Brest Ghetto Mass Grave: More Than One Thousand Murder Victims Exhumed

Earlier this month, the BBC reported here the exhumation of over 1,000 Jews from a mass grave in the site of the Brest ghetto during the previous two months. The unearthed skeletons included women and children and proof that victims were shot in the back of the head. The embedded video in the report included (from two minutes in) an illustrated discussion of the ghetto population register. As I showed in our Critique, this was the 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement' that recorded 16,934 Jews on October 15, 1942, but crossed out that figure the following day. Mattogno of course insists that all these 16,934 Jews were 'evacuated' as that is the term used by Police Battalion 310 in its report of the ghetto action (Mattogno, pp.702-704), but these remains are proof that not all 'evacuated' Jews ever left the ghetto and that at least a thousand of them had infact been shot in the ghetto itself. Moreover, given that this also proves that 'evacuated' was a euphemism that included substantial killing, and there is no evidence these Jews ever left that administrative region of the occupied territories, it is logical to infer that any Jews who were transported elsewhere were also shot. Another desperate Mattogno gambit therefore fails.

The Kortelisy Massacre

On 23 September 1942, Reserve Police Company Nürnberg destroyed the Ukrainian small town of Kortelisy and killed almost all its inhabitants. The present article about this massacre, where not stated otherwise, is based on the well-sourced brochure »Ihr Gewissen war rein; sie haben es nie benutzt«. Die Verbrechen der Polizeikompanie Nürnberg, by Jim G. Tobias and Nicola Schlichting, 2005 ANTOGO Verlag, Nuremberg. Tobias also made a short documentary that includes interviews with survivors of the massacre ("Der Schwarze Mittwoch" Polizeikompanie Nürnberg vernichtet Kortelisy). Accounts quoted in the following are my translations from German text.
  

Brest Sources - Part 3: Domachevo

Domachevo, a spa town 25 miles south of Brest, had 3,316 Jewish inhabitants in February 1942, according to a German document cited by Dean in this collection (p.259). The fate of most of these Jews was documented in a Gendarmerie report dated October 6, 1942:

Read more!

On September 19-20, 1942, an anti-Jewish Aktion was carried out in Domachevo and Tomashovka by a special commando of the SD together with the cavalry squadron of the Gendarmerie and the local police stationed in Domachevo, and in total, some 2,900 Jews were shot. The action took place without any disturbance (cited in Dean, p.259).

This massacre is especially notable in three respects. Firstly, as Browning (p.138) summarizes, the Stadtkommissar for Brest, Franz Burat, wrote a response to the massacre which indicated that he and his SS counterpart, Rohde, were still making futile attempts to retain Jews for essential work in Brest:

Burat noted that the "sudden liquidation" of the Jews of Domachevo and Tomashovka had caused "profound distress" among the Jews of Brest who strove desperately "to prove their indispensability" through "a model organization of Jewish workshops."

Burat continued:

I must unconditionally plead for the retention of the most needed artisans and manpower.

These pleadings were, of course, in vain, as Burat and Rohde would be forced to implement the killing orders for the Brest ghetto issued by their superiors in October.

Secondly, the murders included the slaughter of Jewish children from an orphanage, whose clothes were then handed to ethnic German children attending a kindergarten in Domachevo (Dean, p.259; citing Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p.1,075). A monument to these children and their teacher can be seen here.

Thirdly, Domachevo was the subject of a historic British war crimes trial held in 1999, which was the first trial in British legal history during which the jury was taken overseas to the scene of the crime. The defendant, Anthony Sawoniuk, was given two life sentences, upheld on appeal, for murdering two Jewish women during a hunt for survivors of the massacre.

Brest Sources - Part 2: Perpetrator Testimonies

Many of the perpetrators of the genocide in the Brest region were never brought to justice, but there are several essential perpetrator testimonies by and about the killing actions that converge with the demographic and documentary evidence and bystander and victim statements.

Read more!

The first major Aktion in Brest, in July 1941, was described by 23 members of police battalion 307 whose testimonies are preserved in ZStL, 204 AR-Z 82/61. These are discussed by Browning, pp.121-123. One such testimony, of Heinrich M., can be viewed here.

