Pripyat Marshes 1941
In the summer of 1941, the SS and the German army murder 20 000 Jews in the area around the Pripyat Marshes. The order come from SS supreme leader Heinrich Himmler – men over the age of 14 are to be shot. Women and children are to be driven out into the marshes to drown there.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, a new phase in the Nazi murders began. So far, they had mainly killed Jewish men, leaders and political opponents. In the marshes on the border between present-day Belarus and Ukraine they began to murder Jewish women and children as well.
At a conference in Wannsee in January 1942, Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich gathered bureaucrats and officials. The purpose of the conference was to coordinate the systematic killing of Europe’s Jews. The Nazis called it “the final solution to the Jewish question”.
In German-occupied Poland, pure extermination camps such as Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka were created, with the sole purpose of murdering the people taken there by the Nazis. At the same time, mass murders took place in many other places. In villages and towns, in forests, in fields and on beaches, places that often also became the graves of the murdered.
