Maly Trostenets

"Field of Burial" where the ashes of murdered and cremated prisoners were scattered

Maly Trostenets (Maly Trascianiec, Template:Langx, "Little Trostenets") is a village near Minsk in Belarus, formerly the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. During Nazi Germany's occupation of the area during World War II (when the Germans referred to it as Reichskommissariat Ostland), the village became the location of a Nazi extermination site.<ref name=YadVashem1>Template:Cite web</ref>

Throughout 1942, Jews from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were taken by train to Maly Trostenets to be lined up in front of the pits and were shot.<ref name=YadVashem1/> From the summer of 1942, mobile gas vans were also used.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=YadVashem2/> According to Yad Vashem, the Jews of Minsk were murdered and buried in Maly Trostenets and in another village, Bolshoi Trostinets, between 28 and 31 July 1942 and on 21 October 1943.<ref name=YadVashem1/> As the Red Army approached the area in June 1944, the Germans murdered most of the prisoners and destroyed the camp.<ref name=YadVashem1/>

The estimates of how many people were murdered at Maly Trostenets vary. According to Yad Vashem, 65,000 Jews were murdered in one of the nearby pine forests, mostly by shooting.<ref name=YadVashem2>Template:Cite web</ref> Holocaust historian Stephan Lehnstaedt believes the number is higher, writing that at least 106,000 Jews were murdered at the location. Researchers from the Soviet Union estimated there had been around 200,000 murders at the camp and nearby execution sites. Lehnstaedt writes that the estimates include the Jews of the Minsk Ghetto, who numbered 39,000 to almost 100,000.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Efn

Camp establishment and destruction

Maly Trostenets, Reichskommissariat Ostland. The camp's location is marked by the black-and-white skull icon.

The primary purpose of the camp was the murder of Jewish prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto and the surrounding area. Firing squad was the chief execution method. Mobile gas vans were also deployed. Baltic German SS-Scharführer Heinrich Eiche was the camp administrator.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Request quotation As the Red Army approached the camp in June 1944,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> toward the end of World War II, between June 28 and June 30, the Germans murdered the majority of prisoners by locking them inside of the camps, burning their barracks, and when anyone tried to escape the burning building they were shot.<ref name="holocaustresearchproject.org">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Maly Trostinets Camp">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Maly Trostinets">Template:Cite web</ref> By June 30 the entire camp had been destroyed, however, a few Jewish prisoners were able to escape into the surrounding Blagovshchina forest and survive until July 3 when the approaching Red Army reached the decimated camp.<ref name="holocaustresearchproject.org"/><ref name="Maly Trostinets Camp"/><ref name="Maly Trostinets"/>

After the war

Memorial to the more than 10,000 Austrian Jewish victims of Maly Trostenets concentration camp, inaugurated in 2019.

Ruins of building at Maly Trostenets concentration camp

Ruins of the building used for personal belongings of prisoners at the Maly Trostenets concentration camp

Victims

The names of 10,000 Austrian Jews murdered in Maly Trostenets were collected in a book, Maly Trostinec – Das Totenbuch: Den Toten ihre Namen, by Waltraud Barton.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

• Cora Berliner (most likely)
• Elsa Bienenfeld, Austrian music historian and music critic
• Grete Forst
• Mitzi Freud and Paula Winternitz née Freud
• Vincent Hadleŭski [Wincenty Godlewski], Roman Catholic priest and Belarusian nationalist resistance fighter (Template:Abbr 1888), arrested in Minsk on 24 December 1942 and shot at Trostenets the same day.
• Margarete Hilferding (in transit to the camp from Terezín)
• Norbert Jokl (debated)
• JUDr. Walter Krafft, Austrian Lawyer, cousin of Kurt Adler, including his wife Lilly Sara Krafft
• Alfred Nichtenhauser, Modling, Austria shop owner
• Arthur Ernst Rutra, author and translator

Memorial

A memorial complex has been built at the site of the camp.

• 
  Memorial sign on the place of main massacres
• 
  The plate of the planned memorial complex
• 
  Memorial complex, built in 2015

See also

• List of Nazi concentration camps
• Nazi concentration camps

Further reading

• Kohl, Paul (1995). Der Krieg der deutschen Wehrmacht und der Polizei, 1941–1944: sowjetische Überlebende berichten. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag (includes a photograph of the camp).
• Template:Cite journal