Malo Trostinec/ Maly Trostinets

[PHILDHB]

I was reading in Gerald Reitlingers; SS Alibi of a Nation that : Between 10 & 12 June 1942, three trains carrying more than three thousand Czech Jews left Theresienstadt `to the east`. The trains were routed through the transfer stations of Ujasdow & Trawniki in Poland. Not a single Jew survived & and the trains went certainly to one of the extermination camps, probably Malo Trostinec in White Russia.
This is the first time I have heard this name, I can find no other references in books or on the Net. Any Ideas?
Thanks, Phil.

[David Thompson]

PHILDHB -- "Malo Trostinec" is probably identifiable with Maly Trostinets, a town southwest of Minsk, in Belorussia. You'll have a lot more luck with a Google search using the latter spelling.

[Luca]

Desolate but i cant help You.
Looking in my poor sources Malo Trostinec no exist as detention place.
Maybe You can control how exact are the affermations in Your book if You control into the list of the trains that start from Theresienstadt. (sorry i no speak german).
Only for curiosity=
KL-Lublin have only 6 real subcamps and 5 minor Labour camps. One of these Labor camps was Trawniki in the 1942 (month unknow) with 100 inmates.
Luca

[Luca]

AHHH
In Maly Trostinec in the kreis of Minsk was in activity only a Gefagnis (prison). Bundes/77
Luca

[PHILDHB]

Thanks David, you got it. Apparently apart from the well known death camps there were two more less well known. Jungfernhof in Latvia, & Maly Trostinets in Byelorussia. By some accounts 200,000 at Maly Trostinets alone. Prisoners were transported there in large Transports solely to be executed, their belongings taken & shipped to Germany. This seems to fit the definition of an Extermination Camp. In all my reading I have never come across mention of either of these places, plenty of course about the other well known places in Poland, I wonder why?
Thanks again, Phil.

[Earldor]

In all my reading I have never come across mention of either of these places, plenty of course about the other well known places in Poland, I wonder why?

http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro ... 206636.pdf

"Maly Trostinets

Village in Eastern Belorussia located 7.5 miles east of Minsk; camp and site
of mass murder of Jews. About 200,000 people were murdered in the
Trostinets area. About 65,000 were killed in Maly Trostinets, including over
30,000 from the last major aktion in Minsk.
Between July 28--31, 1942 and on October 21, 1943 the last Jews from
Minsk were murdered and buried in Maly Trostinets and Bolshoi Trostinets.
During 1942, Jews from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were brought by train to be killed in
Maly Trostinets. Most of the victims were lined up in front of large pits and
shot. Tractors then flattened the pits out. The prisoners in the camp were
forced to sort through the victims' possessions and maintain the camp. They
occasionally underwent selections (see also Selktion). This happened more
frequently during 1943.
In the fall of 1943 the Nazis began to destroy all evidence of mass murder
by burning bodies. Soviet Prisoners of war were forced to rake through the
ashes looking for gold. As the Soviet army approached in June 1944, the
Germans killed most of the remaining prisoners. On June 30 the Germans
completely destroyed the camp. When the Soviets arrived on July 3, they
found a few Jews who had escaped."

You probably haven't heard of it for several reasons, the main one being that it was in the SU. I bet that only a few of people in the USA know the particulars of the holocaust in the SU.

[michael mills]

Here is a list of transports to Minsk in 1942, drawn from the book "Kalkulierte Morde" by Christian Gerlach. It is usually assumed that they went to Maly Trostinetz or the vicinity.

Transports of Jews from Germany, Austria and Protectorate to GK Weissruthenien in 1942

18 documented transports shown in standard font, five uncertain ones in italics.

