page_title: Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
section_title: Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic / History / Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Résistante russe juive, pendue par les allemands le 26 octobre 1941. Photographie prise par un photographe lithuanien collaborateur des Nazis. Non identifié à ce jour.
context_page_description: The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, also commonly referred to in English as Byelorussia, was a federal unit of the Soviet Union. It existed between 1920 and 1922, and from 1922 to 1991 as one of fifteen constituent republics of the USSR, with its own legislation from 1990 to 1991. The republic was ruled by the Communist Party of Byelorussia and was also referred to as Soviet Byelorussia by a number of historians.
  To the west it bordered Poland. Within the Soviet Union, it bordered the Lithuanian SSR and the Latvian SSR to the north, the Russian SFSR to the east, and the Ukrainian SSR to the south.
  The Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia was declared by the Bolsheviks on 1 January 1919 following the declaration of independence by the Belarusian Democratic Republic in March 1918. In 1922, the BSSR was one of the four founding members of the Soviet Union, together with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Byelorussia was one of several Soviet republics occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.
context_section_description: In the summer of 1941, Belarus was occupied by Nazi Germany. A large part of the territory of Belarus became the General District Belarus within the Reichskommissariat Ostland.
  Nazi Germany imposed a brutal regime, deporting some 380,000 people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians more. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Germans and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II). More than 600 villages like Khatyn were annihilated with their entire population. Altogether, over 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus during the three years of German occupation, almost a quarter of the region's population.
  After World War II, the Byelorussian SSR was given a seat in the United Nations General Assembly together with the Soviet Union and Ukrainian SSR, becoming one of the founding members of the UN. This was part of a deal with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the General Assembly, which, the USSR opined, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc. A Byelorussian, G.G. Chernushchenko, served as President of the United Nations Security Council from January–February 1975.
caption: Members of the Soviet resistance in Belarus hanged by the German army on 26 October 1941
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