The location was part of the eastern half of occupied Poland, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 in agreement with Germany, and two years later captured by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa.

It is estimated that from May 1942 until November of that year, during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust in Poland, some 50,000 Jews were murdered at Bronna Góra forest in death pits.

[1][2][3] After a century of foreign domination, the Second Polish Republic became an independent state at the end of World War I. Bronna Góra was part of the Polesie Voivodeship, and remained so until the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

[11] The first murder operation took place in June 1942, with 3,500 Jews transported from the Pińsk Ghetto and nearby Kobryn for "processing" (durchschleusen),[a] at Bronna Góra.

[5] According to postwar testimony of Benjamin Wulf, a Polish Jew from Antopal who managed to survive the massacre,[14] the train stop was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.