Misplaced Pages

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Slutsk massacre" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Part of a series on
The Holocaust
Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944
Responsibility Nazi Germany People Major perpetrators Adolf Hitler Heinrich Himmler Joseph Goebbels Heinrich Müller Reinhard Heydrich Adolf Eichmann Odilo Globocnik Theodor Eicke Richard Glücks Ernst Kaltenbrunner Rudolf Höss Christian Wirth Organizations Nazi Party Gestapo Schutzstaffel (SS) Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) Einsatzgruppen Sturmabteilung (SA) Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT) Wehrmacht Trawniki men Collaborators during World War II Nazi ideologues
Early policies Racial policy Nazi eugenics Nuremberg Laws Haavara Agreement Madagascar Plan Forced euthanasia
Victims Jews Romani people (Gypsies) Poles Soviet POWs Slavs in Eastern Europe Homosexuals People with disabilities
Ghettos Będzin Białystok Budapest Kaunas Kraków Łódź Lublin Lwów Minsk Riga Sosnowiec Warsaw Vilnius Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland List of selected ghettos
Camps Nazi extermination camps Auschwitz II-Birkenau Bełżec Chełmno Jasenovac Majdanek Sajmište Sobibor Treblinka Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz I Bergen-Belsen Bogdanovka Buchenwald Dachau Dora Gonars (Italy) Gross-Rosen Herzogenbusch Janowska Kaiserwald Mauthausen-Gusen Neuengamme Rab Ravensbrück Sachsenhausen Salaspils Stutthof Transnistria (Romania) Theresienstadt Uckermark Warsaw Transit and collection camps Belgium Breendonk Mechelen France Gurs Drancy Italy Bolzano Netherlands Amersfoort Westerbork Slovakia Sereď Divisions SS-Totenkopfverbände Concentration Camps Inspectorate Politische Abteilung Sanitätswesen Extermination methods Gas van Gas chamber Extermination through labour Einsatzgruppen Human medical experimentation
Atrocities Pogroms Kristallnacht Bucharest Dorohoi Iași Izieu Szczuczyn Jedwabne Plungė Radziłów pogrom Kaunas Lviv (Lvov) Marseille Tykocin Vel' d'Hiv Wąsosz Einsatzgruppen Babi Yar Bydgoszcz Częstochowa Kamianets-Podilskyi Ninth Fort Odessa Piaśnica Ponary Rumbula Erntefest "Final Solution" Wannsee Conference Mogilev Conference Operation "Reinhard" Holocaust trains Extermination camps End of World War II Wola massacre Death marches
Resistance Auschwitz Protocols Vrba–Wetzler report Czesław Mordowicz Jerzy Tabeau Rudolf Vrba Alfréd Wetzler Bricha Jewish partisans Sonderkommando photographs Witold Pilecki Resistance movement in Auschwitz Związek Organizacji Wojskowej Witold's Report Ghetto uprisings Warsaw Białystok Łachwa Częstochowa
International responseJoint Declaration by Members of the United Nations Auschwitz bombing debate MS St. Louis Nuremberg trials Denazification
Aftermath Bricha Displaced persons Survivors Central Committee of the Liberated Jews Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany
Lists Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps Survivors of Sobibor Timeline of Treblinka extermination camp Victims of Nazism Rescuers of Jews Memorials and museums
Resources Bibliography List of books about Nazi Germany The Destruction of the European Jews Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Functionalism versus intentionalism
Remembrance Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations
v t e

The Slutsk affair refers to the massacre of thousands of Jews and others that occurred in Slutsk, Byelorussia in the Soviet Union, in October 1941, near the city of Minsk while under German occupation during World War II. The perpetrators were a combination of Gestapo special forces and Lithuanian allies of the Third Reich. Nearly 4,000 Jews were murdered over a two-day period along with thousands of non-Jews.

The city of Slutsk had a large concentration of Jews as well as large numbers of Belarusians. Although the German government had previously signed a non-aggression pact (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) with the Soviet Union, the Nazis, emboldened by success in western Europe, planned and executed Operation Barbarossa, and invaded their former ally on June 22, 1941. Along the way, the Nazis picked up a number of allies in satellite nations.

On October 27, 1941, four companies of military police stationed in Kaunas entered the city with the assignment of liquidating the city's Jewish population within two days. This "special security operation" was led by the Einsatzgruppen (death squads) of the SS, and acted without authorization from the local German civil administration and Security SS authorities that had marshaled various specialized workers from the population.

The Jews were surrounded, removed from their houses and killed en masse, in such a frenzy that not just Jews, but also other people in the area were massacred. The German civil administration in Byelorussian was outraged, after having made great efforts to gain the favor of the local population in accordance with the instructions of the Führer.

Commissioner General of White Ruthenia Wilhelm Kube wrote in protest to his superior and to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler:

The town was a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of both the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them Belarusians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The Belarusians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement.

The letter concluded:

I am submitting this report in duplicate so that one copy may be forwarded to the Reich Minister. Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Ruthenia with methods of that sort. To bury seriously wounded people alive who worked their way out of their graves again is such a base and filthy act that the incidents as such should be reported to the Fuehrer and Reichsmarshal.

Adolf Hitler, by all accounts, was never notified of the incident and thereafter mistakenly believed that Nazi partisans among the Belarusian population would support the Germans in the continuing invasion.

See also

• Holocaust
• The Holocaust in Byelorussia
• List of massacres in Belarus

References

1. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Volume III. Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1946. pp.783-789. Retrieved January 2008.

External links

• "The Murder of Soviet Jews"
• Slutsk, Belarus at JewishGen

v t e   History of Jews and Judaism in Belarus
Groups	Orthodox Misnagdim Musar Movement Hasidim Chabad-Lubavitch Karlin Lechovitch Koidanov Slonim Amdur Secular Haskalah Bundism General Jewish Labour Bund Zionist Poale Zion Komverband Jewish Communist Party Hashomer Hatzair Tarbut
Synagogues	Current Great Synagogue (Grodno) Former Choral Synagogue (Brest) Choral synagogue (Vitebsk) Cold Synagogue, Minsk Cold Synagogue, Mogilev Slonim Synagogue Wołpa Synagogue Zaniomanskaja Synagogue
Yeshivas	Baranovich Yeshiva Grodno Yeshiva Kaminetz Yeshiva Mir Yeshiva Novardok Yeshiva Radin Yeshiva Slutsk-Kletsk Yeshiva Volozhin Yeshiva Tomchei Tmimim − Lubavitch
The Holocaust	Ghettos Brest Grodno Dzyatlava Kobryn Lakhva Minsk Rakaŭ Pinsk Slonim Concentration camps Davidovka concentration camp Koldichevo Extermination sites and massacres Bronna Góra Dzyatlava massacre Maly Trostenets Slutsk affair Resistance Bielski partisans Łachwa Ghetto uprising Słonim Ghetto Jewish revolt Minsk Ghetto resistance organization Zhetler Battalion
Timeline of Jewish history in Lithuania and Belarus List of Belarusian Jews

53°01′01″N 27°19′48″E / 53.0170°N 27.3300°E / 53.0170; 27.3300

• Holocaust massacres and pogroms in Belarus
• Jewish Belarusian history
• Slutsk
• Massacres in 1941
• October 1941 events in Europe