Genocide without statute of limitations: Belarusian soil still harbors terrible secrets of war

The Prosecutor General's Office has published a new map of the Great Patriotic War death camps. In 2022, 90 more extermination sites were identified in the territory of the BSSR. Before that 480 were known. The new figure, unfortunately, is not final. And this means that the Belarusian land still keeps terrible secrets of the war.

More and more often in the foreign press publishes thematerials, which say that it was not the Soviet soldier who defeated fascism, that his merits are exaggerated, and that there was no genocide there at all. Now we will show you one important illustration. This is a map of Belarus. And these orange marks are the places where the settlements were burned by the fascists and the territories of mass extermination of peaceful inhabitants. I think that when the search teams check every inch of the land, the map will look different: it will be possible to simply paint over it with one color.

In April 2021 the General Prosecutor's Office of Belarus initiated a criminal case about the genocide of the Belarusian population during the Great Patriotic War. One may ask, "It's been so many years, why? I will answer briefly: to protect our historical truth, to stop devaluing our contribution to the victory. It was the criminal trial that made it possible to identify specific individuals from among the German invaders and their accomplices who managed to avoid responsibility for killing civilians, torture and mockery in concentration camps and ghettos, and the mass hijacking of civilians into German slavery. It is also to raise once again before international organizations the question of recognition of Belarus as a country suffered from genocide.

At present ,more than 16 thousand victims and witnesses have been interrogated in the criminal case, most of them were concentration camp prisoners. Testimonies of eyewitnesses help to establish new burial sites.

Since the initiation of the criminal case, excavations have been conducted at 40 sites. For example, on the territory of the Minsk district near the Uruchye tract there are at least seven pits-graves from the Nazi German occupation period. The number of the buried in this area may exceed 38 thousand people.

During the investigation of the criminal case 90 applications for legal assistance to Belarus were filed with 30 countries. Lithuania and Latvia immediately refused. In their opinion, the execution of the requests would allegedly damage the sovereignty and security of their states.

In total, there are 2 million 105 thousand people buried on the territory of Belarus after the war. Only 547 thousand of them were found.

We must hurry. Every year the last witnesses and eyewitnesses of those years leave us. Graves are overgrown with time, and individual politicians get even more opportunities to rewrite history in their own way.