National Memorial of the Republic of Belarus

The destruction of Khatyn and the murder of the villagers was an act of revenge in response to the bombardment of a German motorcade by Belarusian partisans on 22 March 1943, killing the company commander, Captain Hans Woellke, and three Ukrainian members of the Battalion 118 protection team.

One adult, the then 56-year-old village blacksmith Iosif Kaminskij, and five children survived the destruction of Khatyn and the Second World War.

It was designed and created by the architects Yuri Gradow, Leonid Lewin, Walentin Sankowitsch and the sculptor Sergej Selichanow.

Delegations from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other republics of the Soviet Union, from the then twin cities and other foreign guests took part in the ceremony and the trip to Khatyn.

In July 2004, a photographic exposition was inaugurated at the memorial, commemorating Khatyn, Maly Trostenez and the Ozarichi concentration camp as another example.

At the entrance of the symbolic village there is a six-metre-high bronze sculpture depicting Iosif Kaminskij carrying his dead son Adam in his arms.

[8] The names of 433 Belarusian villages, burned like Khatyn but rebuilt after the war, are immortalized like branches on symbolic "trees of life".

The path along this wall commemorates over 260 death camps and mass extermination sites of the German SS, the Ordnungspolizei and the Wehrmacht.