Summer 1941. Birch forests stretched from the Lithuanian border across Latvia and deep into the heart of Bellarus. Here there were no industrial killing factories with towering smoke stacks like Avitz. There were no sealed gas chambers. Here death came from a different sound, far more exposed and brutal.

 The dry metallic click of a rifle being loaded. During 3 years of occupation, Nazi Germany turned this entire region into a vast mass grave. In Lithuania, 95% of the Jewish community was completely wiped out. In Bellarus, a statistic that still sends a chill through humanity. One out of every four civilians was killed.

 2,200,000 lives were taken. More than 5,200 villages were burned to ash. And among them, more than 600 villages were destroyed together with their entire populations, locked inside and burned alive. This was no longer war. This was annihilation. Victims were marched to the edge of freshly dug pits. They were forced to strip, made to look their executioners in the eyes, and then they fell.

 History calls this place the Bloodlands, where the Nazi regime carried out a series of inhuman crimes, treating human life as worth less than a single bullet. The Baltic [music] region, the first nightmare. When German forces entered the Baltic region in the summer of 1941, [music] violence did not emerge gradually. It erupted immediately.

 There was no phase of stabilized [music] occupation. No time for adaptation. In Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, [music] mass shootings began alongside the very first footsteps of the army. Forests, [music] open fields, and pre-dug pits quickly replaced any notion of law or judicial process. In Lithuania, the Ponary Forest, also known as Paneri, [music] on the outskirts of Vnius, became one of the largest shooting sites in Eastern [music] Europe.

 From 1941 to 1944, approximately [music] 100,000 people were shot to death there. About 70,000 of them were Jews. The rest were Poles, Russians, [music] and political prisoners considered potential threats to the occupation order. The procedure at Ponery changed [music] little over time. Victims were transported by truck from the city of Vnius to the [music] edge of the forest.

Upon arrival, they were forced to remove their clothing and surrender all possessions. Small groups were then led to the edge of pre-dug burial pits. [music] They were ordered to turn their backs or kneel. Soldiers shot each person individually, [music] firing directly into the back of the head, then pushed the bodies into the pit.

 This process [music] continued for hours, for days without pause. A key factor at Ponery was the role of local collaborators. The shootings were not carried [music] out solely by the SS or Inzat’s commando units. A large portion were conducted [music] byis buries, Lithuanian police battalions. These were men who spoke the same language [music] as the victims, who knew the terrain, who recognized faces.

 That familiarity [music] did not reduce the violence. On the contrary, it made the process faster, less chaotic, and morally impossible to conceal. In Latvia, mass [music] shootings were not only repetitive, but also technically standardized. The central figure of this phase was Friedrich [music] Jekal, the SS general responsible for the region.

 In late 1941 in the Rumbula forest near Ria, Jekal organized one of the largest mass shootings ever carried [music] out within such a short period of time. Approximately 25,000 Jews from the Ria [music] ghetto were shot to death in just 2 days. Jackal employed a method he [music] referred to as sardine packing. Deep burial pits were prepared in advance.

The first group of victims was forced to lie face down at the [music] bottom of the pit. Soldiers shot each person in the head. The next group was ordered to lie directly on top of the bodies below, then shot in the same manner. This process [music] was repeated until the pit was full.

 The purpose of this method was never concealed. It was designed [music] to maximize the use of burial space, reduce the labor of digging, and increase the speed of killing. Also in Latvia, the Salispills [music] camp was established under the cover name of a re-education facility. In [music] reality, it served as a detention site for civilians, including large numbers of children.

 Many were separated from their mothers immediately upon arrival. Conditions of starvation and disease [music] caused rapid physical collapse. Postwar investigations documented the [music] extraction of blood from children to transfuse into wounded German soldiers, resulting in the deaths of many [music] during their confinement. In Estonia, the process [music] unfolded even faster.

 The Jewish community there was already small. In 1941, nearly all Jews were shot to death in [music] scattered executions. Estonia became the first country in the region to be declared uden fry, meaning free of Jews. This [music] declaration reflected a simple reality. It was not migration. It was complete [music] extermination. By 1944, as the Red Army approached and German [music] forces prepared to withdraw from the Baltic region, violence entered its final phase.

