denkmal, Christian Dohnke

The Yama (“Pit”) Memorial in 1963 and today. In 1946 an obelisk was erected with an inscription in Russian and Yiddish. It is dedicated to 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto, who the German occupiers murdered on 2 March 1942 in a single operation. The memorial is one of the few from the early post-war years that explicitly commemorated Jewish victims and was retained during the Soviet period. The sculpture ensemble designed by Leonid Levin, Alexander Finskiy and Elsa Pollak was unveiled in July 2000. The memorial complex serves as the central site of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Belarus.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk; Stiftung Denkmal; Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

The Yama (“Pit”) Memorial in 1963 and today. In 1946 an obelisk was erected with an inscription in Russian and Yiddish. It is dedicated to 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto, who the German occupiers murdered on 2 March 1942 in a single operation. The memorial is one of the few from the early post-war years that explicitly commemorated Jewish victims and was retained during the Soviet period. The sculpture ensemble designed by Leonid Levin, Alexander Finskiy and Elsa Pollak was unveiled in July 2000. The memorial complex serves as the central site of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Belarus.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk; Stiftung Denkmal; Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

The Yama (“Pit”) Memorial in 1963 and today. In 1946 an obelisk was erected with an inscription in Russian and Yiddish. It is dedicated to 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto, who the German occupiers murdered on 2 March 1942 in a single operation. The memorial is one of the few from the early post-war years that explicitly commemorated Jewish victims and was retained during the Soviet period. The sculpture ensemble designed by Leonid Levin, Alexander Finskiy and Elsa Pollak was unveiled in July 2000. The memorial complex serves as the central site of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Belarus.

Belorusskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov, Dzerzhinsk; Stiftung Denkmal; Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny, Minsk

Photo 16

On 17 June 1942 German units murdered 1,137 Jewish residents of the ghetto in Gorodeya, 90 kilometres southwest of Minsk. The memorial to the victims was designed by Leonid Levin and erected in 2004.

Stiftung Denkmal

Commemorative culture in Germany

The Field of Stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with the Reichstag building in the background. Funded by national government, the Holocaust Memorial was inaugurated in 2005 following many years of public debate. Today it is one of the most visited sites in Berlin.

Stiftung Denkmal

Following the division of Germany, distinct commemorative cultures developed in the two German states. In East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, GDR), commemorative policy focused on the memory of antifascist resistance.

In West Germany (the Federal Republic), emphasis was initially placed on remembering the victims of Allied bombing raids and of flight and expulsion. The situation began to change in the late 1970s with the gradual emergence of a diverse landscape of memory. This was primarily the product of local initiatives which sought to remember various groups which had been persecuted under National Socialism or to commemorate German resistance.

After German unification a national memorial site concept was developed. Many sites of memory underwent extensive redevelopment. In 2005 – sixty years after the end of the war – the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Berlin. It was followed by national memorials dedicated to additional groups persecuted and murdered under the Nazi regime – the murdered Sinti and Roma, the persecuted homosexuals and the victims of the so-called euthanasia programme.

West Germany

The Kriegerdenkmal (“Warrior Memorial”) in Munich’s Hofgarten park was erected in 1924 in tribute to the fallen soldiers of World War One. As was the case with thousands of other memorials, its dedication was extended after 1945 to include those who had fallen in World War Two. The fallen soldiers were regarded above all as victims.

Elisabeth zu Eulenburg

The Kriegerdenkmal (“Warrior Memorial”) in Munich’s Hofgarten park was erected in 1924 in tribute to the fallen soldiers of World War One. As was the case with thousands of other memorials, its dedication was extended after 1945 to include those who had fallen in World War Two. The fallen soldiers were regarded above all as victims.

Elisabeth zu Eulenburg

Photo 3

Bergen-Belsen, 25 September 1945: inauguration of the first Jewish memorial in the grounds of the former concentration camp.

The first memorials to remember the murdered Jews were erected on the initiative of Jewish survivors. After the war, tens of thousands of people, most of them East European Holocaust survivors in the Allied displaced persons camps – which were often former concentration camps – waited for the opportunity to emigrate to the USA, Israel or Australia.

Yad Vashem Archive, Jerusalem, The Josef Rosensaft Collection FA 185 – 167

Photo 4

Still from the film 08/15 – Part Two starring Joachim Fuchsberger (1927–2014) and Hans Christian Blech (1915–1993). In the mid-1950s this lightweight film trilogy based on the eponymous novel by Hans-Hellmut Kirst (1914–1989) was a big hit. The heroes of the film – naive, likeable Wehrmacht soldiers – were portrayed as the victims of an incompetent, sadistic leadership. There was no critical engagement in the trilogy with the role of the Wehrmacht.

Divina Film GmbH, Munich

Photo 5

The International Monument in Dachau, designed by Nandor Glid (1924–1997) and erected in 1968. In the early years of the West German state, alone survivors made efforts to preserve the historical sites of persecution.

Ronnie Golz

Photo 6

The Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände, a wasteland adjacent to the Berlin Wall, had been the location of the SS and Gestapo headquarters until 1945. In 1987 the “Topography of Terror” exhibition opened on the site, attracting considerable public interest.

