Maly Trostenets Extermination Site:

Maly Trostenets, today a suburb of Minsk, was the largest extermination site on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union in the period between spring 1942 and summer 1944. In order to conceal the traces of their crimes, in late 1943 the murderers had the bodies of the victims exhumed and burnt. In August 1944 the Soviet Union’s Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate National Socialist Crimes estimated the total number of victims to be around 206,500 – most of them Belarusian, Austrian, German and Czech Jews, civilians, partisans, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war. After 1945 a number of small-scale Soviet monuments were erected on the site and a large memorial complex was inaugurated in 2015. This exhibition – produced as part of a German-Belarusian pilot project – honours the victims and at the same time demonstrates how and where those murdered are commemorated in Belarus, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. In addition, it documents the topography of the murders and addresses the role of the perpetrators. The exhibition aims to raise public awareness of Maly Trostenets as a European site of Nazi crimes and of remembrance.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler declared that a racist war of extermination against the Soviet Union would be his main foreign policy objective in future. His world view was dominated by anti-communism and a fanatical hatred of Jews. For Hitler, the Soviet Union embodied “Jewish Bolshevism” that was to be eradicated. From late 1940 preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union were fully under way. The intention was to conquer the European part of the USSR and subsequently to murder the Soviet executive personnel, but also to enslave the local population, expel them on a mass scale, or allow millions to die of starvation.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht crossed the border into the Soviet Union all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Arriving at the rear of the combat troops were SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units) and other special units, which started off by murdering male Jews and political functionaries, but soon extended their killing activities to women and children, so-called Gypsies and patients with physical or mental disabilities. By the end of 1941, half a million Jews had fallen victim to the mass shootings carried out on occupied Soviet territory. In spring 1942 alone, around two million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or perished as a result of starvation or neglect – many of them on Belarusian soil.

From 24 to 26 June 1941, German air raids caused considerable damage to Minsk. Two days later, the Wehrmacht occupied the city. Males over the age of 15 were forced to register with the German military administration, which held them in Drosdy camp for days without providing anything to eat or drink. Jews were segregated from the other prisoners and many of them were murdered. The Wehrmacht interned prisoners of war in places like Stalag 352.

On 1 September 1941 Minsk became the headquarters of the newly established General Commissariat White Ruthenia. The civil administration and police assumed control. The population had to undertake forced labour; tens of thousands of men and women were transported to the German Reich as Ostarbeiter (“workers from the East”). The Germans also exploited local agricultural supplies. While one in two Belarusian children died of starvation, the Wehrmacht fed their horses with rye and wheat. Partisan resistance continued to grow. In retribution the German occupiers annihilated entire villages, above all in 1943/44.

According to Belarusian data, 1,547,000 civilians and 810,000 prisoners of war were killed during the occupation period.

Fyodor Shuvayev was born in the Arkhangelsk region in the north of Russia. From 1940 he served as a soldier in the Red Army; he was stationed in Belarus at the time when the German Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union. In December 1941 Shuvayev was arrested near Minsk and interned in the prison in Volodarskogo Street.

At the end of April 1942, Shuvayev was brought to Maly Trostenets with around 20 other prisoners and was one of the forced labourers deployed to construct the camp. Soon afterwards he was witness to the mass murders in Blagovshchina: he had to mend items of clothing belonging to the Jews murdered there and he regularly had to clean out gas vans. In autumn 1943, he managed to escape. It was during this period that he met his future wife, Elena Shcherbach, in the village of Shabany. He joined the partisans. From October 1944 he served again in the Red Army.

After the end of the war, he remained in Minsk and worked in a car factory. Shuvayev, who had two daughters, became one of the most well-known survivors of Maly Trostenets and spoke publicly about his experiences. He died in 1989 in Minsk at the age of 68.

Hanuš (Hans) Münz was born in Prague in 1910; his family were Czech Jews. During the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938/39, Münz made plans to flee to Norway. In autumn 1941, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and deployed in forced labour.

The following year, on 25 August 1942, Hanuš Münz was among a group of 1,000 Jews who were deported from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets. The journey took three days. On arrival, virtually all of the deportees were murdered in gas vans or shot dead in Blagovshchina forest; only 22 prisoners were selected to undertake forced labour in Maly Trostenets camp. These prisoners included Münz, who claimed to be a metalworker and was put to work in a factory in Minsk.