Place of Departure Date of Departure Date of Arrival Transport Number Number of Transportees

Vienna 6.5.1942 11.5.1942 Da 201 1000
Vienna 20.5 23.5 Da 203 1016
? Reich ? 26.5 ? Known only from mention in Activity Report of Gruppe Arlt 1000
Vienna 27.5 1.6 Da 204 998
Vienna 2.6 6.6 Da 205 around 1000
Vienna 9.6 13.6 Da 206 1006
Theresienstadt 13.6 ? ?May have been diverted around 1000
Koenigsberg 24.6 26.6 Da 40 770
Dachau ? June 1942 ? Known only from survivor ?
Theresienstadt 14.7 17 or 18.7 Da 220 1000
Koeln 20.7 24.7 Da 219 1164
Theresienstadt 28.7 31.7 in Baranovichi Da 221 999
Theresienstadt 4.8 10.8 Da 222 993
? ? Between 1.8. and 15.8 ? Known only from mention in Activity Report of Gruppe Arlt ?
Vienna 17.8 19.8 Da 223 around 1000
Theresienstadt 20.8 ? ?May have been diverted around 1000
Theresienstadt 23.8 25.8 Da 224 1000
Vienna 31.8 2.9 Da 225 around 1000
Theresienstadt 1.9 ? ?Only found in the charge against Heuser around 1000
Theresienstadt 8.9 10.9 Da 226 1000
Vienna 14.9 16.9 Da 227 around 1000
Theresienstadt 22.9 23.9 Da 228 1000
Vienna 5.10 7.10 Da 230 547

[Luca]

From Theresienstradt start these transports to Maly Trostinec =
AAx 14.7.1942 Maly Trostinec 1000
AAz 4.8.1942 Maly Trostinec 1000
Bc 25.8.1942 Maly Trostinec 1000
Bk 8.9.1942 Maly Trostinec 1000
Bn 22.9.1942 Maly Trostinec 1000
but the transport in the topic of the first message is this :
AAk 12.6.1942 Trawniki 1000

Luca

[Luca]

Prisoners were transported there in large Transports solely to be executed, their belongings taken & shipped to Germany. This seems to fit the definition of an Extermination Camp.

I agree with You, but the fact seem to be that "tecnically" in Maly Trostinec was in activity as detention place only a Gefagnis (prison).
The inmates arrived with the transports and was concentred in a farm and shot in a near wood immediaty after the arrive.
Looking in the net you can take a long list of name of jews arrived in Maly Trostinec and kill in the next 2 or max 6 days (apart some exceptions that was used for the work of the "operation" connected with the killing).
I have a lot of difficult for found informations concern building of barracks or use of inmates as labor worker.
So i have the suspect that the Bundes/77 source no wrong a lot if say that in Maly Trostinec no exist KZ.
In any case Maly trostinec can take the definition of Extermination camp maybe with much more right that the others camps. Was simple a place where people arrive and was killed. And this is at my eyes exactly a Extermination place.
Not only at my eyes, infact Maly Trostinec is "officially" one of the 8 VL (Vernichtungslager = Extermination camp)
Luca

PS = Looking the Earldor message we can see that in Maly Trostinec area was present severals camps and killing places. Maly Trostinec is usually the orientation point and was also the point of arrive of the transoprts but the definition of "camp" no is refered to Maly Trostinec.

[Luca]

Apparently apart from the well known death camps there were two more less well known. Jungfernhof in Latvia, & Maly Trostinets in Byelorussia.

During the Soviet occupation of Latva from June 1940 to 1941, there were plans to covert a dilapidated estate near the river Daugava at the Skirotva Railway Station, south-east of Riga, to an airfield. The estate consisted of several former stables and barns in miserable condition which belonged to a farmer baron from the Tsardom.
Very soon after the German occupied Latva, they moved jews to this old farm and established the estate as KZ-Jungfernhof by its actual name. The original idea was to turn this farm back into an agricultiral centre using jewish labor. Instead Jungfernhof became a killing centre for thousands of jews sent from Germany or arrested in Latva. Between 29 November and 4 December 1941, 3.764 Reichs jews arrived in the camp from Nurnberg, Stuttgard, Hamburg and Wien, and in Jenuary 1942 another 1.000 from Wien.
Although KZ-Jungfernhof was run by the German SD, Latvian SD were used as guards. Among the latter was the infamous "Victor Araja's Sonderkommando", which was suspected of killing up to 26.000 civilians, mostly jews, in Latva during the German occupation. On 13 and 14 March
1942, 1.840 older jews were taken from KZ-Jungfernhof to the Bikernieki forest and killed by the Arajs Command. In Jenuary 1942 a Jewish Council was set up in the camp, and a jewish police force took over the internal guard from the Latvian SD. The Camp Commandant in KZ-Jungfernhof was a previous farmer named Rudolf Seck.
The jews in Jungfernhof took part in all types of farm labor, building re-construction, and also worked in a stone quarry near the Daugava river. Jews from Jungfernhof were also engaged in the construction of KZ-Salaspils from 1941 to 1942. Disease and hunger ravaged the camp, and the housing conditions were miserable. Accomodations intended for about 400 persons were overloaded with 4.000 inmates in stables and barns. Early in 1943 there were only about 450 jews left in KZ-Jungfernhof, and on 23 September, only 81.
The exact date for the closing of this KZ is unknow. Because most of the Latvian and Reich jews were killed by the end of 1943 (less than 4.000 alive by September 1943), this KZ was no longer in need.