Testimonies concerning the ghetto liquidation of 1942 can be found in two secondary sources. Firstly, Westermann describes the judicial investigation concerning a member of the Eleventh Company of Third Battalion/Regiment 15 (formerly P.B. 310), whom Westermann gives the pseudonym Hermann Schmidt:

The actions and statements of one of the Eleventh Company 's platoon sergeants, Hermann Schmidt [pseudonym], provide additional evidence for determining the influence of ideology and the effect of war on the unit's members. Schmidt was born on November 21, 1911, in Walsum am Rhein. He entered the SA and the NSDAP in 1933. He was one of the police recruits from Schneidemiihl who joined the battalion (PB 310) in September 1940. In testimony to the federal prosecutor's office in 1961, Fritz Lange [pseudonym] (Schmidt's former brother-in-law) recounted statements made by Schmidt while on leave from his unit during the war. After having had some drinks, Schmidt told Lange that he had participated in the execution of Jews in Poland.

Lange expressed disbelief, which then resulted in Schmidt's exclamation that "the Jews were not people but a danger to the German Volk."' Lange stated that Schmidt had told him of how mothers often pleaded for their children's lives. According to Lange, Schmidt described how he had first shot the chlld of one such mother so that she would see her child die. Schmidt told Lange, "We know no mercy." Lange was not the only person who provided testimony on Schmidt's activities in the East. After initially refusing to provide a statement, Schmidt's former wife subsequently agreed to speak with the prosecutor's office. She stated that her husband had told her of his "forced" participation in the execution of Jews. At one point during the war, she also overheard her husband saying that "earlier [before the war] he couldn't harm a fly, but now he could shoot a Jew in the head while eating a sandwich. The former Frau Schmidt rationalized the actions of her husband as the product of the stresses of war. She stated, "My husband was okay earlier, I mean before the war, only after the war did I recognize he had become sadistic."'It is difficult to believe that the man who had boasted of his reputation as the "Terror of Lemberg" was an unwilling tool of racial policy. Schmidt's conversion to an instrument of genocide whether "forced" or the result of the rigors of war was nonetheless complete.

The second author, Andrea Simon, cites two testimonies by members of the Schutzmannschaft. The first is by the leader of the Schutzmannschaft, Semenyuk, who admits that his company carried out the killing of "about 300" Jews in Volchin (the real figure was 497, according to the source I cited in this blog) but claims that he was absent due to being drunk and the action was overseen by his deputy, Kesarov. He states that the Germans killed 130 civilians in Lishitsi, whilst one of his deputies, Felix Zhukovski, killed about 120 people in various random killings, including sick people who had to be taken off transports, who were "killed...right on the road". He also confirms that the Jews who were forced to work on the Chernavchich highway were killed.

Semenyuk is equally frank about those he killed himself - "I killed six people in Motikali and one in Sukharevichi" - but his most explicit testimony of all concerns the Jews he killed in Brest in November 1942, who had escaped the main Aktion in October:

In November 1942, when the Jews started to run away from the ghetto in Brest, I was ordered to capture them, especially women and children. Once we executed 47 Jews, of whom I personally killed eight. Before shooting them, we took away their clothing and put them into graves in rows. Each one was shot in the back of the head (Simon, p.179)

The second Schutzmannshaft perpetrator Simon cites is Joseph Pavlovich Schidlovsky, who described his participation two mass killings of the Jews of Bereza, a town in the Brest region, during which 4,000 Jews were rounded-up and sent to Bronnaia Gora and a further 3,000 sent to be killed in Smolyarka. Schidlovsky travelled to Bronnaia Gora with the victims, but did not travel to Smolyarka. The SD commander for these killings, according to the witness, was Pichmann, who also oversaw the killing of 1,450 Jews in Divin and 269 in Gorodets.

Brest Sources - Part 1: Demographics

The effects of German policies upon the population of Brest can be seen in this table, which is drawn from several sources. Garrard & Garrard and Andrea Simon utilized archives held in the city of Brest, whilst the Bundesarchiv collection on Brest (in BAB R 94/6) was consulted by Browning. What do these figures tell us and how do we reconcile them with other sources?

Read more!

Under Soviet occupation, from September 1939 to June 1941, Brest (Polish name: Brzesc n.Bugiem) received refugees from western Poland (there were 7,916 Jewish refugees in Brest oblast as of February 1940, according to Nick's source cited here) but also lost 6,709 people who were deported to the Soviet interior (source: Gurjanov). In July 1941, the Germans documented the 'execution' of 4,435 people, of which c.4,000 were Jews, in EM 32. Browning argued that a further 4,403 people were killed by the zbV Brest in the Summer of 1941, but Browning may have overlooked the fact that these killings were carried out across the whole region in which the unit operated, not just Brest city.

