“During 1942, Jews from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were brought by train to be killed in Maly Trostenets. Most of the victims were lined up in front of large pits and shot. Tractors then flattened the pits out. The prisoners in the camp were forced to sort through the victims’ possessions and maintain the camp.” (“Maly Trostenets.” Shoah Resource Center, Yad Vashem)
“Between the spring of 1942 and the summer of 1944, Maly Trostenets, now an outskirt of Minsk, was the largest extermination complex in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union” (“Maly Trostenets Extermination Center: History and Remembrance.” Terezín Memorial)
“In early 1942, the SS in Minsk created a camp on the site of the former Karl Marx kolkhoz in the village of Maly Trostenets on the outskirts of Minsk. It was used as a forced labor camp for Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), Jewish and non-Jewish Belarusians, and Western European Jews” (Bobeldijk, Anne-Lise. “Holocaust Symbolism in the Belarusian Memory of Maly Trostenets.” East European Jewish Affairs)
“Although many people were murdered in and around the camp complex and camp prisoners faced the constant threat of being beaten, shot or hanged by the SS and other guarding personnel, the main function of the camp was to provide and supervise forced labor…The majority of people who were killed at Maly Trostenets, were killed at one of the execution sites in the nearby forests directly after their deportation and never set foot on the camp premises.” (Bobeldijk, Anne-Lise. “Holocaust Symbolism in the Belarusian Memory of Maly Trostenets.” East European Jewish Affairs)
“While the vast majority of Western European Jews were deported to concentration and extermination camps in occupied Eastern Europe (such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek), many Eastern European Jews were shot by Einsatzgruppen or other Nazi killing units in forests, dunes, or in fields close to where they had lived. This is what Desbois frames as “the Holocaust by bullets”, supplementing the traditional (Western) association of the Holocaust with concentration and/or extermination camps. Maly Trostenets was a place where these two dimensions of the Holocaust crossed paths: both Belarusian Jews and deported Western European Jews were killed in the Holocaust by bullets in the forests around Minsk in the vicinity of Maly Trostenets.” (Bobeldijk, Anne-Lise. “Holocaust Symbolism in the Belarusian Memory of Maly Trostenets.” East European Jewish Affairs)