Luca

[Luca]

In all my reading I have never come across mention of either of these places, plenty of course about the other well known places in Poland, I wonder why?
Thanks again, Phil.

Is only a couple of years that i read the intersting messages in this good Forum but, in my poor opinion, this is one of the more interesting questions that i have read in this section of the Forum.
Thank You very much.
Luca

[PHILDHB]

Well thank you very much Luca, I just happened to be sitting reading when I came across the reference in the book. figured somebody here would know.

[michael mills]

Neither Jungfernhof (Jumpravmuiza) nor Maly Trostinets in Belorussia were extermination camps in the true sense of the word, ie installations set up purely for the purpose of mass killing.

Both were agricultural estates taken over by the SS and run as economic enterprises using slave labour, mainly Jewish.

A proportion of the 20,000 or so German Jews sent to Riga between December 1941 and February 1942 were taken into the Jungfernhof camp, where they were used for labour, either on the estate or in other locations. The arriving transports were not subjected to selection on arrival, and there was no killing of the arriving Jews.

There were two selections of old and sick Jews, one in February 1942 and the second in March. A total of about 3,000 was selected and taken away, ostensibly to be employed at the Dünamünde fish canning plant; in fact they were taken to Bikernieki Forest and shot.

After the above two actions, there were no further selections and exterminations, but the mortality of the German Jews kept in Jungfernhof and in the Riga Ghetto was very high due to the poor conditions. An unusually high percentage survived to be evacuated to camps in the Reich in the summer of 1944.

A lot of detail on Jungfernhof and the experience of the German Jews deported to Latvia is to be found in the book "The Holocaust in Latvia" by Andrew Ezergailis.

Maly Trostinets differed from Jungfernhof in that a number of massacres were perpetrated in its vicinity in the summer of 1942. These were of transports of Jews from the Reich and Theresienstadt (I have posted a list in my previous message).

According to the German records, those transports were destined for Minsk, but none of the Jews on them arrived at the Minsk Ghetto. According to the book "The Minsk Ghetto : Soviet-Jewish Partisans against the Nazis", by the Jewish partisan leader Hersh Smolar, transports of Jews from a number of European countries were observed arriving at Minsk railway station, where the local Jewish underground was able to contact them; Smolar gives the impression that the transports continued their journey to the East.

According to post-war testimony by German security policemen, backed up by fragmentary documentation, at least some of the transports were halted in the open country, where most of the deportees were taken off and shot. Whether that shooting had been ordered by Berlin, or was an initiative by the local German authorities who did not want to be burdened by more Jews, is not known for certain.

According to the above book by Smolar, the massacres of Jews in the Minsk Ghetto, which extended from end July 1942 to the end of 1943, were carried out in the ghetto itself, either by shooting or in gas vans; the bodies were at first buried in the Minsk Jewish Cemetery, and later taken to Maly Trostinets to be buried. Smolar did not designate Maly Trostinets as a place where exterminations were carried out.

The figure of 200,000 Jews allegedly killed at Maly Trostinets most probably incorporates all the Jews of Minsk and Jews brought to Minsk from elsewhere, who perished in the area from mid-1942 onward. They were not all killed on the SS agricultural estate at Maly Trostinets.

[PHILDHB]

Thank you Michael, I am more learned than I was a couple of days ago,
Phil.

[alf]

I suggest Phildhb that you research a little more. Maly Trostinets was a death camp. Many of the links given below will be happy to answer any questions you have if you choose to contact them and provide further materials.

The scene of pastoral harmony (kindly SS farmers etc) painted above with no one actually responsible for killing is at odds with some serious Research Centres.