The population reductions of 1942 are documented in the Brest archives. Andrea Simon examined the statistical report of the Brest town council dated 5 June 1942, showing 16,973 Jews, whilst Garrard & Garrard reproduced the ledger for 15th and 16th October, 1942, which they described as follows:

This document is one of the most horrifying discovered at Brest, for it represents the complicity in mass murder of men who sat behind their desks throughout the entire process. Across the top of each page are the names of ethnic groups in Brest. The clerk has been ordered to keep a running total for each group: he records how many had 'arrived' and how many had 'departed' for each day. The total population is given in the righthand column. As of 15 October 1942 the total population is 41,091. Of this total, 16,934 are designated in the column for Jews (Zydowsk.). But then the clerk learns that this total is wrong. He has made a mistake in writing 16,934. In fact, all the Jews in the ghetto have now 'departed'. The clerk corrects his mistake; he strikes through 16,934 and writes in '0'. He then subtracts this figure of 16,934 from 41,091 and writes in the correct number of people alive in Brest now - 24,157. It is unlikely that the clerk did not know what had happened to these thousands of people, even if he was not sure exactly when and where they had been executed. Thus, with a single stroke of a pen, 16,934 people are erased.

Furthermore, Garrard & Garrard found that the reduction of 16.934 in the ghetto liquidation corresponded to the volume of transports from Brest to the killing site:

According to documents in the Brest archives, from late June to November 1942 a total of seven trains transported Jews to be executed at Bronnaya gora. Three of these trains are said to have carried people from Brest—two trains consisting of 40 and 13 cars in July, and a third consisting of 28 cars in October. How many Jews from the Brest ghetto were transported in the three trains? If we say that close to 200 people were crushed into each car, then we arrive at a total of 8,000 people in the first train, 2,600 in the second, and 5,600 in the third. There is no way of knowing how many people had already died of starvation and sickness before July 1942, or were shot in and near Brest before October 1942. But the total number transported by this estimate (16,200) does approximate the figure given in the Brest Town Administration's 'Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement'...

Moreover, these figures were corroborated by Polish railway worker, Roman Stanislavovich Novis, the former station master at Bronnaya Gora, in testimony given to the Soviets on September 12th, 1944 (Cited in Andrea Simon, pp. 189-191). Novis counted a total of 186 railroad cars arriving at Bronnaya Gora from various locations, and claimed that his German successor as station master, Heil, had told him that 48,000 people were shot there.

Finally, these demographics are supported by the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive, which was a list of

Jews of 14 years of age and above living in the Brest Ghetto were required to obtain and sign for identity papers, which included their names, ages, and the names and dates of birth of their parents. A photo of each person was taken and all those receiving these internal passports were required to sign for them.

The list contains 12,258 names. When the omitted children are added to this total, we have a baseline figure for the number of Brest Jews murdered in the second half of 1942.

More Mass Graves in the Polesie

Further to Nick's earlier blog, I present below a number of extracts from Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports that were collated and translated from the Brest archives by Louis Pozez and published by Andrea Simon in her genealogical investigation, Bashert. These describe mass graves exhumations at four locations: Bronnaia Gora, Smolyarka, Malorita and Volchin.

Read more!

Simon met Pozez [who subsequently helped finance the processing of the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive] in 1997 when she went on a mission to Brest, organised by Pozez, which included a visit to her ancestral home in Volchin (various spellings; 21 miles south-east of Brest). On page 91, she introduces summaries of translations of mass graves documents sent to her by Pozez:

Louis Pozez sends me one section from the report, entitled "Act" and dated October 5, 1944. It's from the Brest Regional Assistance Committee, attached to the Extraordinary State Commission.

The report discusses three major locations. Firstly:

In Brona Gora, 117 kilometers from Brest, five pit graves were found, camouflaged with young, newly planted trees. Some of the graves were as long as 63 meters and as wide as 6.5 meters. Three of the graves were opened. At the depth of 2.5 meters, human bones and ashes were found; at 3.5 meters deep, there was a second layer of ashes and bones, inside of which were locks of hair, and handkerchief and some hair pins. Under the layer of ash was dark, red-brown liquid.

Near the pits the Committee found six areas for burning bodies. Around these areas, the Committee located many fragments of small human bones, including a child's shoulder bone, and other items, such as watches and coins.

We therefore have confirmation that the Soviets found human bones as well as ashes. Simon discusses the next two sites on p.268n.:

In the second area of mass graves, near Smolyarka, the committee found three pit graves. This section estimates that 3,000 "peaceful Soviet citizens" from Brest and nearby villages were killed in this area. The forensic evidence indicated that most of the victims were shot from a short distance. The third area, a kilometer northwest of the settlement of Malorita, contained nine mass graves. The committee opened two and determined that most of the victims were shot; some were buried alive. The number of "peaceful Soviet citizens" killed here was also estimated at 3,000. Besides these burial sites, the committee uncovered graves in the Brest prison yard, the Brest fortress, and in other locations in Brest.

