All events · The World Wars

German Anti-Partisan Warfare and Village Destruction in Belarus

1941–1944 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Mass Killing Killing was the defining act

Displaced

400,000

The Belarusian state archives record that 209 towns and 9,200 villages were destroyed or burned, that 630 villages were annihilated together with their inhabitants, and that about 400,000 people were taken from Belarus to forced labour in Germany, of whom almost half did not return. Some 140 punitive expeditions were carried out. The figures come from the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission and postwar Belarusian archival compilations.

Share of the population affected

4.3%

of the population of the Belarusian SSR at the time of the German invasion, 1941

Killed

345,000–700,000

direct killing

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

Belarus was the centre of Soviet partisan warfare and of the German response to it. Under directives that treated whole districts as bandit areas, SS and police units, Wehrmacht security divisions and locally recruited auxiliaries carried out large sweeps in which villages were burned, inhabitants shot or driven into camps, and livestock and grain removed; 'dead zones' were created from which the population was cleared entirely. Khatyn, whose 149 inhabitants were burned alive in a barn on 22 March 1943, became the emblem of these operations and the site of the national memorial. Belarusian archives count 630 villages destroyed with their people, 9,200 villages burned in whole or part, and about 400,000 people deported to labour in Germany. Trostenets outside Minsk, where about 206,500 people were killed according to the same archives, was among the largest killing sites in the occupied Soviet territories. Estimates of total wartime deaths in Belarus range from the Extraordinary State Commission's 2.2 million to about three million, roughly a quarter to a third of the prewar population, including some 800,000 Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Parties

German security forces, SS units and auxiliary police burned villages and killed or deported their inhabitants during operations against partisans in occupied Belarus

Disputed

The Soviet-era total of 2.2 million dead is now regarded by Belarusian archivists as an undercount, while some Western historians caution that Extraordinary State Commission figures were compiled to political specifications; the share of deaths attributable to anti-partisan operations as distinct from the Holocaust and from combat is not precisely separable.

The denominator

The 1939 Soviet census counted 5.57 million in the pre-1939 Belarusian SSR; the annexation of western Belarus later that year brought the republic to roughly 10.4 million, and estimates for June 1941 are usually around nine million. German anti-partisan operations destroyed some 5,295 villages, of which more than 600 were burned with their inhabitants, and Belarus lost roughly a quarter of its population during the occupation.

Where the baseline comes from

Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic — Wikipediaopen-edited
German anti-partisan operations in Belarus — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Estimates of civilians killed specifically in anti-partisan operations in Belarus run from about 345,000, the figure derived by German historians from operational reports of the security forces, to 500,000-700,000 in Belarusian accounting that includes deaths in the associated camps and deportations. These are a subset of total Belarusian war deaths of 2.2 to 3 million, which also include the Holocaust, prisoner-of-war deaths and combat.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingDestruction of PropertyForced LabourSummary ExecutionArbitrary Detention

Village burnings, the shooting of inhabitants and the deportation of survivors to labour are documented in the operational reports of the German security forces, in the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission files and in the compilations of the Belarusian state archives.

Formal findings

International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg (1946) — Found the destruction of villages and killing of civilians in the occupied eastern territories under the guise of anti-partisan warfare to be war crimes — source

Movements mapped

Belarus -> forced labour in Germany400,000
Cleared villages -> Trostenets and other camps near Minsk

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Belarus, Germany

Related entries

Part of: Forced Labour in the German War Economy
The Belarus entry's displacement figure is the National Archives of Belarus count of about 400,000 people taken from Belarus to forced labour in Germany. These deportees are among the Soviet Ostarbeiter counted in the forced labour entry's 8 million, so the two displacement figures must not be summed. The archive gives no figure for people driven from the 9,200 burned villages or the cleared 'dead zones', so no separate figure can be substituted. 400,000 people are counted in both entries.