The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of the first territories of the Soviet Union to be invaded by the German Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941. With at least 1.6 million dead from a total prewar population of 9 million, nearly one-fifth of its inhabitants died during the war. In parts of Belarusian SSR and eastern prewar Poland, Nazi Germany erected the Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien (General Commissariat White Ruthenia), governed by Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, and based in the Belarusian capital of Minsk; it encompassed some 60,000 square kilometers, had 2.5 million inhabitants, and was divided into eleven Gebietskommissariate. Minsk, conquered on June 28, 1941, and liberated by the Red Army on July 3, 1944, numbered about 240,000 inhabitants before the German invasion-more than half of them died during the three years of occupation. The Nazi racial war of extermination not only led to the death of a large part of the country's population, but also to the destruction of Minsk, which suffered near complete destruction in 1944.

Although long neglected by historians, the German crimes and the occupation regime in Belarus are both now fairly well researched. The opening of the Communist archives during the 1990s led to the availability of previously inaccessible sources. Primarily younger German historians made use of these possibilities and produced monographs of great depth and content; unfortunately, only rarely have these research results been translated into English or made accessible via scholarly articles.