Smolyarka was also the site of exhumations of four mass graves in 2006. A memorial is being erected.

The final Soviet site report of 1944, for Volchin, was sent to Simon by Yad Vashem via Simon's associates, Dov Bar and Shmuel Englender, and is titled Document Number 8:

On September 22, 1942, a group of nine Germans, with the help of 20 [local] police, organised a mass killing by shooting of Volchin's Jews and some of Chernavchich's Jews. [They were brought to the Volchin ghetto.] The total killed by shooting on that day was 497 people.

When we opened the big pit, we found many bodies. Most were naked and were thrown on top of each other. Bodies of men, women, children and babies.

To corroborate this evidence, the general prosecutor in Visoke interviewed witnesses on September 28, 1944, who confirmed that:

1. The policemen had been brought from the village of Motikali, where the population was reputed to be antisemitic.

2. The Jews had been deceived into believing that they were being relocated to the Visoke ghetto.

3. A road-building project was in progress at Chernavchich, from which unfit Jews had been sent. The road workers were killed upon completion of the project.

4. 500 escapees from the Brest ghetto were later killed in Motikali.

The murders were also corroborated by the leader of the Schutzmannschaft, Semenyuk, in his Soviet interrogation, and by witnesses who gave taped interviews in Volchin in 1993 and 1997, cited in detail by Simon.

Mass Graves in the Polesie

Deniers are fond of pretending that no mass graves have ever been found containing the bodies of murdered Jews. That's why Germar Rudolf lied about the mass grave outside Marijampole in Lithuania, why in spite of at least nine pieces of documentary evidence, they also lie about Babi Yar.

So it was no surprise that when we reported the news that a mass grave had been uncovered in Smalyarka, Belarus, that some fourth-rate deniers on the internet insisted, lemming-like, that the story could not possibly be true.

Yet documents show that there is not just one more mass grave for 'revisionists' to deny, but many dozens in this one region of Belarus, known as the Polesie, alone.

Read more...

The first step towards enlightenment is to ditch political correctness and call Smalyarka by its Russian name, Smoliarka. The Lukashenko government has for all intents and purposes declared Russian the official language of Belarus, and unsurprisingly, you'll get more results from Google if you use the Russian and not the Belarusian spelling, as we will from here on out.

Smoliarka lies around five kilometres away from the town of Bereza Kartuska, not far from the village of Bronnaia Gora, located in Berezovskii district (raion) of the Brest province (oblast) in Belarus. It is so small that it is not even marked on the map provided on the local district council's website. Yet the same website records the murder of 1,500 people at Smoliarka on its chronology of the district's history. The event, then, is hardly unknown.

The uncovering of the mass grave at Smoliarka, as was reported in the original news story about the excavation, was the work of school students from the village of Bronnaia Gora who had visited the Brest oblast archive and found records of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission into German war crimes describing the location of several mass graves in which up to 1,500 Jews from Bereza Kartuska ghetto and other nearby villages had been buried after being shot circa September 1942 by German policemen.

The incident was so well-known to Soviet investigators that it was included in the so-called Black Book, compiled by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, in 1946, and from there found its way into the yizkor book for Bereza Kartuska:

Soviet citizens of the city of Bereza and of the villages of this area were transported in trucks to the graves, in the suitable place. The sufferings and the slaughters of the peaceful inhabitants of the village of Smoliarka was similar to those of the genocide in Brona Gura [Polish spelling of Bronnaia Gora]. Five common graves were discovered there and they all had Soviet citizens. Each sepulcher had the same measures: 10 meters long, 4 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep. The genocide of Soviet citizens in the area of the village Smoliarka was carried out in September 1942. There they were shot - according to eye witnesses - about 1000 persons.

So the recent excavations broke no new ground: instead, they were an attempt to re-locate a grave that had been opened in 1944, when the Extraordinary Commission first surveyed the Berezovskii district, but which had been forgotten thereafter.

