Operation Hermann was a German anti-partisan action in the Naliboki forest area carried out between 13 July 1943 and 11 August 1943.

During the operation, German troops burned down over 60 Polish and Belarusian villages and murdered 4280 civilians.

The Germans, with the support of Belarusian collaborationists, killed most of the local Jews and launched merciless terror against the Polish population.

[5] Following the operation, the communities around the Naliboki forest were devastated, the Germans deported the non-Jewish residents fit for work to Germany for slave labor and murdered most of the rest.

Prior to the manhunt, homeless refugees were mainly Jews who had escaped the ghetto, but in the fall of 1943 non-Jewish Belarusians, Poles, and Roma who managed to flee roamed in the forest.