The Brest Ghetto or Brześć Litewski Ghetto was created on December 16, 1941, in occupied Poland six months after Nazi Germany entered the Soviet occupation zone under the codename Operation Barbarossa. The Ghetto was liquidated in less than a year, on October 15–18, 1942, when most Jewish inhabitants of Brześć were executed; over 5,000 locally, the rest, after being sent in cattle trucks to a large killing site in the forested area near Góra Bronna (Belarusian: Bronnaya Gora).[1]
The town of Brest (Polish: Brześć) was overrun by the Red Army in September 1939 during the Soviet invasion of Poland and annexed by the Soviet Union following mock elections.
The German armed forces invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, and six months later, on December 16, 1941, set up a Jewish ghetto in the city for some 18,000 Polish Jews who still resided there after a wave of ad hoc executions. The mass killings of Jews in Brześć lasted already for months before the ghetto was set up. On July 10, 1941, the German Einsatzgruppe under SS-Obergruppenführer Eberhard Karl Schöngarth massacred 5,000 Jews including 13-year-old boys and the 70-year-old elderly men in a single nighttime raid.[2] In January 1941, first underground resistance organizations were formed among Jews in the ghetto. In autumn 1942 the Germans demanded a large contribution (money, jewelry) from the Jews under the threat of liquidating the ghetto. Despite significant contribution worth 26 million rubles, the ghetto was liquidated soon afterwards. Most of the Jews were murdered over execution pits nearby.
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