In 1943, Münz managed to escape. He joined the partisans and fought among their ranks until July 1944. He then served in the Red Army until the end of the war. In 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he later married and opened a dental surgery. Hanuš Münz died in 2010, shortly before his 100th birthday.

Before the war, Tsyra Goldina (née Milenkaya) and her husband Efim Goldin (1906–1974) worked in the “Oktober” textile factory in Minsk. The couple had three children: Rahil (born in 1928), Lazar (1931–1982) and Aron (1936–1942). The family were of Jewish origin but did not practise their religion. They spoke Russian at home. When the war broke out, Efim was evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union along with other factory workers. Tsyra remained behind with the children. In July she had to move with them into the ghetto, and from then on they lived at her sister Ida’s house in very cramped conditions. Tsyra’s two oldest children, Rahil and Lazar, had to undertake forced labour at a goods depot; they were at least able to barter items of clothing for food and thereby to feed the family.

On 28 July 1942 the SS and their auxiliaries forced around 10,000 ghetto residents out of their homes – a total of 6,500 local Jews and 3,500 German Jews from Sonderghetto (“special ghetto”) 2. Most of them were children, women and elderly people. They were either brought by truck to Blagovshchina, where they were shot, or they were murdered in gas vans on the way there. Their bodies were then hastily buried. The operation took three days. Among the victims were Tsyra Goldina, her five-year-old son Aron and Tsyra’s sister Ida.

Lili Grün was born on 3 February 1904 in Vienna and was the youngest of four children. Her parents died when she was young. In her youth, Lili Grün was interested in theatre, drama and literature. She performed at a number of theatres, for example at the new theatre of the Socialist Workers’ League in Vienna. In 1931 Lili Grün moved to Berlin. She wrote articles and poems and her work was published in magazines such as Tempo and newspapers including the Berliner Tageblatt and the Prager Tagblatt. She was among the artists who founded the cabaret Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). After time spent living in Prague and Paris, she returned to Vienna in 1933; her first novel was published in the same year.

Because she was Jewish, from 1938 she was banned from publishing her work. She became destitute and suffered from tuberculosis. The authorities forced her to vacate her apartment, probably in 1940. Her final residence was in mass accommodation for Jews in Vienna’s 1st District. On 27 May 1942 she was deported to Minsk on a transport that departed from Vienna’s Aspang railway station. She was murdered in Blagovshchina on 1 June.

Erich Klibansky (1900–1942) grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. He studied history, German and French. In 1928 he married Meta David (1902–1942) from Hamburg. The couple moved to Cologne, where Erich Klibansky became headmaster of Jawne Grammar School in 1929.

Founded in 1919, Jawne was the first Jewish grammar school in the Rhineland region. After Jewish pupils were excluded from German state schools in the 1930s, Jawne School had its highest ever number of pupils. Klibansky tried to prepare his pupils for emigration. After the November pogroms in 1938, he decided to relocate the entire school to Britain. The following year, he arranged for 130 pupils to leave for Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue effort.

Jawne School was closed down on 1 July 1942. Just a few weeks later, Erich Klibansky was deported to Minsk along with his wife; their three sons Hans-Raphael (1928–1942), Alexander (1931–1942) and Michael (1935–1942); and around 100 pupils from Jawne School. The SS deported a total of 1,164 people from Cologne and the surrounding area on Transport Da 219 on 20 July 1942. After four days, the transport arrived in Minsk. Upon arrival, the deportees were either brought by truck to Blagovshchina, where they were shot at pits dug in advance, or they were murdered in gas vans on the way there.

Biography prepared by the Austrian House of History

Lea Dlugacz and Pinkas Rennert were both from the Austrian province of Bukovina, which became part of Romania after World War One. They got engaged in 1920. After their marriage the couple moved to Vienna, where their daughter Silvia was born in 1922 and their son Erwin in 1926. Lea Rennert was a housewife, while Pinkas Rennert worked as a metalware salesman, primarily for the galvanising company “Brunner Verzinkerei” run by the Bablik brothers. After the “Anschluss” (Austria’s annexation to the German Reich), Pinkas Rennert was initially able to continue working within the company as a welder, but then lost this job too on account of his Jewish origins. He was subsequently employed by the Israelite Religious Community. On 31 October 1939 the couple’s two children were able to emigrate to the USA. Lea and Pinkas Rennert’s final residence was in a building in Odeongasse 5/9 designated as collective accommodation for Jews expelled from their homes. On 5 October 1942 they were deported to Maly Trostenets, where they were murdered.

