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The execution by hanging of Masha Bruskina and Volodya Sherbateyvich by an officer with the 707th Infantry Division.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 25136
The execution by hanging of Masha Bruskina and Volodya Sherbateyvich by an officer with the 707th Infantry Division.

The execution by hanging of Masha Bruskina and Volodya Sherbateyvich by an officer with the 707th Infantry Division.

Date
1941 October 26
Locale
Minsk, [Belarus] USSR
Photo Designation
INVASION & OCCUPATION -- USSR -- GENERAL -- Aktionen: Arrests/Executions -- Towns M
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ada Dekhtyar

About This Photograph

Event History
On 26 October 1941, twelve members of the Communist underground in Minsk were publicly hanged in four groups of three near a yeast-making factory in Minsk. This is believed to be the first public execution after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Of the four groups only one was photographed before and during the execution. This group consisted of Masha Bruskina, Kiril Trus, and Volodya Sherbateyvich. Bruskina was a seventeen year-old Jewish woman who had resided in the Minsk ghetto during the summer of 1941. She was living as a non-Jew on the Aryan side when she was captured. In the months before her arrest she worked as a medical assistant in a hospital that the German army had converted into a prison camp for wounded Soviet POWs. In league with resistance groups operating near Minsk, she smuggled in civilian clothing and false documents for escaping Soviet officers. Following her arrest by German troops she was imprisoned and tortured. Unable to make her yield under torture, the Germans then paraded Bruskina and her two Belorussian cohorts through the streets of Minsk wearing signs that read "We are partisans who shot German soldiers." They were then publicly hanged and their bodies left for several days to serve as a deterrent to would-be resisters.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005441.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: Ada Dekhtyar
Source Record ID: KGB Archive of Lithuania
Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography
Copyright: Public Domain
Source Record ID: 968932
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Copyright: Agency Agreement
Provenance: David Cohen
Source Record ID: 120 Russia 1, Minsk 70
Sovfoto/Eastfoto
Copyright: Exclusively with source
Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes
Copyright: Agency Agreement
Source Record ID: Env. 3881
Published Source
The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust... - Berenbaum, Michael - Little, Brown and Company - p. 175
 
Record last modified: 2017-05-31 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa12790