The "final" destruction of evidence

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

The shooting and burning of several thousand people and the burning of the buildings of the SD camp Maly Trascjanec represent the final transformation process by the German occupiers. When the Red Army arrived at the beginning of July 1944, they found a site reshaped by violence, which was the result of an attempt to finally destroy the evidence of crimes against humanity.

After the “1005” cover-up operation and the ongoing murder of people in the Šaškoǔka forest, the recapture of Minsk by the Red Army became foreseeable in June 1944. Before the German troops were pushed back from the area, Kurt Gornig, head of Department IV of the Minsk BdS, ordered that the last survivors from the surrounding camps and prisons be murdered, including the prisoners of the SS labour camp on the Širokaja Street.¹ The goal was to finally destroy all the evidence and kill all witnesses of the mass murders between 1941 and 1944.

To put the plan into action, the inmates and POWs from the surrounding camps were taken in trucks to a barn in the camp.² A survivor of the camp from Vienna reported:

"On 28 June, wagons with evacuees had already arrived in uninterrupted succession and Mr Rieder and the new kommando almost could not keep up. Then on the 29 June, the second part of the new kommando arrived. - One wagon after the other arrived with 'evacuees' from all areas. In our camp there was a barn that was 60 m long and 20 m wide. The evacuees were also brought there. Civilians were not allowed to enter this barn. The continuous machine gun fire could also be heard from far away. "³

One after the other, the camp inmates were herded into the barn, where they were told to stand on a layer of logs and were shot with machine guns. Logs were placed on their corpses - the newly arriving groups of people had to climb up and were also shot.⁴ It continued in this way until the pyre reached the roof of the barn. Then the perpetrators built a new pyre. When the barn was full, the systematic killing of the last survivors outside the building continued.⁵ Within three days, between 28 and 30 June 1944, approximately 6,500 people from the surrounding prisons and camps were herded into the barn, murdered and stacked on pyres.

On 30 June, just three days before the Red Army recaptured Minsk, the barn on the grounds of the Maly Trasyanec camp was set on fire. Stepani Savinskaya survived the last extermination action of the German troops at Maly Trasjanec.⁶ She told about the last hours:

"At the command of the German executioners, the captured women got out of the wagon in fours. It was soon my turn, too. I climbed onto the pile of corpses with Anna Golubovich, Yuliya Semashko and another woman whose name I do not know. Shots rang out, I was slightly wounded in the head and fell down. Wounded, I remained lying under corpses until late in the evening. Then I tried to escape from the shed, saw two wounded men and all three of us decided to flee. The German guards noticed this and shot, the men were dead and I managed to hide in the swamp. I stayed there for 15 days, not knowing that Minsk had already been liberated by the Red Army."⁷

After the perpetrators set the barn on fire, the wooden buildings of the Maly Trascjanec camp and the barracks in which the prisoners had been housed were also torched. Documents that could have proven the mass murder of thousands of people were destroyed as well.⁸

This unscrupulous act shows the last attempt to cover up crimes against humanity committed by German occupiers in the immediate vicinity of the village of Maly Trascjanec. When the troops of the Red Army arrived at the extermination site on 3 July 1944, the barn was still burning.⁹