From the SD camp to the collective farm

Parallel to the Investigations of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union (ČGK) in July 1944, relatives of the murdered prisoners of the Maly Trascjanec extermination site began to organise commemorative rallies. After the ČGK completed its investigation, the site of the former camp was transformed back into a collective farm. There was hardly anything to remind people of the murders or the suffering caused by the German occupation in that locality.

Mourning rally in Maly Trascjanec on 3 September 1944

After the investigations conducted by the ČGK, people from the local population, including employees of neighbouring collective farms and representatives of the authorities, gathered for memorial rallies to commemorate the victims. The ČGK and those politically responsible were urged by the population to place so-called "brother graves" (mass graves of war victims in the former Soviet Union) on the former camp grounds.¹ However, these requests were ignored by the authorities.

Historical objects from the Maly Trascjanec camp in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, 1946

On 22 October 1944, the Museum of the Great Patriotic War was opened in Minsk. The exhibition at that time displayed personal belongings of the murdered prisoners as well as warning signs of the former camp at Maly Trascjanec. The murdered prisoners were described as peaceful Soviet citizens, just as they were in the investigation protocol of the Extraordinary Commission. The anti-Semitic dimension of the German war of extermination on the territory of Belarus was left out.

The actual area of the former Maly Trascjanec camp was meanwhile returned to agricultural use and restructured into a collective farm.

Satellite image from 1963: The red circle shows Blahaǔščyna, the blue circle shows the artillery training area and the green rectangle shows the landfill site

In 1956, the decision was made to erect a monument to "warriors of the Soviet army, partisans and peaceful civilians" in the neighbouring village of Vjaliki Trascjanec on top of the brother graves that were already there. However, the project was never realised for two reasons: firstly, there was probably not enough money to implement the project, and secondly, no significant resistance activities were reported from the Maly Trascjanec camp that would have justified such a "veneration" against the background of the Soviet remembrance policy of the 1950s.² The Belarusian-Soviet culture of remembrance focused primarily on the heroes of the "Great Patriotic War"; the victims of the occupation period were disregarded. After the end of the war, a military artillery training ground was built in Blahaǔščyna. In 1958, a landfill was built in the immediate vicinity. The placement of the landfill caused protest from the military stationed there, which resulted in only a small part of the originally planned area being used as a landfill site.³

Responsible for content: Charlotte Vöhl