Discovery of a huge mass grave in the center of Brest-Litovsk, the city, became a "time capsule" of the horrors of the Holocaust. This finding sheds light on a little-understood chapter of the Holocaust — the monstrous crimes of the Einsatzgruppen.

They consisted of units of the SS, Gestapo police, as well as soldiers specially trained for shootings. The Einsatzgruppen were involved in the first stage of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which began in 1941 after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and then continued the killings of Jews until 1944.

In the mass grave found in Brest, the remains of hundreds of people with gunshot wounds to the skulls were discovered. This area housed the Brest Jewish ghetto, a city on the Belarus-Poland border, and later part of the USSR. The bones were found at the early stages of construction of an elite residential complex.

Then, over several weeks, Belarusian soldiers pulled human skeletons from the ground. In total, 1,214 men, women, and children killed by the Nazis after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union were found at the construction site. Among them were women and children. They all lay in a pit measuring 40 by 4 meters. Bullet holes were found in the skulls. The construction was taking place on the site of the former ghetto, which existed in Brest from December 1941 to October 1942. According to the memories of longtime residents, shootings were carried out in the inner courtyards of the ghetto. It is believed that about 5,000 Jews were exterminated here.

Although Jewish communities worldwide protested against building a house on the site where the remains were found, work is planned to continue. As a concession, the Belarusian government assured that a memorial sign commemorating the victims of the Nazis would be installed at the site of the discovery.

After the city was captured in 1941, the Nazis demanded that all Jews over 14 years old report to the city administration, where they were photographed and fingerprinted. In addition, personal data were recorded, including name, address, profession, and dependents. This way, detailed information was collected about more than 12,000 residents of Brest.

On October 15, 1942, before the mass shooting of Jews, the city "Population Movement Register" in Brest listed 16,934 Jews. On October 16, the SS authorities crossed out this number, leaving the line blank. All the Jews were exterminated. Brest was "Judenfrei."

Who were these thousands of Jews destroyed in such a cruel way? If not for a strange twist of history, no one would know about them today.

The discovery of mass graves in Brest sheds light on the "hidden Holocaust" — millions of forgotten victims of the Einsatzgruppen.

More than two million Jews — from Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine — from Pinsk, Slutsk, Slonim, Grodno, Eishyshok, Vilna, Vitebsk, Volozhin, Minsk, Zhytomyr, and thousands of other cities were cold-bloodedly killed before the concentration camps appeared.

They were dead by 1942, perished in "death pits," or suffocated from engine carbon monoxide pumped into wagons and chambers in small death camps in occupied Poland.

Thousands of mass graves with hundreds of thousands of corpses are unmarked, and for the most part, their locations are unknown.

Information about their extermination is helped to be concealed by search systems such as Wikipedia, which describes mass shootings as "depopulation." It creates the impression that demographic changes occurred due to natural population movements during the war.

Sources:

Photo by Vasily Poshelyuk

https://natatnik.by/skrytyj-holokost-briska/

https://www.kp.ru/daily/26980.4/4038561/