The Einsatzgruppen: Operational Situation Report USSR No. 175

The Chief of the Security Police and Security Police

Berlin,
March 2, 1942

OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR No. 175

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Byelorussia

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Increased partisan activity in the area of Slutsk and Baranovichi continues. Several arrests for holding arms without permit. Locomotives collided in Baranovichi due to an act of sabotage by Polish railway workers. Two electricians were arrested in Minsk. They are suspected of having cut the telegraph cable of the militairy airport three times during the last eight days.

A Jew was shot in public in the Baranovichi Ghetto because he refused to work. In Minsk, four Jewesses and six Jews were arrested for being outside the ghetto without a permit and because they did not wear the Jewish badge. The Polish district mayor of Chukin in the district of Baranovichi was shot by a Sonderfuhrer of the German Army for resistance activity. A secret agent obtained a wireless receiver for partisans through an agent from the factory for telecommunication equipment. Distribution of land that had been announced in the Rear Army Area was interpreted as a sign of wekness by the Communist adversary. Part of the population expressed considerable joy as its first reaction [to the announcement].

The mood continues to be low within the population because of rumors of increased partisan activity, air attacks, etc. In the towns, the food situation gets worse from day to day. More and more places of work are abandoned.

Emigration, even by Jews, to the west has been noticed for the first time in the rural communities. The peasents hide part of their last reserves of grain and fodder.

(The Einsatzgruppen Reports by Yitzak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, editors. p. 301-2)