Hans D. Beyer

East Germany

Photo 7

Berlin, 15 September 1947: the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, a joint association of survivors, holds a commemoration for the victims of fascism at the Lustgarten park in Berlin. The ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) founded in 1946 considered itself part of the tradition of antifascist struggle, which was why other groups who had been victimised under the Nazi regime were paid scant recognition.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-0331-501

Photo 8

Ensemble of figures sculpted by Fritz Cremer, situated in front of the bell tower in the grounds of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. From an early stage, East Germany utilised the authentic sites of Nazi terror on its territory as so-called National Sites of Warning and Memory. The site at Buchenwald opened in 1958, followed by Ravensbrück in 1959 and Sachsenhausen in 1961. At these sites, too, commemoration focused on the antifascist resistance.

Sammlung Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Peter Hansen

Photo 9

Still from the 1963 feature film Naked Among Wolves, which is based on the eponymous novel by the former Buchenwald inmate Bruno Apitz (1900–1979). In the film, members of the communist resistance in Buchenwald concentration camp hide a small child from the guards, risking their own lives in the process. As the focus is entirely on the humanity of the heroes, audiences at the time were spared from having to consider their own involvement in the Nazi regime.

DEFA – Stiftung, Waltraut Pathenheimer

Photo 10

Berlin, 1989: members of East Germany’s Pioneer youth organisation at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Soviet Memorial in the district of Treptow. Just a few months after the end of the war, the Red Army had monuments and cemeteries built to commemorate its fallen soldiers. The East German state utilised them to display its “unbreakable friendship with the Soviet Union”. After the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1994, the Federal Republic assumed responsibility for the upkeep of these sites.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0727-24, Thomas Uhlemann

Post-unification Germany

Photo 11

Munich, 24 February 1997: protest against the opening of the touring exhibition “War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944”. Between 1995 and 1999 the exhibition was shown in a total of 33 towns and destroyed the myth of an “unblemished Wehrmacht” whose soldiers had always acted with decency and honour.

picture-alliance/dpa, Bildnr. 2634697, Stefan Kiefer

Photo 12

Lebus War Cemetery, 8 May 2015: Federal President Joachim Gauck lays a wreath to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two. Around 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the final offensive of the war in spring 1945 are buried in Lebus, approximately 60 kilometres east of Berlin.

Bundesregierung, Jesco Denzel

Photo 13

A view of the permanent exhibition which opened in 2013 at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst. The exhibition seeks to make connections between various national perspectives.

Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Thomas Bruns

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Part of the memorial site at the former Blagovshchina shooting sites from above.

IBB Minsk/ Andrei Shauliuha_1

The Belarusian-German touring exhibition, which was first displayed in November 2016, was an important step towards achieving understanding and reconciliation between the two countries. Since then, the exhibition has been shown in more than two dozen towns in Belarus, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. It has been viewed by thousands of visitors and has attracted substantial regional and national media coverage.

The impetus for the exhibition came from the International Centre for Education and Exchange (Internationales Bildungs- und Begegnungswerk, IBB) in Dortmund and the Johannes Rau International Centre for Education and Exchange (IBB) in Minsk. The Belarusian State Museum for the History of the Great Patriotic War and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin both played a key role in developing the exhibition. Historians and experts from Belarus, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria also made a significant contribution to the project.

The digitalised version of the exhibition and its translation into English represent the next important stage in raising greater international public awareness of the history of Maly Trostenets extermination site. Our particular thanks go to the German Federal Foreign Office for generously supporting the development of the exhibition.

There have also been many developments at the historical site itself since the start of the touring exhibition. The most important event was the opening of the second section of the Maly Trostenets memorial site complex with the inauguration of the memorial at the former Blagovshchina execution site in June 2018, which was attended by the heads of state of Belarus, Germany and Austria. This event also marked the first occasion that either a German or an Austrian Federal President had ever visited the Republic of Belarus. The following year saw the unveiling of the “Massif of Names” memorial, which commemorates the Austrian victims of the Maly Trostenets extermination site.

Despite these developments, one of the significant objectives still remaining is to provide permanent documentation of the historical events at the historical site itself as a symbol of joint remembrance. This exhibition, which was produced as a joint project and is now available online, could provide the basis for such a permanent display.

Photo 1

5 May 2015: commemoration at Blagovshchina with guests from Belarus, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Britain and Switzerland.

IBB Minsk

Photo 2

5 May 2015: Gabriel Heim, Petr Klenka, Kurt Marx, Hermann Völker and Michael Marx gathered to attend a commemoration. They are all relatives of victims of Maly Trostenets.

IBB Minsk

Photo 3

In the presence of the German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and the Austrian Federal President Alexander van der Bellen, the second construction phase of the Trostenez Memorial, which covers a total area of around 100 hectares, was opened in a ceremony on Friday, June 29, 2018.

IBB Minsk

Photo 4

Das Mahnmal „Der Weg des Todes“ führt durch stilisierte Eisenbahnwaggons über eine Strecke von etwa 800 Metern zu 34 Massengräbern.

IBB Minsk

Photo 5

The Memorial "Massif of Names" commemorates the approximately 10 thousand Austrian victims. The Memorial was built on the initiative of IM-MER and with the support of the Austrian government.

History Workshop/Yana Bondar

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