Occupation policy of Nazi Germany on Belarusian lands in modern Belarusian historiography

Abstract

In 2023, Belarusian historians Alesya Korsak and Sergei Kaminsky published a book about one of the camps for Soviet prisoners of war set up by the Nazis on Belarusian soil near Polotsk. The authors used a variety of archival sources from the archives of Minsk, Moscow and Podolsk, many of them introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, as well as published German documents from the archive in Freiburg. The authors’ attempt to reconstruct the history of one single camp, in which more than 18,000 Soviet citizens died during the war years, deserves respect. The work of Korsak and Kaminsky fits well into the modern trends in the development of Belarusian historiography of World War II. Belarusian historians, in close coordination with government agencies, are carrying out large-scale work to identify and systematize documentary materials reflecting the Nazi policy of genocide in the occupied Belarusian lands. The restrictions of the Soviet period, when for political reasons the participation in the Nazi crimes of collaborators from Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, were hushed up, have not been in effect for several decades, which allows specialists to recreate an objective picture of the occupation policy of the Nazis in the period of 1941–1944.