V.I. Adamushko
Director of Archives and Records Department of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus

The Holocaust that took the lives of 6 million European Jews, and became one of the most murderous chapters of WWII. Hundreds of thousands Belarusian Jews did not escape this dreadful fate.
Belarus was occupied by the Germans in the early months of WWII. Special areas – ghettoes – were created in Belarusian cities, towns and villages in order to concentrate Jewish population. Some 250 ghettoes were set up in Belarus. The Minsk ghetto, which numbered 100,000 prisoners, was the largest. Ghettoes in Grodno, Brest, Baranovichi, Pinsk and other cities in Belarus numbered tens of thousands of prisoners. The Annihilation of the prisoners in these ghettoes was completed by September-October 1943. There is no agreement on the number of Holocaust victims in Belarusian historiography: [estimates range – ed.] from 600,000 to 900,000 victims. 
According to recent research published in the supplement 'Annihilation and deportation sites in Belarus in 1941-1944' to the collection of documents and records Executioners testify. Annihilation of Jewish population on the occupied territory of Belarus in 1941-1944 (Minsk, 2009) state this figure at 751,861 Jews.
Various sources were used in the course of this work, among them documents from the Belarus State Archives.
The bulk of information on crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jewish population is kept in the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (more than 900 record groups), in regional and area state archives, and in the Belarusian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents.

Documents of Soviet organizations comprise the most informative group of Holocaust documents. Among them are the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German–Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organisations, State enterprises and institutions of the U.S.S.R., as well as republic and regional commisions of facilitating the work of ChGK, Central and Regional committees of Belarus Communist Party, Belarus Partizan Stuff and Partisan units. A certain amount of information on genocide of Belarus Jewish population is stored in the archives of various military and civil organizations which exercised occupation control over Belarus in 1941-1944. These are the archives of the General Commissariat of Belarus, regional commissars, district commissars, police commandants, garrison and field commandant’s offices, and local councils. During the compiling of the collection of documents the authors broadly used documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation, Yad Vashem, the History and Culture Museum of Belarusian Jewry, and local history museums, as well as published documents, such as: Tragedy of Belarusian Jews (1941-1944), (Minsk, 2002), and 148 volumes of the memorial book Historical and documentary chronicles of Belarus cities. In all, 253 sites of Jewish annihilation were revealed in Belarus. However, it is too early to finish this work. We still have to reveal more places of annihilation, and we should define the number of victims more accurately.