The Holocaust saw the systematic extermination ofJews living inByelorussia duringits occupation by Nazi Germany inWorld War II. Before the construction of theExtermination Camps in Poland, theHolocaust was to be carried out in Belarus and the Baltic states using large gassing installations and transport by boats on the waterways rather than by trains. Although theExtermination Camps were eventually established in occupied Poland, roughly 800,000Belarusian Jews (or about 90% of the Jewish population ofBelarus) were murdered according to one estimate.^[1] Other estimates place the number of Jews killed between 500,000 and 550,000 (about 80% of theBelarusian Jewish population).^[2]

Nazi German rule in Belarus began in the summer of 1941 duringOperation Barbarossa (the invasion of theSoviet Union).^[3][4]Minsk was bombed and taken over by theWehrmacht on 28 June 1941.^[5] In Hitler's view, Operation Barbarossa was a war against "Jewish Bolshevism", a Naziconspiracy theory.^[6] On 3 July 1941, during the first "selection" inMinsk, 2,000 Jewish members of the intelligentsia were marched to a forest and massacred.^[5] The atrocities committed beyond theGerman-Soviet frontier weresummarized byEinsatzgruppen for both sides of the prewar border between BSSR andPoland.^[7] The Nazis made Minsk the administrative centre ofGeneralbezirk Weißruthenien in theReichskomissariat Ostland. As of 15 July 1941, all Jews were ordered to wear ayellow badge on their outer garments under penalty of death, and on 20 July 1941, the creation of theMinsk Ghetto was pronounced.^[5] Within two years, it became the largest ghetto in the German-occupied Soviet Union,^[8] with over 100,000 Jews.^[5]

The southern part of modern-day Belarus wasannexed into the newly formedReichskommissariat Ukraine on 17 July 1941 including the easternmostGomel Region of theRussian SFSR, and several others.^[9] They became part of theSchitomir Generalbezirk centred aroundZhytomyr. The Germans determined the identities of the Jews either through registration or by issuing decrees. Jews were separated from the general population and confined to makeshift ghettos. Because the Soviet leadership fled from Minsk without ordering evacuation, most Jewish inhabitants were captured.^[9][10] There were 100,000 prisoners held in the Minsk Ghetto, with 25,000 atBobruisk, 20,000 atVitebsk, 12,000 atMogilev, 10,000 each atGomel and Slutsk, and 8,000 atBorisov andPolotsk.^[11] In theGomel Region alone, twenty ghettos were established in which no less than 21,000 people were imprisoned.^[9]

In November 1941, the Nazis rounded up 12,000 Jews in the Minsk Ghetto to make room for the 25,000 foreign Jews slated for expulsion fromGermany,Austria and theProtectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.^[5] On the morning of 7 November 1941, the first group of prisoners was formed into columns and ordered to march and singrevolutionary songs. People were forced to smile at the cameras. Once beyond Minsk, 6,624 Jews were taken by lorries to the nearby village ofTuchinka (Tuchinki) and shot by members ofEinsatzgruppe A.^[12] The next group of over 5,000 Jews followed them to Tuchinka on 20 November 1941.^[13]

As a result of the Soviet 1939 annexation of Polish territory comprising SovietWestern Belorussia,^[14] the Jewish population of BSSR nearly tripled.^[1] In June 1941, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, there were 670,000 Jews in recently annexedWestern Belorussia and 405,000 Jews in the Eastern part of present-day Belarus.^[1] The territories of Western Belorussia in 1941 and modern-day Western Belarus are not the same because theSoviet annexation of Polish territory of 1939 included less land than the annexation of 1945. On 8 July 1941,Reinhard Heydrich, head of theReich Security Main Office (RSHA), gave the order for all male Jews in the occupied territory – between the ages of 15 and 45 – to be shot on sight as Sovietpartisans. By August, the victims targeted in the shootings included women, children, and the elderly.^[15] The GermanOrder Police battalions as well as theEinsatzgruppen carried out the first wave of murders.^[16]

In the Holocaust by bullets, no less than 800,000 Jews perished in the territory of modern-day Belarus according to one estimate.^[1] Most of them were shot byEinsatzgruppen,Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and Order Police battalions aided bySchutzmannschaften.^[1] Notably, when the bulk of the Jewish communities were annihilated in the first major killing spree, the number of Belarusian collaborators was still considerably small, and theSchutzmannschaft in Belarus consisted most of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Latvian volunteers.^[17] HistorianMartin Gilbert wrote that the General-Commissar forGeneralbezirk Weißruthenien,Wilhelm Kube, personally participated in the 2 March 1942 killings in the Minsk Ghetto. During the search of the ghetto area by the Nazi police, a group of children were seized and thrown into a deep pit of sand covered with snow. "At that moment, several SS officers, among them Wilhelm Kube, arrived, whereupon Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the shrieking children. All the children perished in the sand."^{[18][dubious –discuss]}

As of 1 January 2017, theYad Vashem in Israel recognized 641 Belarusians asRighteous Among the Nations.^[19] All of the awards were granted after thedissolution of the Soviet Union. Many of the distinguished individuals came from Minsk and are already deceased.^[20]

In the 1970s and 1980s, historian and SovietrefusenikDaniel Romanovsky, who later immigrated toIsrael, interviewed over 100 witnesses, including Jews, Russians, and Belarusians from the vicinity, recording their accounts of the"Holocaust by bullets".^{[21][22][23][24]} Research on the topic was challenging in the Soviet Union because of government restrictions. Nevertheless, based on his interviews, Romanovsky concluded that the open-type ghettos in Belarusian towns were the result of the prior concentration of the entire Jewish communities in prescribed areas. No walls were required.^[21] According toLeonid Rein, the collaboration with the Germans by some non-Jews was in part a result of attitudes developed under Soviet rule; namely, the practice of conforming to atotalitarian state, sometimes pejoratively calledHomo Sovieticus.^[25][26][27]

• 1941 establishments in Belarus
• 1944 disestablishments in Belarus
• Belarus–Germany relations
• Byelorussia in World War II
• Generalbezirk Weißruthenien
• The Holocaust by country
• The Holocaust in Belarus
• Nazi war crimes in Belarus
• The Holocaust in the Soviet Union

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