The reason why Smoliarka had been forgotten is because an even larger mass grave was to be found nearby, outside Bronnaia Gora itself. To quote from the Black Book again:

According to the program prepared by Fascist conquerors in the forests of Brona Gura, at a distance of 400 meters NE to the railroad station of Brona Gura, between May and June of 1942, they dug graves on a surface of 16.800 (square) meters.
To do this work Germans used peasants of the area, between 600 and 800 people daily. To speed up the work they used different explosive materials.
After digging the graves, by the middle of June of 1942, Germans began to transfer in railroad boxcars Soviet citizens from different places and from fields in Bereza, Brest, Dohitzin, Yanov, Horodetz and other fields in Belarus, to the station Brona Gura. Soviet citizens were also transferred on foot to the area of Brona Gura
Boxcars were replete and among them were many that died. Then they took them to the railroad crossing, where there were military deposits, some 250 meters of the central station of Brona Gura. They stopped the boxcars close to the prepared graves, and they discharged people on the land surrounded by wires of spikes.
After discharging people from boxcars, they ordered them to undress, to throw their clothes, and were left naked. Then they led them by a kind of narrow corridor among wires of spikes toward the graves. The first ones descended to the graves by a stairway and were forced to lie face down, one next to another. After filling the first "layer" they shot them with automatic weapons. Germans dressed the uniforms of the ASD and SS. In the same way they filled the second and third layer until filling the moat. The screams of men, women and children broke the heart. After shooting all the citizens, they loaded the clothes and objects on the boxcars toward an unknown destination.
The arrival and discharge of people in the boxcars, were carried out under the severe surveillance of the station chiefs in Brona Gura, Pikeh and Schmidt, of German origin. In order to erase all sign of the cruelties made in Brona Gura, Germans shot all the citizens (more than 1000 people) that inhabited the area in which were in the past military deposits.
On the surface where the terrible slaughter was made, were eight wells. The first sepulcher had 63 meters long and 6,6 meters wide. The second, 36 meters long and 6.5 wide. The third was 36 meters long and 6 meters wide. The fourth was 37 meters long and 6 meters wide. The fifth was 52 meters long and 6 meters wide. The sixth was 24 meters long and 6 meters wide. The seventh was 16 meters long and 4.5 wide. The depth of all the sepulchers was between 3.5 to 4 meters.
From June until November of 1942 Germans murdered more than 30,000 citizens in the area of Brona Gura.

The German historian Christian Gerlach, along with many other commentators, has given in his book Kalkulierte Morde even higher figures of up to 50,000 killed at Bronnaia Gora, and indeed, this is the number recorded on the memorial stone there. The killing-site, whose name in Polish would translate to 'harrow hill' from Polish, is almost unique in the 'occupied eastern territories: instead of the killers coming to the ghettos, the ghettos were brought to the killers. Jews from Antopol, Bereza Kartuska, Kobryn, Gorodets and Mikroshevichi were brought by train from June to November 1942 to the site and murdered there, instead of being killed near to their homes.

Proof of the scale and extent of the mass-murders of Jews in the Brest region is extensive. The main unit responsible for the killings, Polizeibataillon 310 (also known as III./Polizeiregiment 15), left behind its war diary, which has received extensive scholarly commentary from many historians. Indeed, Edward Westermann, a professor at the US Air Force University, has written a whole article on the subject.

Not only do we have the unit records, we also have an embarrassment of information from Brest itself. These fall into two categories: reports sent to the Ostministerium from the Gebiets- and Stadtkommissar appointed to the Brest region, and records left behind in the retreat. The Ostministerium papers can be found in the US National Archives II in College Park, microfilmed under NARA RG 242 T454. According to the Lagebericht of the Stadtkommissar Brest of November 21, 1941, a total of 17,574 Jews were registered as inhabiting the city of Brest (NARA T454/102/7).This was fewer than had lived there on June 22, 1941, since Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 32, compiled by the RSHA from activity reports of the Einsatzgruppen on July 24, 1941, recorded that 3950 Jews and 400 Russians had been 'liquidated' (NARA T175/233/2721638). From other records, in particular reports of the 221st Security Division, we know that the perpetrators of this massacre were Polizeibataillon 307.

The fate of the surviving 17,574 Jews left from more than 21,000 inhabitants of Brest before the outbreak of war is especially well-documented in the subsequent monthly reports of the Stadtkommissar Brest. Moreover, the Brest Oblast archive contains an almost unique collection of over 12,000 passports issued to all Jews over the age of 14 inhabiting the Brest ghetto. The collection has now been digitised and is available here.

The 'evacuation' of 19,000 Brest Jews was recorded in the report of the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer Brest for the month of October 1942, dispatched on November 11, 1942 (NARA T454/104/999, excerpts are published in Paul Kohl, 'Ich wundere mich, dass ich noch lebe.' Sowjetische Augenzeugen berichten, Gütersloh, 1990, p.198). The war-diary of Polizeibataillon 310 gives a lower figure, of 16,000. Meanwhile, a retrospective report (Der Ortsbeauftragte Brest-Litowsk, Betr.: Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Zivilverwaltung, November 11, 1943, NARA T454/104/1680) gave a figure of 18,000. Without the benefit of any access to German reports at all, the Black Book of Grossman and Ehrenburg estimated that between 17 and 20,000 Jews were sent from Brest to the killing-site at Bronnaia Gora.