Off topic but highly relevant if your starting out on serious research beware of obscure authors quoted and books, its human nature to read only what supports one's OWN belief systems. After all any author can prove anything simply by deliberate selection , as a simple example to illustrate - David Irving the psuedo historian

David Irving in Irving v. Lipstadt on April 12, 2000. In his decision, Mr Justice Charles Gray said:


In my view the Defendants have established that Irving has a political agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it conform with his political beliefs.

Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence

http://www.hdot.org/ieindex.html

Use the net to research, many Universities have excellent research facilities available of primary source documents

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/Holocaust.htm is an excellent source of historical WW2 Holocaust records

Back on topic, the gentle SS work farm where unknown people did the killings for suspect reasons

According to post-war testimony by German security policemen, backed up by fragmentary documentation, at least some of the transports were halted in the open country, where most of the deportees were taken off and shot. Whether that shooting had been ordered by Berlin, or was an initiative by the local German authorities who did not want to be burdened by more Jews, is not known for certain

Compare this strange unaccountabilty of murders with the Murder Process (source is posted below) and the lengths the SS went to, to destroy the evidence.

b]The Murder Process[/b].

Most of the victims were lined up in front of pits 164 feet (50 m) long and 10 feet (3 m) deep, and shot to death. After the executions, the pits containing the victims were leveled by tractors. The operation was conducted by a unit of thirty to one hundred SS men, commanded by an officer named Rider. A Soviet source estimates the number of persons killed and buried in the Trostinets area at over two hundred thousand

.


Here are some links for you to go and read.


http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_holo ... 44_14.html

The Red Army liberated Minsk on July 3, in what Moscow defined as "one of the most crucial victories of the war." Only a few of the 80,000 Jews who had inhabited Minsk before the war were still there upon the liberation. 60,000 had fled. They had managed to hide out during the final Aktion on October 21, 1943, in which the last 5,000 were taken to Maly Trostinets, where they were murdered

http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x15/xr1561.html

During 1942, Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland were transported by train to Maly Trostinets, to be killed there. It is estimated that there are sixty - five thousand bodies at Maly Trostinets, including those of about thirty - nine thousand Jews from the final Aktionen in Minsk. The inmates of the camp were employed in sorting the victims' possessions, or in camp maintenance. From time to time they were subjected to Selektionen, which became more frequent during 1943.

The Murder Process.

Most of the victims were lined up in front of pits 164 feet (50 m) long and 10 feet (3 m) deep, and shot to death. After the executions, the pits containing the victims were leveled by tractors. The operation was conducted by a unit of thirty to one hundred SS men, commanded by an officer named Rider. A Soviet source estimates the number of persons killed and buried in the Trostinets area at over two hundred thousand.

Attempts to Erase the Traces of Murder.

In the fall of 1943 the Germans began to obliterate the traces of the mass murder by cremating the bodies in nearby Blagoveshchenie. There, a team of Soviet prisoners of war were made to sift the ashes in search of gold. During June 1944, as the Soviet forces approached, the Germans killed most of the remaining inmates. On June 30, the Germans burned the camp to the ground. When the Soviet forces arrived on July 3, they found a handful of the Jewish escapees alive

.

http://www.holocaust-education.dk/lejre ... slejre.asp

Apart from the six “known” extermination camps in Poland, organised mass murder was carried out in at least two more camps: in Jungfernhof (in Latvia) and in Maly Trostinets (in Byelorussia). Here, mass extermination was carried out in the form of shooting and gassing of Jews and Soviet POW’s

http://www.humanitas-international.org/ ... ossary.htm

Maly Trostinets: Concentration camp in eastern Byelorussia, near Minsk, Jews from the final operations in Minsk were murdered and buried at Maly Trostinets in July 1942 and in October 1943. Also during 1942 Jews from the Protectorate, Austria, Germany, Holland and Poland were transported to Maly Trostinets to be killed. It is believed that there are 65,000 bodies at Maly Trostinets, including those of about 39,000 Jews from the final operations in Minsk. Most of the victims were lined up in front of pits 164 feet long and 10 feet deep, and shot to death. After the execution the pits containing the victims were leveled by tractors

.

Enjoy the field of research.