TheGerman invasion of the Soviet Union duringWorld War II started on 22 June 1941 and led to a Germanmilitary occupation ofByelorussia until it was fully liberated in August 1944 as a result ofOperation Bagration. The western parts of Byelorussia became part of theReichskommissariat Ostland in 1941, and in 1943, the German authorities allowed localcollaborators to set up a regional government, theBelarusian Central Rada, that lasted until theSoviets reestablished control over the region. Altogether, more than 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, around a quarter of the region's population,[1] or even as high as 3,000,000 killed or 30% of the population,[2] including 500,000 to 550,000 Jews as part of theHolocaust in Belarus.[3] In total, on the territory of modern Belarus, more than 9,200 villages and settlements, and 682,000 buildings were destroyed and burned, with some settlements burned several times.[4] By the end of the war, Belarus had lost half of its population as a result of death and moving.[5]
The Soviet and Belarusian historiographies study the subject of German occupation in the context of contemporary Belarus, regarded as theByelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), a constituent republic of theSoviet Union in the 1941 borders as a whole. Polish historiography insists on special, even separate treatment for the East Lands of the Poland in the 1921 borders (alias "Kresy Wschodnie" aliasWest Belarus), whichwere incorporated into the BSSR after the Sovietinvaded Poland on 17 September 1939. More than 100,000 people of different ethnic backgrounds, mostly Poles and Jews in West Belarus, were imprisoned, executed or transported to the eastern USSR by Soviet authorities before the German invasion. TheNKVD (Soviet secret police)killed more than 1,000 prisoners in June and July 1941, for example, inChervyen.
After twenty months of Soviet rule in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine,Nazi Germany and itsAxis allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Eastern Belarus suffered particularly heavily during the fighting and Germanoccupation. Following bloody encirclement battles, all of the present-dayBelarus territory was occupied by the Germans by the end of August 1941. With Poland regarding the Soviet annexation as illegal, the majority of Polish citizens did not ask for Soviet citizenship from 1939 to 1941, and as a result were Polish citizens under Soviet and later German occupation.
In the early days of the occupation, a powerful and increasingly well-coordinatedSoviet partisan movement emerged. Hiding in the woods and swamps, the partisans inflicted heavy damage to German supply lines and communications, disrupting railway tracks, bridges, telegraph wires, attacking supply depots, fuel dumps and transports, and ambushing Axis soldiers. In one of the most successful partisan sabotage actions of the entire Second World War, the so-calledAsipovichy diversion of 30 July 1943, four German trains with supplies andTiger tanks were destroyed. To fight partisan activity, the Germans had to withdraw considerable forces behind their front line. On 22 June 1944, the huge Soviet Strategic OffensiveOperation Bagration was launched, finally regaining all of Belarus by the end of August.
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The German invasion and occupation resulted in heavy human casualties, with some 380,000 people deported for slave labour, and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more civilians. The ethnicallySlavic Byelorussian population was intended to be exterminated, expelled, or enslaved as part of the German ethnic cleansing operation namedGeneralplan Ost. At least 5,295 Byelorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and had some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II),[6] and more than 600 villages likeKhatyn had their entire population annihilated.[6]
Some historians have argued thatSoviet partisans deliberately provoked German reprisals, partly accounting for the high death toll. However, this conclusion has been disputed and a 2017 study focusing on the logistics of mass killing found "that Soviet partisan attacks against German personnel provoked reprisals against civilians but that attacks against railroads had the opposite effect. Where partisans focused on disrupting German supply lines rather than killing Germans, occupying forces conducted fewer reprisals, burned fewer houses, and killed fewer people."[7][8]
The largest Jewish ghetto inSoviet Belarus before the conclusion of World War II was theMinsk Ghetto, created by the Germans shortly after the invasion began. Almost the whole, previously numerousJewish population of Belarus which did not evacuate east ahead of the German advance was killed during the Holocaust by bullet. The list of eradicated Jewish ghettos in Nazi-Sovietoccupied Poland extending eastward toward the border with the Soviet Belarus can be found at theJewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland article.
Later in 1944, 30 German-trained Belarusians were airdropped behind the Soviet front line to spark disarray. These were known as "Čorny Kot" ("Black Cat") led byMichał Vituška. They had some initial success due to disorganization in the rear guard ofRed Army. Other Belarusian units slipped throughBiałowieża Forest and full scaleguerrilla war erupted in 1945. But theNKVD infiltrated these units and neutralized them by the end of 1946.
In total, Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population in the Second World War, including practically all its intellectual elite. About 9,200 villages and 1,200,000 houses were destroyed. The major towns ofMinsk andVitebsk lost over 80% of their buildings and city infrastructure. For the defense against the Germans, and the tenacity during the German occupation, the capital Minsk was awarded the titleHero City after the war. The fortress ofBrest was awarded the titleHero-Fortress.
