Archive/File: holocaust/ussr/minsk minsk.001
Last-Modified: 1995/01/11

   "In the East, throughout July [1941], the first victims were
   carefully chosen so that the communities immediately lost their
   natural leadership. In Minsk, within hours of the German
   occupation, forty thousand men and boys between the ages of fifteen
   and forty-five were assembled for 'registration', under penalty of
   death: Jews, captured Soviet soldiers, and non-Jewish civilians.
   Taken to a field outside the city, each group was put into a
   separate section. For four days all were kept in the field,
   surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. Then, on the fifth day,
   all Jewish members of the intelligentsia - doctors, lawyers,
   writers - were ordered to step forward. Some two thousand did so,
   not knowing for what purpose they would be needed, perhaps as
   administrators, as functionaries, or in their professional
   capacities. Many non-professsionals were among those who stepped
   forward, believing that this group was to be given some privileged
   work or position, and wanting to be a part of it. All two thousand
   were then marched off to a nearby wood, and machine-gunned.<27>"
   (Gilbert, 166)

   <27> Rueben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern
        Europe, London, 1974, pages 464-6.

                            Work Cited

   Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe
   during the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
   1985

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