Qualla: Mogilev Ghetto

Mogilev Ghetto: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nic Nat70, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 13 August 1941, Felzin - the German-installed mayor of newly occupied Mogilev - signed a deportation order. By order of the city's military commander, every Jew in Mogilev had 24 hours to leave their home and move to the ghetto area. Anyone who failed to comply would be 'taken away by force by the police and their property will be confiscated.' The Jewish residents of Mogilev were paraded through Gradzhanskaya Street to the assembly area, watched by the city they had lived in for generations. Within two months, thousands had been murdered. By 1943 the ghetto had been liquidated, with around 10,000 of the city's prewar Jewish community of 19,715 dead. The cemetery monument that marks them today - in the Soviet manner - calls them 'Soviet citizens,' without naming them as Jews. The dead were Jews. The history is theirs.

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Image: Nic Nat70 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mogilev Ghetto: Mogilev Before Barbarossa

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AleBurd, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mogilev (Belarusian Mahilyou) is a city of around 350,000 in eastern Belarus, on the Dnieper river, about 200 kilometers east of Minsk. By 1939 its Jewish community numbered 19,715 - approximately 20 percent of the city's population - in what had been for centuries one of the maj...

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Image: AleBurd | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mogilev Ghetto: Killings Before the Ghetto

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kessler, Rudolf, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Before the formal ghetto was established, the killing was already underway. In August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and the Sicherheitsdienst executed 80 Jews from what they categorized as 'Category One' - those they identified as active opponents of Nazism or potential resistance orga...

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Image: Kessler, Rudolf | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Mogilev Ghetto: Conditions and Killings Inside

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kessler, Rudolf, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. When the ghetto opened on 13 August 1941, conditions were deliberately brutal. Each house in the ghetto held 40 to 60 people. No food was provided. All able-bodied residents were assigned to slave labor. The Belarusian Auxiliary Police - units recruited from local collaborators s...

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Image: Kessler, Rudolf | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Mogilev Ghetto: Strommashyna and Liquidation

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paju, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the main ghetto was liquidated, the remaining 1,000 to 1,500 Jews were sent to a second concentration site at Strommashyna, on the city's edge. On 26 May 1942, roughly 400 more Jews were deported from Slonim - a town in western Belarus where the ghetto had also been liquida...

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Image: Paju | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mogilev Ghetto: What the Stones Say

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kessler, Rudolf, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. After the war, the Soviet authorities who governed Belarus for the next 45 years preferred a single official narrative: the war's victims had been 'Soviet citizens,' a category that smoothed over the specific Nazi targeting of Jews. The monument in Mogilev's Jewish cemetery names...

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Image: Kessler, Rudolf | CC BY-SA 3.0 de