Description of the attraction
Maly Trostenets is the largest concentration camp in Eastern Belarus. The camp was established on July 28, 1942 and existed until the end of June 1944.
Initially, the camp was conceived as a labor camp. Before the war, there was a large collective farm named after Karl Marx on 200 hectares of land. Prisoners of war were driven to forced construction and agricultural work. Using slave labor, the Nazis built a house for the commandant, premises for guards, a garage, paved a road lined with poplars from the Mogilev highway. On the collective farm fields, foodstuffs necessary for the needs of the German invaders were grown. There was also a carpentry workshop, a mill, a sawmill, a shoe and clothing workshop.
The concentration camp was fenced off with barbed wire, high towers with machine gunners stood over the fence. There were signs in German and Russian along the entire perimeter: "Entry to the camp is prohibited, they will shoot without warning!"
The prisoners were kept in inhuman conditions: damp, cold, large overcrowded barracks. They fed people with the waste of the German canteen and other garbage. The prisoners were bullied, torture was practiced, as well as mass executions of those who could not or did not want to work.
Prisoners of the underground were taken here for demonstration executions from the Minsk prison from Volodarsky Street. Prominent figures of the anti-fascist underground were imprisoned in this concentration camp: E. V. Klumov, E. M. Zubkovich, E. I. Zagorskaya, O. F. Deribo, E. V. Gudovich and many others.
Before retreating in 1944, the Nazis drove all the prisoners into a former collective farm shed, shot and burned the prisoners in two large pits. In total, in Maly Trostenets, more than 6, 5 thousand prisoners of the concentration camp and prison from the street were killed. Volodarsky.
Trostenets unites several places of mass extermination of people. In addition to the Trostenets labor camp, nearby were: Blagovshchina - the German "death factory", where people brought from different countries, mostly Jews, were taken into account, their personal belongings were taken away and destroyed; Shashkovka - a furnace for incineration of corpses was built here.