 At the Kuga camp, German soldiers gathered the remaining [music] prisoners. Wood was stacked on their bodies. Fire was set. The purpose [music] was not punishment, but erasia. When Soviet troops arrived, they found partially burned corpses lying [music] beside piles of wood that had not fully collapsed.

 evidence of a retreat carried out alongside the destruction of [music] witnesses. What happened in the Baltic region [music] reveals a core feature of early Nazi violence. Mass shooting was not a situational response. It was part of the occupation mechanism itself. No concentration [music] camps were required.

 No complex systems were necessary. All that was needed was absolute [music] power, target lists, and men willing to pull the trigger. Bellarus, [music] hell on earth. Not only the Baltic region, from 1941 to 1944, Bellarus also became the area [music] that suffered the greatest level of destruction in Europe when measured by population loss.

 Historical [music] estimates indicate that between 1/4 and 1/3 of Bellarus’s population was killed, [music] equivalent to approximately 2.3 million people. This figure does not merely reflect the number of deaths. It reflects [music] a harsher reality. Not a single family emerged from the war intact. Unlike other regions where violence [music] was concentrated on specific target groups, Bellarus was turned into a space of total destruction.

 Civilians, [music] peasants, women, children, the elderly, Jewish prisoners, suspected partisans, and random hostages [music] were all swept into the same mechanism. Near the capital city of Minsk, the site of Malitrostets [music] became the largest killing center on the territory of Bellarus. During [music] its period of operation, approximately 206,000 people were killed there by multiple [music] methods.

 The victims included Jews from the Minsk ghetto, Jews deported [music] from Western Europe, political prisoners, and Bellarusian civilians. Trostinets [music] was not a camp in the classical sense with monumental gates and symbolic fences. It was a complex [music] of mass shootings and mass burials located in a forest.

 One method used frequently was the [music] gas van. Trucks were modified so that engine exhaust was diverted into a sealed cargo compartment. Victims were forced into the compartment at railway stations or assembly points. As the truck drove toward the forest, exhaust [music] fumes gradually filled the enclosed space.

 By the time the vehicle arrived, those inside [music] were dead or severely incapacitated. The bodies were then pulled out and [music] buried in pre-dug pits. Alongside fixed killing [music] sites, Bellarus was also the testing ground for what the German forces called antipartisan [music] operations, but which in practice amounted to scorched earth warfare.

 The principle applied was collective [music] responsibility. Any village suspected of sheltering partisans, supplying food, or simply lying within an area of resistance [music] activity was treated as a legitimate target. The process usually followed a familiar pattern. Villages were surrounded at dawn. [music] Residents were driven into a square or open field.

 Some were shot on the spot as a warning. The rest were locked inside houses, [music] barns, or storage buildings. The structures were then set on fire. Those who attempted to escape [music] were usually shot immediately. When the flames died down, the village no longer existed. According to postwar [music] statistics, more than 5,295 villages in Bellarus [music] were destroyed in such operations.

 Of these, more than 600 villages [music] were burned together with their entire populations, leaving no survivors. Karten was only one of hundreds of names, but [music] it became a symbol because it was thoroughly documented. Most other villages were reduced [music] to ashes and numbers in military reports. It is important to note [music] that these operations were not carried out by a single unit.

 They were the result of coordination [music] between the Waffan SS, German order police, and local auxiliary units. Each operation generated reports, statistics, [music] and evaluations of effectiveness. The burning of villages and the shooting of civilians were recorded as measures to [music] stabilize the rear areas. Bellarus therefore was not only a victim [music] of violence, but a space where violence was tested at maximum scale.

Here the boundary between warfare and total annihilation was erased. No personal choice was required. No specific act of resistance was necessary. Mere existence [music] within a designated space was enough to become a target. The central figure of evil in this chain of events, the Derivanganger Brigade, the SS Stern [music] Brigade Derivanganger, was a unit created to carry out forms of violence that other units avoided.

 Its recruits [music] did not come from the regular army, but from German prisons. Those admitted [music] into its ranks included violent criminals, men who had previously shot others, men [music] who had forced women, and poachers released under conditional amnesty. Selection was not based on discipline or combat [music] skill, but on willingness to use direct violence.

The commander was Oscar Derivanganger. He was a severe alcoholic with prior [music] convictions related to sadism and the sexual abuse of children. Under his command, the brigade did not function as a military unit, but as an armed group legalized by SS [music] insignia and orders from above. In Bellarus, Durvanga was granted almost unlimited authority in operations labeled pacification [music] campaigns.

