The Holocaust in Belarus

The Holocaust saw the systematic extermination of Jews living in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic during its occupation by Nazi Germany in World War II.

[5] The southern part of modern-day Belarus was annexed into the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ukraine on 17 July 1941 including the easternmost Gomel Region of the Russian SFSR, and several others.

On 8 July 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, gave the order for all male Jews in the occupied territory – between the ages of 15 and 45 – to be shot on sight as Soviet partisans.

[1] Notably, when the bulk of the Jewish communities were annihilated in the first major killing spree, the number of Belarusian collaborators was still considerably small, and the Schutzmannschaft in Belarus consisted most of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Latvian volunteers.

[17] Historian Martin Gilbert wrote that the General-Commissar for Generalbezirk Weißruthenien, Wilhelm Kube, personally participated in the 2 March 1942 killings in the Minsk Ghetto.

During the search of the ghetto area by the Nazi police, a group of children were seized and thrown into a deep pit of sand covered with snow.

[20] In the 1970s and 1980s, historian and Soviet refusenik Daniel Romanovsky, who later emigrated to Israel, interviewed over 100 witnesses, including Jews, Russians, and Belarusians from the vicinity, recording their accounts of the "Holocaust by bullets".

Nevertheless, based on his interviews, Romanovsky concluded that the open-type ghettos in Belarusian towns were the result of the prior concentration of the entire Jewish communities in prescribed areas.

[21] According to Leonid Rein, the collaboration with the Germans by some non-Jews was in part a result of attitudes developed under Soviet rule; namely, the practice of conforming to a totalitarian state, sometimes pejoratively called Homo Sovieticus.