Azaryčy 1944

Between March 12th and March 17th, 1944, divisions and corps of the 9th Army of the Wehrmacht deported approximately 50.000 civilians, who were classified by the Germans as “useless eaters,” to a camp system west of the town of Azaryčy. The operation targeted its victims in an area of about 5.000 square kilometers between Babrujsk and Azaryčy, which is located about 80 kilometers to the south. There, the deportees were left on the battlefield as “human shields” to cover the retreat of the Wehrmacht and to slow down the advance of the Red Army. About 9.000 people died directly or indirectly in connection with this war crime.

80 years after the event, the project “Mapping the Co-Presence of Violence and Memory in Belarus” dealt with landscapes of memory in Minsk, Mahilioŭ, and Azaryčy during a workshop at the University of Osnabrück in March 2024. A working group in this blog has attempted to relate the deportations to Azaryčy and their echo in discourses in Belarus and Germany.

The project “Mapping the Co-presence of Violence and Memory in Belarus” was conducted between 2022 and 2024 as a collaboration between Osnabrück University, the IBB Dortmund and the European Humanities University, and was funded by the EVZ Foundation.

Project lead: Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Universität Osnabrück