Martin Dean, author of Collaboration in the Holocaust, has added yet more evidence, this time from reports of the Polish Underground:

Brest. The liquidation of the Jews has been continuing since 15 October. During the first 3 days about 12 000 people were shot. The place of execution is Bronna Gora. At present the rest of those in hiding are being liquidated. The liquidation was being organised by a mobile squad of SD and local police. At present the 'finishing off' is being done only by the local police, in which Poles represent a large percentage. They are often more zealous than the Germans. Some Jewish possessions go to furnish German homes and offices, some are sold at auction. Despite the fact that during the liquidation large quantities of weapons were found the Jews behaved passively.

In March 1944, the Bronnaia Gora site was visited by Sonderkommando 1005, the SS unit under Paul Blobel responsible for exhuming and cremating the evidence of German mass murder. In central Russia and Belorussia, SK 1005 was active near many of the larger towns: reports survive of its operations at Smolensk, Mogilev, Borisov, Bobruisk and Minsk. But not, it would seem, at the smaller raion capitals and the rural shtetls. Thus, while Soviet investigators found at Bronnaia Gora only ashes and empty graves of the dimensions described above, elsewhere in the Brest region and the Polesie as a whole, they repeatedly were directed by eyewitnesses and local informants to the sites of a score of other intact mass graves.

Smoliarka, then, was one such exhumation. Christian Gerlach mentions another, at the town of Drogichin, where the Extraordinary Commission recorded in Akt No. 5 of November 2, 1944 that a mass grave totalling a volume of 1092 cubic metres was opened. It was evidently exhumed in its entirety, as the report indicates 3,186 corpses were found in the mass grave: 895 men, 1083 women and 1838 children.

Such precision was far from always the case with Soviet exhumation protocols: unsurprisingly, most of the investigators preferred to open a grave, measure its dimensions, check the identity of the corpses (i.e., whether in military uniform and therefore Soviet prisoners of war, or in civilian clothing), and estimate their number based on a volume calculation.

Because of these methods, and because the Germans did not always leave reports behind, an absolutely precise figure for the number of victims, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, of Nazi occupation policies and genocide will never be known. Yet the convergence of evidence from both German reports, eyewitnesses and exhumation protocols is more than sufficient to prove the extent and scale of the genocide of Jews in the former Soviet Union. Before the war, the Brest region had belonged to the Polesie woewodstwo (voivodship) of Poland. In 1931, the official Polish census recorded 113,988 Jews by religious confession in the Polesie woewodstwo. In September 1939, the entirety of the Polesie was annexed to the Soviet Union and split into two provinces, Brest and Pinsk oblasti.

Estimates vary of the total number of victims in both oblasti, but one source puts the number of Jews murdered in the Polesie at 113,451, an entirely plausible number when it is remembered that the Jewish population grew perhaps 10% before the outbreak of war, and was further swollen by the arrival of refugees from the western districts after the partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Belarusian historians Emanuil Ioffe and Viacheslav Selemenev uncovered an NKVD report in the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (NARB) in Minsk concerning the number of Jewish refugees in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as of February 1940. According to this document, a total of 65,796 Jews had fled over the Nazi-Soviet 'interest border' by this date, of whom 9,879 resided in the former Polesie province; 7,916 in Brest and 1,963 in Pinsk oblast (‘Jewish Refugees from Poland in Belorussia, 1939-1940’, Jews in Eastern Europe, Spring 1997, pp.45-50). From the exhaustive reconstruction of the fate of the Jews of Pinsk published by E.S. Rozenblat and I.E Elenskaia (Pinskie evrei: 1939-1944 gg. Brest, 1997), we know that around half of these refugees were deported in the summer of 1940 by the NKVD; the rest stayed.

For non-Russian-speakers, the Israeli historian Tivka Fatal-Knaani has given a decent enough overview of the fate of the Jews of Pinsk in Yad Vashem Studies Vol. 29 [PDF]. It was was identical to those of Brest, even down to the involvement of the same perpetrators, Polizeibataillon 310. The sole difference was that Heinrich Himmler intervened personally to order the destruction of the Pinsk ghetto:

OKW has informed me that region of Brest-Gomel suffers increasingly from gang attacks, which bring into question the need for additional troops. On the basis of the news, which has been reported to me, one must regard in the Ghetto of Pinsk the center for the movement of the gangs in the region of the Pripyat marshes.
Therefore I order, in spite of economic considerations, the destruction and obliteration of the Ghetto of Pinsk. 1000 male workers may be spared, in the event that the operation allows for this, to be made available to the Wehrmacht, for the production of wooden prefabricated huts. These 1000 men must be kept in a well-guarded camp, and if security not be maintained, these 1000 are to be destroyed.
(Published in Helmut Heiber (ed),‘Reichsführer!...’ Briefe an und von Himmler. Stuttgart, 1968, p.165)

