Introduction

At dawn on June 22, 1941, after a heavy artillery barrage and aerial bombings, the forces of Nazi Germany crossed the border into the Soviet Union. The German invasion of the Soviet Union brought with it a qualitative change in the war. From the very beginning, the war was perceived by Hitler and the leadership of Nazi Germany not merely as a struggle between two armies, but rather as a struggle between two ideologies, a struggle in which all the norms of conventional warfare were supposed a priori to be set aside. The Germans intended from the very beginning to not only defeat the enemy's armed forces, but also to suppress and annihilate the real or imaginary bearers of the hostile Bolshevik ideology. For the Nazis, the main bearers of the Communist ideology were Jews. The millions of Jews living in the invaded territory were seen as the very embodiment of the proverbial Jewish bolshevism dominating the Soviet state, the image of which had been propagated by Hitler and other Nazi leaders long before their ascendance to power in Germany. Thus the extermination of Soviet Jewry was perceived not merely as the annihilation of a racial enemy, but also as a precondition to achieving Nazi geopolitical goals in the east.

Around a million Jews were living in Belarus, which was situated along the German route to Moscow, at the time of the Nazi invasion.