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
Lithuania
Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...
n 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
, native_name_lang = be
, pop = 9.5–10 million
, image =
, caption =
, popplace = 7.99 million
, region1 =
, pop1 = 600,000–768,000
, region2 =
, pop2 ...
. 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
Kaunas (; ; also see other names) is the second-largest city in Lithuania after Vilnius and an important centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaunas was the largest city and the centre of a county in the Duchy of Trakai ...
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
(, ; also ' task forces') were (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The had an integral role in the im ...
'' (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 letter concluded:
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
External links
"The Murder of Soviet Jews"*
{{Authority control
Belarus in World War II
Holocaust massacres and pogroms
The Holocaust in Belarus
Jewish Belarusian history
Slutsk
Mass murder in 1941
October 1941 events