Yevgeniy Klumov was born in Moscow, where he studied medicine until 1904. In World War One he served as a medical officer in the Russian Army. From the 1920s Klumov headed the gynaecological department of a hospital in Minsk and taught midwifery and gynaecology at the city’s Medical University.

Right from the first few days after the German attack on the Soviet Union, he operated on wounded soldiers in his hospital and had them moved farther away from the front line. In early 1942 Klumov established links with resistance groups in Minsk. He provided them with surgical instruments, medicines and bandages. He treated the wounded and made sure that they were able to get to the partisans. He hid young people in his hospital to protect them from being transported to Germany as forced labour.

In October 1943, Klumov, his wife, and fellow doctors were arrested, interrogated and tortured in the hospital. They were brought to the camp in Shirokaya Street. In February 1944, the SS murdered Klumov and his wife Galina in a gas van on the way to Trostenets. Their corpses were then presumably burnt in Shashkovka.

Nikolaj Valakhanovich was a train controller at Negoreloye station, 50 kilometres from Minsk. From April 1943 he compiled reports on the traffic of freight transports and passed these on to contacts within the Soviet intelligence.

On 20 June 1944 – shortly before the liberation of Minsk – Valakhanovich was betrayed and the SD arrested him and a number of other villagers on suspicion of being partisans. He was brought to the prison in Volodarskogo Street in Minsk, where he was tortured. On 29 June the SS then brought him and other prisoners by truck to Maly Trostenets, where they were to be shot. Valakhanovich was taken into a barn in which countless dead bodies were already piled up and he was shot, losing an eye in the process. He lay between the bodies for almost a day and a half before creeping outside – the shootings were still under way – and finding a place to hide. Shortly afterwards the barn was set on fire by the guards.

In the early 1960s the authorities invited him to Moscow to give a witness statement as the Soviet Union was gathering evidence for a trial against members of the SS in Koblenz. Well into old age, Valakhanovich continued to take part in commemorations at Maly Trostenets, where he recounted his experiences to school groups.

This text was prepared by Institute for the History of Frankfurt

Arthur Harder was born in 1910 in Frankfurt. From September to November 1943 he headed Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte, which was responsible for removing evidence of the crimes committed in Maly Trostenets. During this period, Harder also participated in the murder of Jewish and Russian prisoners used as forced labour. In November 1943 he carried out the execution of three Jewish prisoners on the orders of the Reich Security Main Office by having them burnt alive.

Most members of the commando recalled Arthur Harder as a tall, powerful man with a loud and brutal demeanour. According to their reports, he would say, “I want to see figures!” (he used the term “figures” (Figuren) to describe the corpses as well as the prisoners) and climb on to the piles of bodies in Blagovshchina forest, and he would beat the forced labourers with whips or cudgels to get them to work faster.

After leaving school (“Volksschule”) and completing a commercial apprenticeship, Arthur Harder initially worked as an employee, but he had already joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1929 and the SS in 1930. From 1938 he worked full time for the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS. In 1942 he was called up for the Waffen-SS and was awarded the rank of Hauptsturmführer in 1944.

In May 1945 Arthur Harder was initially held captive by the British forces, who then handed him over to the Americans. As a member of the SS, he was held in Darmstadt internment camp. On 2 July 1948 a denazification tribunal categorised him as a “minor offender”, put him on probation for two years and issued him with a fine of 200 Reichsmarks.

After returning to live in Frankfurt-Eckenheim, he was a salaried employee at the Krupp vehicles firm. In the 1950s the Frankfurt public prosecutor investigated him for allegedly singing antisemitic songs during a meeting of the “Aid Association of Former SS Members” in a Frankfurt pub. During the investigations, he attacked and seriously injured a prosecution witness and was consequently given a two-month suspended sentence by a Frankfurt court.

In 1963 Koblenz Regional Court found him guilty of the murder of the three Jews whom he had burnt to death in November 1943 and sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in prison. The Federal Supreme Court repealed the sentence. Arthur Harder died on 3 February 1964 in Frankfurt.