July Massacre

At the end of July 1942, the police, SD and Wehrmacht units prepared the second "major action" to create "space" for further planned transports. On 25-27 July 1942, nine pits were dug in order to carry out the upcoming mass execution. On 27 July Jews were subjected to additional compulsory identification – working Jews received a red badge, their non-working family members and the unemployed received a green badge. Previously, the family members of the workers were also protected, but this should now change with the upcoming "action".

On 28 July 1942, at first the entire compound of the Russian Jews was sealed off and surrounded by guards, then auxiliary crews herded them out of their homes and loaded them onto trucks. Approximately 6,000 people were taken to the forest of Blahauščyna near Maly Trascjanec and shot there.

The very next day, the "large-scale action" was extended to the "special ghettos", which until then had been exempt from such massacres. For the killing of the Jews in the "Sonderghetto II" (mostly from the German Reich), mainly gas vans were probably used. They drove back and forth between the Minsk ghetto and Maly Trascjanec, and took the people suffocated by exhaust fumes to the pits designated for this purpose. About 3,000 Jews became victims of this murder.

SS-Unterscharführer Gerhard Artl gave an account of the "July Action" in his activity report:

On 25.7 – 27.7, new pits are dug. / On 28.7, large-scale action in the Minsk Russ. Ghetto. 6000 Jews are taken to the pit. / On 29.7, 3000 German Jews are taken to the pit."[1]

This murder operation mainly affected women, the sick, the elderly and Jews who were not able to work. After that, “Sonderghetto II” was dissolved and the remaining forced laborers were resettled in “Sonderghetto I”. In the summer of 1942, around 9,000 people, 3,000 of them “Reich Jews”, were still living in the Minsk ghetto.

After the war seemed to be lost for the Nazi regime in the East from 1943, in June 1943 Heinrich Himmler gave the order to dissolve all ghettos in the "Ostland".Thus, on 1 September 1943, the Nazi leadership in Minsk also began a phase of dissolution of the Minsk ghetto that lasted several weeks.

Gradually, some of the Jews still in the ghetto were sent on trains, trucks or on foot to other (extermination) camps such as Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz. Around 6,500 Jews from Belarus and Germany were shot on the spot or in Blahauščyna or murdered in gas vans between the beginning of September and mid-October. On 21 – 23 October1943, the security police and SD cleared the ghetto, and the last remaining approximately 1,000 inmates of the ghetto were probably murdered in Blahauščyna.

Sources:

[1] Rentrop, Petra: Tatorte der „Endlösung”. Das Ghetto Minsk und die Vernichtungsstätte Maly Trostinez. Berlin: Metropol. 2011. p. 148.