The historical context

In the summer of 1941, immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Belarusian capital Minsk was captured by German soldiers. Only a few kilometers away, to the southeast of Minsk, was the small village of Maly Trascjanec. In its immediate vicinity, between 1941 and 1944, masses of people from Europe and the Soviet Union, mainly of Jewish faith, but also partisans and members of the local intelligentsia were deported for forced labor and murdered.

The fence around the SD camp Maly Trascjanec.

Shortly after the beginning of the German occupation in Belarus, the Security Police and SD established the "SS Trostenez Estate" on the grounds of the "Karl Marx collective farm". Tens of thousands of Jewish people from Europe and the Soviet Union were murdered in the Blahaǔščyna forest between 1941 and 1944 and buried in mass graves. As part of the "Aktion 1005", their bodies were dug up and burned in order to leave no traces in the event of a retreat. When the Red Army moved ever closer to the village in June 1944, the occupiers attempted to destroy the last evidence of the mass murders in an act of concealment. Afterwards, Maly Trascjanec and the events in the Blahaǔščyna and Šaškoǔka forests were forgotten for a long time.

The forest clearing with more than 30 mass graves grew over again, the former SD camp became a collective farm and in the village of Vjaliki Trascjanec, not far from Maly Trascjanec, a monument was erected to the people murdered during the German occupation. It took until the 1960s and 2000s respectively for memorial stones to be installed at Šaškoǔka and Blahaǔščyna. It was not until the 1990s that planning began for a large memorial installation, which is still unfinished today.

Members of the ČGK questioning a village resident

The question of the number of people who were murdered in Maly Trascjanec and its surroundings cannot be clarified to this day. According to the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union (ČGK), 206,500 victims can be assumed, of which 150,000 in Blahaǔščyna, 50,000 in Šaškoǔka and 6,500 in the barn.¹ The historian Christian Gerlach assumes that these figuers are too high. Due to the exhumation of corpses and the associated deformation of the mass graves in Blahaǔščyna, the information provided by the ČGK cannot be regarded as reliable. There are also no authentic numbers of victims for the temporary crematorium in Šaškoǔka; the ČGK was only able to find ashes and some small human remains there. Only the number of people murdered in the barn is taken over by Gerlach; this is where the ČGK stayed the longest. In total, Gerlach estimates the death toll at Maly Trascjanec at about 60,000.²

Responsible for content: Tatjana Rykov, Rukia Soubbotina and Charlotte Vöhl

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_{¹ Cf. Kohl, Vernichtungslager Trostenez, p. 20; Rentrop, Tatorte der Endlösung, p. 226f.}

_{² Cf. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 770.}