Murder Story of Minsk Jews at the Tuchinka NKVD Penal Colony

In late October-early November 1941, Jewish deportees from Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the German-occupied Czech territory) were expected to arrive in Minsk. To make room for them, the German authorities decided to cull the population of the Minsk Ghetto. On November 7, 1941, German order and security policemen and auxiliaries surrounded part of the territory of the ghetto and rounded up in Jubilee Square, in the center of the ghetto, all those Jews deemed unfit for work. Those assembled were lined up, given red placards and banners, and led along Opanski (now Kalvariya) Street in a mock procession marking the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. After marching for some time, the victims were loaded onto trucks and driven to the former 6th Penal Colony of the NKVD (the present-day Kaskad condominium) in Tuchinka, an eastern suburb of the city (the present-day Kaskad neighborhood). Here, the victims were held in overcrowded conditions for several days, either inside the barracks or in the open air. Afterward, some of them were shot at nearby pits by members of Sonderkommando 1b of Einsatzgruppe A and by men of the 46th Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Battalion, while the rest were shot at the quarries further south. According to various documents, this mass-killing operation claimed the lives of several thousand people.