Little Known Death Factory

Operation Barbarossa, The German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced on June 22,1941. Behind the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht forces mobile SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, went into action. They killed Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and political commissars. The historian Raul Hilberg estimated the number of Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the ravines of Babi Yar, in the forests of Riga and many other places at 1.3 million. On the outspread yards of a former kolkhoz, a dusty Soviet collective farm, the SS task forces set up a secret death factory. Its horrible assembly lines creaked and cried in the outskirts of Minsk of Byelorussia, near the village of Maly Trostenets. Here the Nazis murdered thousands of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, Gypsies and other Byelorussian civilians. And then, on May 19,1942, the first transport of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived. Maly Trostenets became a Vernichtungslager, an extermination camp. Men, women and children Were shot daily in the forests. Others, thousands of them, were killed in mobile gas chamber vans, on the way from Minsk to Maly Trostenets. Special groups of prisoners threw the corpses Of the murdered into deep pits of mass graves. The Nazis used a euphemistic code, ‘the final solution', in orderto conceal their horrible genocidal atrocities. The extermination of the Jews was a heinous secret operation of Hitler's Third Reich, a clandestine action disguised as "resettlement". The guards in all death camps were sworn to secrecy. Furthermore, the perpetrators of the massacres tried to obliterate the evidence that Maly Trostenets, or other camps for that matter, ever existed. As the Red Army advanced towards Berlin, the inmates were forced to exhume the bodies from the mass graves and to cremate the corpses. After they completed their terrible task the guards killed them as well. Finally, on June 28,1944, the SS guards blew up the camp. One of the victims who was shot by the Nazis at Maly Trostenets was Vincent Hadleuski, a Catholic priest and Byelorussian patriot. Another victim who died here was Cora Berliner, a German Jewess born in 1890 in Hannover, She was known in her homeland as a pioneer of social work and as an economist. The Austrian-born soprano Grete Forst was murdered in Maly Trostenets, too. History has recorded the date: June 1,1942. The psychologist Margarete Hilferding, her compatriot, also lost her life here, on September 23 of the same year. No survivors of the lager are known to be alive today. Since the Nazis did not keep camp records the exact number of people who perished here in the genocide is unknown. Estimates range from 200,000 to half million murdered men, women and children. At least 65,000 of them were Jews.