 In practice, this meant no clear military objective was required. Villages were surrounded on the basis of vague suspicions [music] of partisan support. Civilians were taken as hostages. Many were beaten to death during interrogations. [music] Women were subjected to mass sexual assaults in villages or temporary detention sites.

 Children witnessed violence as part of a systematic campaign [music] of terror. One method used repeatedly [music] was forcing civilians to walk ahead of advancing units to clear mines. These people [music] were compelled to step onto roads suspected of being mined, turning their bodies into tools for [music] mind detection.

 Their survival or death was not recorded as a loss but as a tactical [music] expense. The level of brutality displayed by the Derivanga Brigade [music] exceeded even the accepted norms within the SS system. Reports and internal [music] complaints were sent to Berlin describing indiscriminate shootings, uncontrolled [music] destruction, and severe breakdowns of order.

 These complaints led to no [music] dissolution or punishment. On the contrary, Durivanganger continued to be deployed because his task was not merely territorial control, but the creation of absolute [music] fear. The Derivanga brigade exposes [music] a core reality of the Nazi system in the east.

 When the objective was [music] the destruction and terrorization of civilian populations, the system deliberately [music] selected the most violent individuals, granted them power, and accepted [music] every consequence. The climax, [music] the Cartin tragedy. On March 22nd, 1943, [music] the village of Cartin was erased from the map.

 Not because of combat, [music] not because of a mistake. Kaitin was destroyed as a deliberate act [music] of retaliation carried out by the Duranganger Brigade in coordination with police battalion [music] 118, an auxiliary unit operating under German command. That morning, the entire village population was driven out of their homes. 149 people, including 75 children, [music] were not separated and were not questioned.

 All were forced toward a large wooden barn on the edge of the village. When the barn doors were shut, dry straw was piled thickly around the structure. Fire was set from multiple sides at the same time. Inside, the air [music] quickly became suffocating. Screams erupted. The sound of pounding against the doors intensified as the flames spread through the enclosed space.

 When the heat caused the doors to collapse, [music] some people burst out in desperation. Those who ran from the barn were already on fire. They were cut down by machine gun fire in the yard with no order to stop. The process ended only when there was no movement left. After German forces [music] withdrew, Joseph Kaminsky, 56 years old, regained consciousness among the charred bodies.

He was one of the very few survivors. [music] Kaminsky walked through the remains searching for his son. He found Adam, the child badly wounded in the abdomen [music] and barely breathing. Adam died in his father’s arms shortly afterward. There was no medical aid. There were no witnesses other than the father himself.

Cartin was not an isolated case. It was a condensed model of what happened in hundreds of other villages across [music] Bellarus. The only difference was that Cartin had a surviving witness and complete documentation. That is what made Katina [music] a symbol not because it was more brutal but because it was recorded more clearly.

Today at the Katin Memorial Complex, [music] the statue titled the father carrying his dead son stands in an open space [music] where the village once stood. The statue does not depict the moment of violence. It records the final consequence. A father still alive holding his dead child [music] in his arms. There is no explanation.

 There is no justification. Only an irreversible loss. Kin represents Bellarus in the war. Not through numbers, but through a single [music] concrete story. One day, one village, one family, [music] and one undeniable truth. Action [music] 1005. The effort to erase memory. From late 1943 into 1944, [music] the course of the war shifted.

 The Red Army pushed deep into territory that had been occupied. For Nazi Germany, the [music] primary concern was no longer expanding the front lines, but what would be discovered once retreat became unavoidable. Thousands of mass graves scattered across [music] Bellarus and the Baltic region stood as undeniable evidence. In this [music] context, action 105 was launched.

 It was a top secret operation intended [music] to eliminate traces of mass killings that had taken place since 1941. A special unit commonly referred to as [music] Sonda Commando 105 was ordered to move from sight to sight, focusing on forests, ravines, [music] and open ground where mass shootings had previously occurred. The procedure followed a fixed sequence.

 [music] First, older burial pits were reopened. Bodies were [music] pulled from the ground layer by layer. The bones were then crushed by machines and the remaining remains were stacked onto large improvised cremation platforms built from wood and metal railroad rails. Fires were kept burning continuously [music] for many days.

