Murder Story of Baranowicze Jews in Grabowiec (Gas Vans)

The direct initiator of this mass murder was the Baranowicze SiPo (Security Police), while ultimate responsibility lay with Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader of Ostland, who demanded that the area be made "Jew-free", as part of the anti-partisan operations in “Weissruthenien”. The perpetrators were German policemen, as well as Belorussian and Latvian auxiliaries. In anticipation of Jewish resistance, the German policemen who showed up at the ghetto wore the uniforms of the Todt Organization, which exploited Jewish labor. The perpetrators began to assemble the ghetto inmates in front of the Gebietskommissariat. At the same time, the police carried out a search for underground shelters where the inmates might be hiding. According to some accounts, there were about 500 clandestine bunkers in the Baranowicze Ghetto. Some of the shelters were discovered on that same day, while the rest were exposed over the following days. As a result, the killing “operation” dragged on until October 2. To expedite the search for hidden Jews, the Germans permitted local Belarusians to enter the ghetto for plunder, after the bulk of the victims had been transported to the killing site. The patients in the ghetto hospital were killed on the spot. Some Jews revealed the location of bunkers in exchange for a promise to spare their lives, but they were killed, as well. Some Jews tried to resist during the roundup and/or managed to escape into the forest.

Some of the assembled victims were loaded into gas vans and killed on the way to Grabowiec; the rest were escorted to pits west of Grabowiec, 2-3 kilometers south of Baranowicze, and shot. The total number of Jews killed over this eleven-day period (September 22- October 2, 1942) has been estimated at 6,000.

The Germans carried out their third and final massacre of the Jews of Baranowicze in December 1942. On December 17, as the Jewish workers were going out to work, the Germans intercepted some of them and transported them to the area of Grabowiec. The non-working Jews were transported to the murder site at the same time. Just like in September 1942, many ghetto inmates went into hiding, and it took the perpetrators (local policemen, as well as Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries) several weeks to find most of them. The most reliable estimate of the number of Jews killed in those days is about 3,000, although some estimates run higher.

During this operation, the Nazis spared some of the most essential Jewish workers (these would be killed in the fall of 1943). Nevertheless, the ghetto was liquidated.