Please consider supporting our unique and crucial information service. Visit our Support Us page to learn more. Dismiss
Documented History After German troops had occupied Ukraine’s capital Kiev on 19 September 1941, Soviet partisans blew up several large buildings in the city center on 24 September, killing hundreds of German soldiers, mostly officers. The explosions caused a fire that eventually destroyed a square mile of Kiev’s center, making some 50,000 persons homeless. Efforts…
Bad Nenndorf is a German spa town some 15 km west of the northwest-German city of Hannover. After the end of the war, the town was part of the British Zone of Occupation. In violation of the Hague Convention of Land Warfare, the British occupiers hunted down civilians, especially the political leadership of the defeated…
At the beginning of the Second World War, the northeastern Polish city of Białystok was briefly occupied by German forces, but then handed over to the Soviets. After the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union, Białystok was occupied by Germany within a few days. In early August 1941, all 50,000 Jews of…
Bikernieki → Rumbula /
Brest, back then called Brest-Litovsk, is a Belorussian City close to the border to Poland. It belonged to Poland since 1921, but to Belorussia since 1939. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a ghetto for Jews was established in that city. According to German wartime documents, altogether almost 9,000 Jews from that ghetto…
Bronnaya Gora is a Belorussian town located on the railway line from Brest to Minsk, some 110 km northeast of Brest. In mid-October 1942, the Brest Ghetto was evacuated and the roughly 17,000 Jews residing in it were officially resettled elsewhere according to German wartime documents. A Soviet investigative commission report, later published in the…
The city of Kaunas, Lithuania, has nine 19th-century fortresses surrounding the entire city. Some of them were used as NKVD prisons after the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Baltic states in 1940. During the German occupation of the area, these prisons served to detain and presumably kill Jews from the Kaunas Ghetto and deported from…
Hartheim Castle some 8 miles west of Linz, Austria, was one of National-Socialist Germany’s euthanasia centers. It entered the Holocaust stage with two affidavits containing claims attributed to Franz Ziereis, the former commandant of the Mauthausen Camp. Both affidavits are written by former Mauthausen inmates, one of them by Hans Maršálek. Both contain the claim…
Kerch is a port city in the east of the Crimea Peninsula. Soviet media reported that German formations had committed a massacre outside of this city, near the village of Bagerovo. Photos of dozens of dead civilians littering the landscape were published alongside small pits with a few dead bodies, yet still it was claimed…
Marijampole is a Lithuanian city some 120 km west of Lithuania’s capital Vilnius. According to a German document from 1 September 1941, 5,090 persons were killed there by German Einsatzgruppen units. In the summer of 1996, Marijampole’s city administration decided to erect a Holocaust Memorial on top of the presumed mass graves, whose locations were…
The orthodox Holocaust narrative contains a plethora of claims about mass graves of Jewish victims which are said to have been emptied out later, when the order was allegedly issued to erase the traces of these mass crimes, by exhuming the corpses and burning them using large open-air incinerations. (See the entry for Aktion 1005.)…
Ponary is the Polish name for the Lithuanian town Paneriai, which today is a mere district of Lithuanian’s capital Vilnius. Between 1921 and 1939, the town was part of Poland, hence the name. During the two-year occupation by the Soviets from 1939 to 1941, a construction project was initiated in a forest outside of town…
Rumbula is a small railway station southeast of the capital of Latvia, Riga. A forest nearby is said to have been the location of the mass execution of mainly Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto by Einsatzgruppen and associated units (see that entry). Depending on the sources, somewhere between 4,000 to 38,000 Jews were executed…
End of content
End of content