In September 1941, a unit of the Einsatzkommando 8b, commanded by Carl Ruhrberg, shot 400-560 Jewish men, women and children (according to German and Soviet sources respectively) near the village of Yeloviki, four kilometers to the northwest of Bobruysk on the Minsk Road, in the “Lysye Gorki” natural reserve. The murders were carried out with the participation of SiPO. According to some sources, the specialists who had survived the mass murder operation in Kamenka on November 6, 1941, and Jews who had managed to escape that massacre and had returned to the ghetto, were probably killed in the Yeloviki murder site on December 30, 1941.
M. Sivilobov’s article “In Bobruysk,” published in the main Communist Party newspaper Pravda on December 16, 1942, was a direct Soviet indication of the Holocaust in Russian. The information about the fate of Jews in Bobruysk and in surrounding places had been received from the Belarussian partisans in October – November, 1942, and perhaps the data on the number of Jews killed in Yeloviki was exaggerated.
This article preceded Pravda’s December 18, 1942 publication of the Allied Declaration condemning the extermination of European Jewry.
... Residents of Bobruysk will never forget the terrible November nights of the last year when the German cannibals carried out a brutal mass murder of Jews. Jews – both children and adults, were dragged out of their beds, put on trucks and brought to a deep ditch dug in the village of Yeloshki [Yeloviki].
Witness S. tells about horrible scenes:
“All trucks in the town were mobilized. The arrived trucks were standing in line next to the ditch. The doomed people were standing in the trucks and watched those, who’s turn was before theirs, being shot. Groups of 40-50 people were put at the edge of the ditch, one, sometimes two abreast. Cut down by gun-machine bursts, people fell over still warm corps of those who had been murdered 10-15 minutes prior. Entire families were shot.”
The Hitlerists excelled in their insults at the defenseless people. Mothers, holding their babies, approached the edge of the ditch being kicked by the Germans. The Germans took the babies away from some mothers, stubbed them with bayonets and threw into the ditch.
When the deep ditch was full, the officer, who supervised the execution, called for a tank. The huge machine drove in the ditch over the planking human bodies as a ramming machine.According to uncompleted calculations, in November last year there were about 20,000 Jews killed ....
M. Sivilobov, "In Bobruysk," Pravda, December 16, 1942, p.2