Maly Trostenets extermination camp

Last updated April 21, 2019

Maly Trostenets on the map of major ghettos in Reichskommissariat Ostland . The camp's location is marked by the black-and-white skull icon. WW2-Holocaust-ROstland.PNG — Maly Trostenets on the map of major ghettos in *Reichskommissariat Ostland* . The camp's location is marked by the black-and-white skull icon.

The Trostinets extermination camp,^[1] also known as Maly Trostinets,^[2] Maly Trastsianiets and Trascianec (see alternative spellings), was a World War II Nazi German death camp located near the village of Maly Trostinets (Малы Трасцянец, "Little Trostinets") on the outskirts of Minsk in Reichskommissariat Ostland . It operated between July 1942 and October 1943, by which time, virtually all Jews remaining in Minsk had been murdered and buried there.^[1]^[2]

National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.

Minsk is the capital and largest city of Belarus, situated on the Svislač and the Nyamiha Rivers. As the national capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is the administrative centre of Minsk Region (voblasć) and Minsk District (rajon). The population in January 2018 was 1,982,444, making Minsk the 11th most populous city in Europe. Minsk is the administrative capital of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and seat of its Executive Secretary.

Nazi Germany established the Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO) in 1941 as the civilian occupation regime in the Baltic states, the northeastern part of Poland and the west part of the Belarusian SSR during World War II. It was also known initially as Reichskommissariat Baltenland. The political organization for this territory – after an initial period of military administration before its establishment – was that of a German civilian administration, nominally under the authority of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories led by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, but actually controlled by the Nazi official Hinrich Lohse, its appointed Reichskommissar.

History

Originally built in the summer of 1941 on the site of a Soviet kolkhoz, a collective farm 200 hectares (490 acres) in size, Trostinets was set up by Nazi Germany as a concentration camp with no fixed killing facilities, for the Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured during Operation Barbarossa launched against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.^[3]

A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz. These were the two components of the socialized farm sector that began to emerge in Soviet agriculture after the October Revolution of 1917, as an antithesis both to the feudal structure of impoverished serfdom and aristocratic landlords and to individual or family farming.

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation stemmed from Nazi Germany's ideological aims to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans (Lebensraum), to use Slavs as a slave labour force for the Axis war effort, to murder the rest, and to acquire the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories.

The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, and over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.

The camp became a Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) on 10 May 1942 when the first consignment of Jews was brought in under the guise of "resettlement". Jews from Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic were murdered there. The Holocaust transports organized by the SS were sent from Berlin, Hanover, Dortmund, Münster, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich, Breslau, Königsberg, Vienna, Prague, Brünn, and Theresienstadt.^[4] In most cases, the Jews were killed immediately upon arrival. They were trucked from the train stop to the nearby killing grounds at Blagovshchina (Благовщина) and Shashkovka (Шашковка) forests and shot in the back of the neck.

Extermination camp Nazi death camps established during World War II to primarily kill Jews

Nazi Germany built extermination camps during the Holocaust in World War II, to systematically kill millions of Jews, Slavs, Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs, political opponents and others whom the Nazis considered "Untermenschen" ("subhumans"). The victims of death camps were primarily killed by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. Some Nazi camps, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek, served a dual purpose before the end of the war in 1945: extermination by poison gas, but also through extreme work under starvation conditions.

Terezín is a former military fortress composed of citadel and adjacent walled garrison town of Litoměřice District, in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic.

The primary purpose of the camp was the killing of Jewish prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto and the surrounding area.^[4] Firing squad was the chief execution method. Mobile gas chambers deployed at Trostinets performed a subsidiary if not insignificant function in the killing process. These were called "gas vans". Baltic German SS- Scharführer Heinrich Eiche was the camp administrator.^[5]

The Minsk Ghetto was created soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was one of the largest in Belorussian SSR, and the largest in the German-occupied territory of the Soviet Union. It housed close to 100,000 Jews, most of whom perished in The Holocaust.

Scharführer was a title or rank used in early 20th Century German military terminology. In German, Schar was one term for the smallest sub-unit, equivalent to a "troop", "squad", or "section". The word führer simply meant "leader".

On 28 June 1944, as the Red Army approached the region, the Germans blew up the camp as part of Sonderaktion 1005 , an operation to destroy evidence of genocide. But the Soviets are said to have discovered 34 grave-pits, some of them measuring as much as 50 meters (160 ft) in length and three to four meters (9.8–13 ft) in depth, located in the Blagovshchina Forest some 500 meters (1,600 ft) from the Minsk–Mogilev highway according to the special report prepared by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in the 1940s. Only a few Jewish prisoners survived Maly Trostenets.^[2] They were liberated by the Red Army and gave first witness testimonies about its existence on 7 July 1944.^[2]

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, frequently shortened to Red Army was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and, after 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Beginning in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in December 1991.

The Sonderaktion 1005, also called Aktion 1005, or Enterdungsaktion began in May 1942 during World War II to hide any evidence that people had been murdered by Nazi Germany in Aktion Reinhard in occupied Poland. The operation, which was conducted in strict secrecy from 1942–1944, used prisoners to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies. These work groups were officially called Leichenkommandos and were all part of Sonderkommando 1005; inmates were often put in chains in order to prevent escape.

Mogilev is a city in eastern Belarus, about 76 kilometres from the border with Russia's Smolensk Oblast and 105 km from the border with Russia's Bryansk Oblast. As of 2011, its population was 360,918, up from an estimated 106,000 in 1956. It is the administrative centre of Mogilev Region and the third largest city in Belarus.

According to modern historians of the Holocaust, original estimates of the number of people killed at Trostinets were greatly exaggerated by functionaries of the Soviet State Commission; ranging from 200,000 to more than half a million. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and other researchers estimate the true number of victims at 60,000–65,000 Jews.

