Blahaǔščyna execution site

Trigger warning: This exhibition page deals explicitly with the murder of Jewish people and could be disturbing to visitors.

Erich Ehrlinger, Commander-in-Chief of the Security Police (KdS) Minsk

The selection of the Blahaǔščyna forest as an execution site marked the beginning of the transformation process of Maly Trascjanec under Nazi occupation. This development is related to the infrastructural demands that the Nazi extermination machinery faced as a result of its exploitative and genocidal occupation policy.

On 19 July 1941, the German occupiers set up a ghetto in the war-torn city of Minsk, where the remaining 85,000 Jews from Minsk and, from November 1941, the first Jewish deportees from the "Old Reich" were to be detained as part of the beginning planning of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. For the planned mass executions of the ghetto residents, the commander of the Minsk security police (KdS), led by SS-Obertsturmführer Erich Ehrlinger, looked for an execution site with poor visibility, which he found in the Blahaǔščyna forest, 13 km southeast of Minsk.¹

Two reasons were decisive for the KdS Minsk in choosing this area: firstly, the remoteness and secondly, the good infrastructural connection to the highway to the south leading to Mahiljou. From 10 August 1942, the SS used the rehabilitated Kolodišči train station, a few hundred metres north of the Trascjanec estate, from which deportees were brought to Blahaǔščyna from that day onwards.²

In a forest clearing, Ehrlinger had Soviet prisoners of war dig pits measuring 60x5x3 meters. They were euphemistically called "resettlement grounds" by the KdS office. The first victims of the shootings in Blahaǔščyna were 10,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto in November 1941. The clearing quickly became the central execution site of the Minsk SD.³

Testing of gas vans as a method of killing in Belarus

The deportees were transported from the Minsk freight station by truck to Blahaǔščyna, to a collection point about two kilometres from the pits. There the people were taken out of the trucks, had to walk to the pits and line up directly at the edge of these pits, where they were shot by members of the SD. After the pits were filled with corpses, they were covered with slaked lime, filled with soil and levelled.⁴ Another commando played music next to the pits to drown out the sound of the shots for the surrounding residents and the people in the arriving trucks.⁵

In March 1942, three gas vans were made available to the KdS Minsk.⁶ The driver of one of the gas vans, Josef Wendl from Vienna, describes an operation as follows:

"After all g-wagons [=gas vans] had been loaded, about 70 victims had been loaded in my wagon, and we drove in a southerly direction about 5 km away from this railway area. There, in an area of woods and meadows, a large pit had been dug. I remember that the pit was secured by machine gun nests. [...] We had to drive up to the pit backwards with the gas vans. Now the usual gassing followed."⁷

Detail of aerial photograph from 1944 (Blahaǔščyna)

In the "major operation" described by Wendl, 7,000 to 10,000 people were murdered in one day. By October 1943, 34 pits in the Blahaǔščyna forest were filled with the corpses of up to 30,000 murdered people; most of them were Jews. In addition, an undeterminable number of partisans, Soviet citizens and members of the intelligentsia were murdered here. The "Aktion 1005", a large-scale operation to remove the traces, made it impossible to provide precise information. An aerial photograph from June 1944 shows the clearing with the mass graves dug up and dug over.