Not only did Himmler leave a documentary trail, so, too, did Hauptmann der Schutzpolizei Helmut Saur of Polizeibataillon 310. His after-action report is to be found in the files of the battalion that were captured by the Soviets after the war. It was submitted to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as document USSR-119a, and can today be found in its original in GARF Fond 7445, Moscow, while published versions are also to be found in The Black Book and elsewhere. There is no mistaking the language used in Saur's Erfahrungsbericht of what transpired on October 29, 30, and 31, and November 1, 1942:

"Die Juden, nun aufmerksam geworden, sammelten sich zum groessten Teil freiwillig auf allen Strassen und mit Hilfe von 2 Wachtmeistern gelang es, schon in der ersten Stunden einige tausend zum Sammelplatz zu lotsen. Da nun der andere Teil der Juden sah, wohin es ging, schlossen sie sich dem Zuge an, sodass die vom SD am Sammelplatz in Aussicht genommene Sichtung auf Grund des starken und ploetzlichen Anlaufs nicht mehr erfolgen konnte. (Man hatte fuer den ersten Tag der Durchkaemmung nur mit 1-2000 Personen gerechnet.) Die erste Durchkaemmung war um 17.00 Uhr beendet unt verlief ohne Zwischenfaelle. Am 1. Tag wurden cr. 10 000 Personen exekutiert. Fuer die Nacht lag die Komp. in Alarmbereitschaft im Soldatenheim.
Am 30.X. wurde das Ghetto zum zweiten-, am 31.X zum dritten- und am 1.XI zum vierten Male durchkaemmt. Es wurden insgesamt cr. 15 000 Juden dem Sammelplatz zugefuehrt. Kranke Juden und einzelne, in den Haeusern zurueckgelassene Kinder wurden sofort im Ghetto auf dem Hof exekutiert. Im Ghetto wurden cr. 1200 Juden exekutiert. Zu Zwischenfaelle kam es bis auf einem Fall nicht."

From the wording of the report, it is unclear whether Saur had reported the execution of 16,200 or 26,200 Jews. Most specialists (Gerlach, Fatal-Knaani, Dean, Rozenblat/Elenskaia) tend towards the latter view, based on the available contextual sources. There are numerous eyewitnesses who testified along the lines of the higher number. The Wehrmacht Lieutenant-General Feuchtinger, stationed in Pinsk during 1943, and captured by the British after serving in France, gave the following account to a fellow prisoner of war in 1945, without knowing he was being recorded by the British:

“When I was at Pinsk I was told that in the previous year there had been still 25000 Jews living there and within three days these 25000 Jews were fetched out, formed up on the edge of a wood or in a meadow – they had been made to dig their own graves beforehand – and then every single one of them from the oldest greybeard down to the new-born infant was shot by a police squad. That was the fiest time I myself had actually heard and seen what happened there. I had previously not believed or considered it possible, that anything like that went on. The nurse at the officers’ hostel where I lived told me that: “For heaven’s sake, don’t say anything about my having told you that.”
(Report on information obtained from Senior Officer PW on 1-6.6.45, GRGG 311, 8.6.45, PRO WO 208/4178

Soviet investigators after liberation found 34 mass graves in and surrounding Pinsk, containing a total of 59,084 corpses, of whom 20,000 were Soviet POWs and 38,342 civilians (Akt, 24 aprelia 1945 g, g. Pinsk, NARB 845-1-13, p.1).

I have not discussed the August 1941 massacre of up to 9000 Jews in Pinsk by the SS-Kavallerie-Regiment 2, because it has been so admirably dealt with by both Christian Gerlach and, lately, Martin Cüppers in his doctoral dissertation, Wegbereiter der Shoa. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939-1945. English-speaking readers can also consult the Pinsk memorial book here.