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—between 1941 and 1945. Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs, the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay men. Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to over 17 million.

Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the dead; honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors and Gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need; and researching the phenomenon of the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general, with the aim of avoiding such events in the future.

A great number of Soviet soldiers, citizens and partisans were killed, but the exact number remains unknown. It ranges from 80,000 to more than 330,000.^[2]^[4]

Perpetrators

Only a few perpetrators of the Holocaust from Trostinets were brought to justice after the war. Among them was Eduard Strauch, who died in a Belgian prison in 1955. In 1968 a court in Hamburg sentenced to life imprisonment, three low-ranking SS men – Rottenführer Otto Erich Drews, Revieroberleutnant Otto Hugo Goldapp, and Hauptsturmführer Max Hermann Richard Krahner – German overseers of the Jewish Sonderkommando 1005 who were recognized as guilty of murdering the laborers forced to cover up the traces of the crimes in 1943.^[4] Several people were also convicted during trials in West Germany and the USSR, although they were not at Maly Trostenets, but for the crimes committed in the wider area of Minsk.^[6]

Heinrich Seetzen committed suicide in a British POW camp. Heinrich Eiche fled to Argentina after the war and all trace of him was lost. Gerhard Maywald settled after the war in West Germany. In 1970, the public prosecutor's office in Koblenz ended an investigation against him "because of the absence of sufficient evidence of guilt". On 4 August 1977 Maywald was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for murder and complicity involving 8,000 Jews in Latvia.^[7]^{[ clarification needed ]}

Camp's name

In Belarusian the name is Малы Трасцянец (pronounced [maˈlɨ trasʲtsʲaˈnʲets] ), transliterated as Maly Tras’tsyanyets; in Russian it is Малый Тростенец. Alternative romanizations and the placename’s German variants include Maly Trostinets, Maly Trostinez, Maly Trostenez, Maly Trostinec and Klein Trostenez – literally, "Little" Tras’tsyanyets) as opposed to the neighboring locality named Вялікі Трасцянец or "Large" Tras’tsyanyets).

Meanwhile "Trostenets" or "Trastsyanets" itself has root derived from "Trostnik" (Тростник), Russian name for reed or some similar (but not necessarily botanically related) wetland grass. Suffix "-ets" is just typical way of forming place name from certain natural feature (compare with Kremenets, Yelets, Konevets etc). Thus "Trostenets" sounds like "place overgrown by reed".

Known victims

The names of 10,000 Austrian Jews murdered in Maly Trostinec are gathered in a book "Maly Trostinec - Das Totenbuch - Den Toten ihre Namen geben". Compiled and edited by Waltraud Barton (Hrsg.) Vienna. Edition Ausblick.

Cora Berliner (most likely)
Grete Forst
Vincent Hadleŭski [Wincenty Godlewski], Roman Catholic priest and Belarusian nationalist resistance fighter (b. 1888), arrested in Minsk on 24 December 1942 and shot at Trostenets the same day.^[8]
Margarete Hilferding (in transit to the camp from Terezín)
Norbert Jokl (debated)

Commemoration

A memorial built at the site of the camp attracts thousands of visitors annually, especially after travel restrictions eased with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.^{[ citation needed ]}

Memorial sign on the place of main massacres
The sign on the obelisk, in Belarusian, quotes the widely disputed number of 201,500 victims.^{[n 1]}
The plate of the planned memorial complex (see image description for its text)
Memorial complex, built in 2015

Notes

↑ The number of casualties is disputed by historians (see History section above).

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References

1 2 Dr. Leonid Smilovitsky (1999). "Ilya Ehrenburg on the Holocaust in Belarus: Unknown Testimony". Vol. 29, No. 1–2, Summer–Winter. East European Jewish Affairs. pp. 61–74. Retrieved 1 September 2013. Ilya Ehrenburg's Black Book cites the official data that in all, 206,500 people were murdered at Trostenets, of whom 150,000 were killed at the Blagovshchina Forest between September 1941 and October 1943, and another 50,000 at the Shashkovka Forest between October 1943 and June 1944.
1 2 3 4 5 Yad Vashem (2013). "Maly Trostinets" (PDF file, direct download, 19.5 KB). Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
↑ ARC (28 May 2006). "Maly Trostinec". DeathCamps.org. Archived from the original (Internet Archive) on July 1, 2014. Retrieved 29 January 2015.
1 2 3 4 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2 April 2006). ""Sonderkommando 1005" trials: Hamburg, 1968". Aktion 1005. ARC. Archived from the original (Internet Archive) on July 23, 2014. Retrieved 29 January 2015.
↑ Paul Kohl (2003). Das Vernichtungslager Trostenez: Augenzeugenberichte und Dokumente. Internationales Bildungs- und Begegnungswerk IBB. pp. 102–111.
↑ Der Spiegel (30 September 1968). "Wolkenhöhe". Prozesse / Sonderkommando 1005. Der Spiegel 40/1968. Retrieved 29 January 2015.
↑ Einsatzgruppen Trials Axis History Forum.
↑ Syargyey Yorsh (b. 1972), Rytsar Svabody... [Рыцар Свабоды: Ксёндз Вінцэнт Гадлеўскі як ідэоляг і арганізатар беларускага нацыянальнага антынацыскага Супраціву; =Champion of Liberty: The Reverend Vincent Hadleŭski as the Ideologue and Organizer of Belarusian National Anti‑Fascist Resistance], Minsk, Belaruski Rėzystans, 2004 – a monograph on his life; Library of Congress control No. 2004454542: call No. not available

The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginnings of Mass Murder on the Yad Vashem website.
Marking 70 Years to Operation Barbarossa on the Yad Vashem website.