Follow
The Pińsk Ghetto (Polish: Getto w Pińsku) was a World War II extermination ghetto created by Nazi Germany for the confinement of Polish Jews living in the city of Pińsk (now Pinsk, Belarus) in the eastern territory of occupied Poland. Pińsk was overrun by the Red Army in 1939 during the Soviet invasion of Poland and captured in 1941 by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa, when it became part of the German Reichskommissariat Ostland.
During the Red Army's rapid retreat, on 5–7 August 1941 the Waffen SS massacred as many as 11,000 Jewish men of Pińsk aged 16 to 60, due to reports of Soviet guerrilla activity in the area. Their bodies were dumped in hastily-constructed mass graves. The subsequent creation of the ghetto was followed – over a year later – by the total eradication of the imprisoned Jewish population of Pińsk, totalling 26,000 victims: men, women and children. Most killings took place between 29 October and 1 November 1942, with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police led by the SS-Ordnungspolizei. No houses were damaged in the process. It was the second largest mass shooting operation in a single settlement to that particular date during the Holocaust, after Babi Yar where the death toll exceeded 33,000 Jews. The Babi Yar shootings were surpassed only by the Nazi Aktion Erntefest of 3 November 1943 in the Lublin district with 42,000–43,000 Jews murdered at once over execution pits, dug specifically for this purpose.