Instead, this survey of mass graves will end in the easternmost Polesie, in the district of Luninets. As at Brest and Pinsk, the first massacres were carried out in 1941, in this case also by SS-Kavallerie-Regiment 2, in the district capital of Luninets. Cüppers cites an order indicating that the staff of the 'mounted detachment' (Reitende Abteilung as well as one whole squadron of cavalrymen, 4./SS-Kavallerie-Regiment 2, arrived in Luninets on August 11, 1941. (Funkspruch Reit.Abt, 11.8.41, Bundesarchiv-Militaerachiv, RS 4/936). The regiment reported soon after:

11-13.8.41: Die Durchkämmung der Pripjet-Sümpfe wurde durch Reitende Abteilung erfolgreich beendet... 2325 Plünderer wurden in der Berichtszeit erschossen. Insgesamt wurden bisher 7730 Plünderer, Kommunisten, Kommissare, Parteisekretäre, Agitationaredner und Partisanen erschossen.
SS-Kav.Rgt. 2, Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom 11-13.8.41, NARA T354/785/327

As Gerlach and many other historians have demonstrated, in early August 1941, 'plunderer' was SS code for Jewish men of military age (between 17 and 45). Soviet investigations located the following mass grave in 1945:

On the outskirts of the town of Luninets the commission examined mass graves of victims of fascist terror: in the direction of Mochula 7 graves were found, located 400 metres to the north of the embankment of the reserve railway line Luninets-Pinsk. The dimension of each of the three large graves was 6 x 2 x 2.5 metres, the dimensions of the four small graves was 4 x 2 x 1.5 metres. In these 7 graves were buried 1312 male persons.
(Akt rassledovaniia zlodeianii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov na vremmenno okkupirovannoi territorii Luninetskogo raiona Pinskoi oblasti, 10 aprelia 1945 goda, go. Luninets, NARB 645-1-13, p.12)

The remaining elderly, women and children of the Luninets ghetto and the neighbouring towns of Lakhva and Koshangrodek were exterminated in early September 1942, by detachments of the KdS Wolhynien-Podolien, Aussenstelle Pinsk, as a West German trial at Frankfurt in Main (see here for more details: Nr.787, Pinsk) established in 1973. The clinical summary of the Soviet investigators should be enough to indicate the dimensions of these mass murders:

Luninets
2932 corpses found in a single mass grave measuring 50 x 4 x 3 metres (600 cbm)
of which
- 106 men
- 1429 women
- 1397 children
Date of 'action' was September 4, 1942

Lakhva
1946 corpses were found in a mass grave measuring 25 x 4 x 2.5 metres (250 cbm)
of which
- 524 men
- 698 women
- 724 children
Date of 'action' September 3, 1942

Koshangrodek
937 corpses were found in a mass grave measuring 12 x 4 x 3 metres (144 cbm)
of which
- 311 men
- 325 women
- 301 children
Date of 'action' September 3, 1942
Akt, 10.4.45, NARB 845-1-13, pp.12-13

By a rare coincidence, the boundaries of Luninets raion corresponded with those of the pre-war Polish powiat of Luniniec. In 1931, the census recorded 8,072 Jews on a confessional basis in the county. Soviet investigations found that 7,127 Jews had been murdered in Luninets raion. Approximately 80-90% of all Jews in the county had been exterminated, and their bodies recovered.

This, then, is the dirty secret that deniers do not want you to know: there were many, many more mass graves littering the landscape of Eastern Europe than just those at Babi Yar, Belzec or Treblinka. In Poland, there were 1,657 Jewish communities, of whom at least a quarter were murdered in or nearby to their home towns. In the Soviet Union, a further 800 ghettos have been identified, all of which were wiped out by 1943. To speak of a 'limited' number of 'justified' reprisal executions, as deniers sometimes concede, is arrant nonsense. Nor can one identify the mass shooting actions solely with the Einsatzgruppen. In none of the cases presented here did a Kommando of Einsatzgruppe B carry out the exterminations. Instead, the perpetrators were the Ordnungspolizei, the Waffen-SS and the static detachments of the Sicherheitspolizei. When was the last time you heard a revisionist discuss the activities of these units? Almost never.

Russian demographers have worked out that 26 million Soviet citizens died between 1941 and 1945. A cautious calculation of the number of Jews murdered in the Soviet Union indicates that 10% of this number, 2.6 million, were killed in the Holocaust. Of these, 144,000 were killed in Russia, at least 250,000 in pre-war Belorussian SSR, 656,000 in the Ukrainian SSR, 100,000 in present-day Moldova, 218,000 in the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; and 1.2 million on the territory of eastern Poland annexed to the Soviet Union as western Belorussia and western Ukraine in 1939.

Deniers would have us believe there is no evidence for this litany of horror. Yet the evidence exists in abundance: in German documents, in eyewitness accounts from perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and in exhumation protocols repeated from the Caucasus to the Polish border with monotonous consistency. The fact that Belarusian school students can take Soviet investigative reports from 60+ years ago and today relocate mass graves only proves what deniers cannot cope with: that mass murder took place, and took place repeatedly.