The Jewish cemetery was located on Hrabska (present-day Chernyshevskogo) Street, near the center of town. The Nazis used this site for their early killings of June-July 1941, when they hunted for Jews belonging to specific categories: those denounced by local residents as collaborators with the Soviet authorities in 1939-41, Jewish professionals and members of the intelligentsia, and Jewish hostages taken to extort “contributions” from the other Jews. The first such group killing took place as early as June 30, 1941, and it claimed the lives of thirty-six Jewish physicians. On July 8, seventy-three “Jewish Communists” were shot. On July 18, the Germans took Jewish hostages and demanded a ransom to the tune of one million rubles, ten kilograms of gold, and 100 kilograms of silver. Before the Judenrat could raise the required sum, the Nazis shot the hostages. Seventy Jewish intellectuals were killed in late July. At least 400 Jews had been killed in Baranowicze by August 1, 1941, and most of these killings took place at the Jewish cemetery.

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On March 4-5, the local German SiPo (Security Police) and SD carried out the first mass murder of Jews in Baranowicze. In the preceding days, the Germans had delivered 6,000 workers' certificates (dubbed “life certificates” by the ghetto inmates) to the Jewish Council, with orders to distribute them among the skilled and able-bodied Jewish workers. Ovsey Izykson, the chairman of the Judenrat, grasped the dreadful import of these certificates (as did all the other Jews), and so he handed some of them to the eminent rabbis residing in the ghetto, rather than to workers. On March 3, the ghetto was sealed by the Auxiliary Police, and during the night it was divided into two sections. On March 4, at 4 AM, the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Belorussian auxiliaries, commanded by SiPo officers, began to carry out a selection among the Jews: The holders of workers' certificates went to the eastern half of the ghetto, while the “non-workers” – mostly elderly and sick people, and women with children – went to its western half. The Belarusian police searched the ghetto for those who were hiding; they attempted to involve the Jewish ghetto police in this search, but the latter refused. Members of the German military police and the civil administration also took part in the operation. According to many survivors’ accounts, before the roundup the Germans demanded that Izykson provide them with a list of the elderly and the infirm, but the chairman refused, saying: “I am not God; I will not decide who lives and who dies” (several survivors give different versions of Izykson’s last words). On that day, Ovsey Izykson and his secretary were killed along with the other victims. At 8 AM, trucks drove up to the ghetto gates and began to transport the doomed Jews to the murder site, where pits had been dug in advance. The Baranowicze SD had a quota of 3,000 Jews to exterminate. Being eager to fill this quota, they took many holders of “life certificates” from the eastern section of the ghetto to the pits.
Some eyewitnesses maintain that the trucks arriving at the ghetto gate on that day, or at least some of them, had been gas vans; thus, they transported the already dead bodies to the pits, which had been dug near the so-called Zielony Most (Green Bridge) on the northern outskirts of the town, near the northern railway depot. The victims of the massacre included Izykson and his secretary Henia Mann, as well as the entire Jewish police force, along with their commander, Chaim Weltman. Nowadays, the killing site is known as Minskii Pereezd (the Minsk Crossing).

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The murder site lay west of the village of Grabowiec. Some sources give its location as “between the villages of Grabowiec, Gliniszcze (Hlinishcha), and Uznohi” (the latter village is now part of the town of Baranovichi). This area was the site of the second large-scale massacre in Baranowicze, which began on September 22, 1942 (the day after Yom Kippur). The direct initiator of this mass murder was the Baranowicze SiPo (Security Police), while ultimate responsibility lay with Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader of Ostland, who demanded that the area be made "Jew-free", as part of the anti-partisan operations in “Weissruthenien”. The perpetrators were German policemen, as well as Belorussian and Latvian auxiliaries. In anticipation of Jewish resistance, the German policemen who showed up at the ghetto wore the uniforms of the Todt Organization, which exploited Jewish labor. The perpetrators began to assemble the ghetto inmates in front of the Gebietskommissariat. At the same time, the police carried out a search for underground shelters where the inmates might be hiding. According to some accounts, there were about 500 clandestine bunkers in the Baranowicze Ghetto. Some of the shelters were discovered on that same day, while the rest were exposed over the following days. As a result, the killing “operation” dragged on until October 2. To expedite the search for hidden Jews, the Germans permitted local Belarusians to enter the ghetto for plunder, after the bulk of the victims had been transported to the killing site. The patients in the ghetto hospital were killed on the spot. Some Jews revealed the location of bunkers in exchange for a promise to spare their lives, but they were killed, as well. Some Jews tried to resist during the roundup and/or managed to escape into the forest. Some of the assembled victims were loaded into gas vans and killed on the way to Grabowiec; the rest were escorted to pits west of Grabowiec, 2-3 kilometers south of Baranowicze, and shot. The total number of Jews killed over this eleven-day period (September 22- October 2, 1942) has been estimated at 6,000. The Germans carried out their third and final massacre of the Jews of Baranowicze in December 1942. On December 17, as the Jewish workers were going out to work, the Germans intercepted some of them and transported them to the area of Grabowiec. The non-working Jews were transported to the murder site at the same time. Just like in September 1942, many ghetto inmates went into hiding, and it took the perpetrators (local policemen, as well as Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries) several weeks to find most of them. The most reliable estimate of the number of Jews killed in those days is about 3,000, although some estimates run higher. During this operation, the Nazis spared some of the most essential Jewish workers (these would be killed in the fall of 1943). Nevertheless, the ghetto was liquidated.

More information: Yad Vashem