On this day in 1941, one month after the Germans captured Minsk, Belarus, the Minsk Ghetto was officially established. At the time of occupation, one-third of the total population in Minsk was Jewish; 80,000 people were immediately crowded into the ghetto. Many of these people were refugees from Western Poland who fled to Minsk following the German occupation of Poland.In August of 1941, German authorities began conducting mass killing operations against residents of the ghetto. At the same time, an anti-German underground was established in the ghetto where members organized escapes and formed partisan units in the forests. Though 10,000 Jews fled to the forests throughout the war, many were killed by German forces.August 1941 also brought about the mass murder of 5,000 to 15,000 men, aged 15 to 45. The residents of the ghetto were told that the men had been taken for labor, and only several months later did they find out that the men had been killed. Similar actions occurred between November 7 and November 20 when Germans surrounded an area of the ghetto, forced out its inhabitants, and shot them into pits. Between 17,000 and 23,000 Jews were murdered to make space in the ghetto for new deportees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Only 10 German Jews who were deported to Minsk survived the Holocaust.On July 28, 1942, 9,000 Jews were suffocated in gas vans after being told they were getting rides to work. Most ghetto inhabitants were murdered between August and October 1943 when the liquidation began. By that September, only 2,000 Jews remained in the ghetto before it was destroyed. The SS deported some Jews to the Sobibor extermination center, while the majority were sent to Maly Trostenets, a village near Minsk. In the spring of 1943, a family camp of 650 Jews was set up in a forest, and groups of children returned to the ghetto numerous times to save as many lives as they could, even after the liquidation. In total, 10,000 Jews escaped to the forests and nearly half survived to the end of the War.When Minsk was liberated by the Red Army on July 3, 1944, only 13 Jews survived in hiding.