[2] After the start of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the invading Wehrmacht soldiers murdered 379 people, 'pacified' 30 villages, burned down 640 houses and 1,385 industrial buildings in the area.

[7] The borders of this area ran from the southeastern protrusion of East Prussia (the Suwalki triangle) following the Neman River up to Mosty (excluding Grodno), including Volkovysk and Pruzhany up to the Bug River to the west of Brest-Litovsk and then following the border of the General Government to East Prussia.

[2] Bialystok District was established on 1 August 1941; it was simultaneously excluded from the operational zones of the German Army in the Soviet Union.

Day-to-day activities were handled by his permanent deputy head of the Nazi Party in Königsberg, East Prussia, Waldemar Magunia from 15 August 1941 to 31 January 1942.

The SSPF reported to the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of Russland Mitte (Central Russia) headquartered in Mogilev until July 1943 and thereafter in Minsk.

He undertook intensive propaganda activities and in the fields of education and culture, and at the end of March 1942 he published the weekly Nowaya Daroga (Belarusian: Новая дарога)).

Belarusian activists also took on a number of functions in the strictly subordinated to German administrative authorities, including becoming mayors in Białystok (Wasyl Łukaszyk), Bielsk Podlaski (Jarosław Kostycewicz) and Narewka (Piotr Kabac).

On 25 July 1941, police units commanded by Colonel Max Montua forced 183 families from the villages of Budy, Pogorzelce, and Teremiski in the Białowieża Forest.

[5] Heinrich Himmler visited the newly formed Bialystok District on 30 June 1941 and pronounced that more forces were needed in the area, due to potential risks of partisan warfare.

The chase after the Red Army's rapid retreat left behind a security vacuum, which required the urgent deployment of additional personnel.

[11] Scrambling to meet this "new threat", Gestapo headquarters formed Kommando SS Zichenau-Schroettersburg which departed from sub-station Schröttersburg (Płock) under the leadership of SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper (born 1911) with express mission to murder Jews, communists and the NKVD collaborators across the local villages and towns.

The relief unit, called Kommando Bialystok,[12] was sent in by SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Eberhard Schöngarth on orders from the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), due to reports of Soviet guerrilla activity in the area with Jews being of course immediately suspected of helping them out.

[13] The first stage of the Nazi persecutions mainly involved applying collective punishment to various villages where any form of real-or-imagined threat had been identified.

On 2 November 1942 Nazi SS and police forces, in a coordinated operation with help from the local gendarmerie, suddenly encircled and quarantined all the ghettos.

Between November 1942 and February 1943, approximately 100,000 Jews in the District, including some 10,000 from Bialystok proper, were sent to the Treblinka and Auschwitz death camps.

The Lizard Union envoy, 2nd Lt. Feliks Mazurek, pseudonym "Zych", began talks with representatives of the Armed Confederation.

In January 1944, the region's Home Army began participating in Operation Tempest launching a series of uprisings throughout Białystok.

Przybyszewski, wanting to strengthen national influence in the ranks of the Home Army, led to the commencement of talks between representatives of the district commands of NOW and NSZ in 1944.

Boleslaw Kozlowski ("Grot") and Waclaw Nestorowicz ("Kalina"), opponents of Stanislaw Nakoniecznikow ("Kilinski") sided with NSZ-NOW.