Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War

Белорусский государственный музей истории Великой Отечественной войны / Беларускі дзяржаўны музей гісторыі Вялікай Айчыннай вайны

The predecessor of the Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War was opened in Minsk as early as 1944. In summer of 2014 the museum took up new quarters.

History

The territory of today's Republic of Belarus – including the former Polish territories which were occupied by and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 – was one of the bloodiest theatres of the Second World War as well as the centre of Soviet partisan warfare. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in July 1941 the Wehrmacht occupied the area within a couple of weeks. This was followed by one of the most vicious occupation regimes in Europe: The land was to be looted completely and death by starvation of millions of inhabitants, above all Jews, prisoners of war and inhabitants of cities was the professed goal of the National Socialists.
Despite the ever-present terror the occupants never completely managed to seize control of the country. The strengthening of the partisans who operated from the virtually inaccessible woods and marshes was answered by unprecedented terror. More than 600 villages in Belarus were completely destroyed and frequently their entire population was killed. Altogether about a quarter of the country's eight million inhabitants were killed during the occupation.
In July 1944 »Operation Bagration« was launched whereby the Red Army managed to retake the more or less completely destroyed area by end of August 1944. The operation proved to be decisive for the outcome of the war: The Wehrmacht could never recover from the immense casualties and had to surrender less than a year later.

Near Minsk, 1943, Killed civilians, Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1970-043-52

Near Babruysk, 1944, Abandoned war material of the German Wehrmacht, public domain

Victims

During the three-year German occupation of Belarus approximately two million people were killed, more than a quarter of the country's population. Among the victims were about 230,000 Jews who were murdered at mass shootings, in camps or in ghettos. The best known death camp was Maly Trostenets near Minsk, where tens of thousands of Jews from the German Reich were murdered too.
During the combat operations in 1941 and 1944 hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fell in battle. Exact numbers are not ascertainable. After the war the Soviet authorities deported more than 100,000 Poles from the territory of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland the north-east of the country was annexed to Soviet Belarus. In summer 1941 the whole of Belarus was occupied by German troops. Over the next three years between one in four and one in three residents met a violent death. Almost all of the towns were completely destroyed. The Wehrmacht or SS systematically annihilated around 620 villages together with theor inhabitants, including Chatyn. The largest extermination camp on occupied Soviet territory was located in Maly Trostenets outside the Belarusian capital Minsk. It is now presumed that at least 60,000 German and Belarusian Jews were murdered there. Up to 85,000 Jews are estimated to have died in Minsk and 230,000 in the country as a whole. From 1941, Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan struggle against the German occupation with over a thousand active partisan groups. The Red Army began to recapture the country at the end of 1943 and the German occupation was considered over by summer 1944. The country was largely destroyed, the society shattered and the people traumatised. Belarus was reincorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944. A large part of the Polish territory annexed in 1939 remained part of the country. National memorial and memory culture in post-war Belarus were dominated by the liberation of the country on 3 July 1944 and the day of victory on 9 May 1945 as the end of a »heroic« struggle in the Great Patriotic War. Memory of the partisan war was also of key importance. The genocide of the Jews was not mentioned directly in the Soviet republics. An obelisk put up at the »Yama«, a pit where mass murders took place in the Minsk ghetto, was therefore an exception in the former Soviet Union. It was erected as early as 1946 and for decades was the sole memorial with a Yiddish inscription and a direct reference to the murdered Jews. The memorial site at Khatyn is also unusual. Here,153 people were burnt alive in March 1943. The memorial site, established in 1969, is notable for its simplicity, its concentration on the human dimension of the plight of the victims amidst the horrors of war and the absence of monumental features otherwise common in the former Soviet Union. After Belarus claimed independence in 1991 the search began for an independent national identity. The number of victims plays a decisive role, especially those killed during the Second World War. However, there is consciously no distinction drawn between the territorial situation of the country pre- and post-1939. Both the crimes of the Stalinist regime and the Holocaust have come to the fore but the nature of the state has prevented public discussion of these aspects. State remembrance continues to be dominated by the war in the years 1941 to 1944. Its main symbol is the monumental new building of the Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, opened in 2014. In the meantime, however, the association of Jewish communities in Belarus has established a series of memorials to the victims of mass murder. Since the early 1990s, several German towns have also put up stelae in Minsk to remember the Jews deported and murdered there. The Berlin stele, financed by the federal state of Berlin and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated in an official ceremony on June 25, 2009. There is also movement with regards to a fitting development of the Maly Trostenets area: In 2015, a memorial complex was inaugurated at the site. A second segment which was co-financed by Germany was opened in 2018 by the presidents of Belarus, Austria and Germany. Germany has also pledged to finance the renovation of the Historical Workshop’s historical building on the former territory of the Minsk ghetto, documenting the fates of its victims.

Remembrance

The decision to establish a »Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War« was made by the Communist Party in 1943, long before the Red Army had even started to recapture Belarus. Soldiers and partisans were asked to save material such as documents and weapons for later use in the museum. In September 1944, few months after the liberation of Minsk the museum was already opened in the then totally ruined city. In 1966 the museum was relocated to another building where it stayed until 2014.
In 2010 the government in Minsk decided to provide the museum with a very spacious new building. The museum was to become the country's most important project regarding politics of remembrance. The result is an area of more than 4,000 square meters of exhibition space, while numerous weapons from WWII and several memorials are placed in the outdoor area. The entrance is behind a 45-meter obelisk which had already been erected in 1985 in honour of the »Hero City Minsk«. Like in Soviet times the exhibition is dominated by a heroic view of the »Great Patriotic War«, which according to the Soviet point of view began with the German attack on the Soviet Union – the incorporation of the eastern part of Poland into the USSR in September 1939 remains unmentioned. The suffering of the civilian population, the camps and the deportation of hundreds of thousands for forced labour is mentioned only peripherally and only a small installation remembers the hundreds of thousands of Jews from Eastern Poland, Belarus and other European countries who were murdered by the German occupiers on the territory of today's Belarus. Instead, the triumphs of the Red Army, the partisan warfare and the remembrance of Soviet war heroes are in the fore.

Minsk, 2014, View of the exhibition – Installation »Death Camp Trostenets«, Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii velikoy otechestvennoy voyny

Minsk, 2014, View of the exhibition, Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii velikoy otechestvennoy voyny

Possibilities

Permanent exhibitions, tours, workshops, archive, individual consultations, borrowable exhibition

Open

Open Tuesday and Thursday to Saturday from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm
Wednesday and Sunday from 11.00 am to 7.00 pm
Closed on Monday and national holidays.

Contact

http://www.warmuseum.by

mail@warmuseum.by

+375 (0)17 203 0792

проспект Победителей, 8 / Pr. Pobeditelej, 8
220004 Minsk

Minsk, 2014, »Victory Gate«, Belorusskiy gosudarstvennyy muzey istorii velikoy otechestvennoy voyny

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