Maly Trostenets is one of the largest places of mass destruction during the Second World War, the largest on the territory of Belarus, which existed from the spring of 1942 to the summer of 1944. Jews were brought there — Belarusian and deported from Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic, prisoners of war, partisans, underground fighters suspected of resistance, hostages from among the civilian population.

 The complex was located southeast of Minsk on both sides of the Mogilev highway, near the village of Maly Trostenets, and included: a forced labor camp, a mass extermination site in the Blagovshchina tract, and a primitive crematorium in the Shashkovka tract. In the fall of 1943, the Nazis began burning the bodies of the victims to destroy evidence of the massacres.