 Once the burning was complete, the ashes were scattered into [music] forests or dumped into rivers to remove any identifiable traces. Those forced [music] to carry out this work were Jewish prisoners selected from camps or ghettos. They were compelled to exume the bodies of their own communities, sometimes members of their own families, [music] under strict guard.

 When work at a site was finished, these prisoners were shot on the spot or transferred elsewhere to meet the same fate. According to [music] German planning, no living witnesses were to remain. Action 105 was not [music] designed to kill additional people for the war effort. Its purpose was to erase memory. It constituted a double crime. First came mass murder.

 Then came [music] the destruction of the evidence of the victim’s existence. Bodies were destroyed. Traces were eliminated. Names were removed from the ground itself. In reality, [music] the effort failed. Improvised cremation sites could not be fully concealed. A small number of surviving witnesses remained.

 Documents, [music] orders, and postwar testimony eventually reconstructed the full picture. Action 1005 [music] did not erase the crimes. It revealed another truth instead. When defeat drew near, the perpetrators did not seek [music] accountability, but attempted to erase the very traces of their victims. The fate of the executioners.

The final question that always follows every tragedy is whether those who committed the crimes were punished. The answer inevitably is not [music] consistent. In some cases, justice was carried out publicly. In others, death came violently in the shadows. And in still other cases, perpetrators escaped for many years, sometimes for an entire lifetime.

For Friedrich Yekl, justice arrived in a direct and visible form. He was captured by the Red Army, put on trial before a Soviet court, [music] and sentenced to death. On February 3rd, 1946, Jekal was publicly hanged in Ria Square. Thousands of civilians were present to witness it. There was no mercy.

 There were no mitigating circumstances. The sentence was carried out before the crowd as a confirmation that what he had done could not be closed in silence. The end of Oscar Derivanganger unfolded more quietly, but with no less violence. He was arrested in June 1945 and placed in detention. Derivanganger never stood trial.

 He died in custody after being beaten to death by Polish guards. [music] There was no public hearing. No sentence was read aloud. His death reflected the life he had lived, ruled by violence. However, not every commander met such an end. Eric von Zelevki, who directed numerous antipartisan operations in Bellarus and Poland, escaped the death penalty.

 [music] He became a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against his comrades and superiors. Because of this role, Bach Zelevki avoided the highest sentence. He was not executed for crimes in the east despite having commanded large-scale shooting and village burning operations. The injustice is even more evident in the cases of collaborators.

Victor Zaraj, commander of the Arj commando, fled Europe after the war. He lived for many years before being arrested and tried in West Germany in the 1970s. By contrast, Herbert Cookers, another notorious figure, escaped to South America and lived undisturbed for a long time before being assassinated by Mossad in Uruguay in 1965.

These outcomes reveal an unavoidable reality. Postwar justice was incomplete. Some perpetrators were punished publicly. Some died violently. Others exploited postwar chaos, legal gaps, and the exchange value of information to evade the punishment they deserved. History does not close with a balanced reckoning.

 It leaves behind voids where the question of responsibility remains unresolved to this day. After 1944, when the sound of gunfire faded, Bellarus did not emerge from the war with a complete victory. Across the land, hundreds of villages were never rebuilt. Where homes, schools, and barns once stood, only empty foundations and solitary chimneys remain, raised as memorials. They do not mark triumph.

They mark absence. Each chimney represents a family that disappeared. Each empty space marks a community from which no one returned. The legacy left by Nazi Germany in Bellarus and the Baltic region is not limited to the millions who were killed. It lies in a social structure permanently broken.

 Family lines cut off. Oral memories with no one left to pass them on. Maps altered not by borders but by the removal of human beings from the landscape. This is a form of loss that time cannot fully repair. Nazi Germany failed to erase the peoples of this region. It did not turn Bellarus or the Baltic lands into empty territory.

 But it left behind a scar that cannot heal. That scar exists in the landscape in collective memory and in stories like Cartine, Ponery and Trostinets where human existence was once treated as something that could be erased by a single order. Millions fell in silence. Most have no individual graves. Many have no names in the final records. Our task today is not revenge.

That task belongs to history. The task of the present [music] is remembrance. To remember is to understand what happens when absolute power goes unchecked. To remember is to recognize that this brutality did not arise in a vacuum but was created by people, organized by systems, and justified through language.

Remembrance does not bring the dead back to life, but it prevents the worst from happening again. As long as the scars on the ground can still be seen and called by their true names, history retains a final boundary between humanity and destruction.