Wąsosz pogrom The Wąsosz pogrom was the mass murder of Jewish residents of Wąsosz in Nazi German occupied Poland that took place on July 5 , 1941 , during World War II . Circumstances surrounding the pogrom . When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 , the village of Wąsosz ( Podlaskie Voivodeship ) was taken by the Germans in the second week of the war . At the end of September , in accordance with the German – Soviet Boundary Treaty , the area was transferred by the Nazis to the Soviet Union . The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East two weeks earlier , on September 17 , 1939 , pursuant to the secret protocol of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact . The Red Army overran 52 . 1 % of territory of Poland with over 13 , 700 , 000 inhabitants . The Soviet occupation zone included 5 , 1 million ethnic Poles ( ca . 38 % ) , 37 % Ukrainians , 14 , 5 % Belarusians , 8 , 4 % Jews , 0 , 9 % Russians and 0 , 6 % Germans . There were also 336 , 000 refugees who escaped to eastern Poland from areas already occupied by Germany – most of them Polish Jews numbering at around 198 , 000 . Soon thereafter , the Soviet secret police began spreading terror throughout the region . Polish prisoners of war were massacred . In less than two years the Soviet NKVD conducted mass deportations of up to 1 . 5 million ethnic Poles to Siberia , with some of the local people collaborating with them , including some Jews who formed armed militias . There were also instances of Jewish Communists denouncing ethnic Poles to the Soviets . Following the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union , German Wehrmacht re - entered Wąsosz on June 22 , 1941 . At that time , 800 Jews lived in the town according to the one and only one existing deposition . The only existing document . The only account of what might have happened during the pogrom belongs to a document written by 22 - year - old Menachem Finkielsztejn who had lived in the region with his parents under Polish protection during the Holocaust , before his subsequent emigration to Israel with his family and siblings . The paper , deposited in June 1945 at the Jewish Committee in Białystok , was a rough and unsigned translation from Yiddish , with original , attributed to Finkielsztejn . His own estimation of the number of Jews burned alive in a barn in nearby Jedwabne was over ten times higher than what has been established by the Institute of National Remembrance ( IPN ) as a fact . Exaggerated stories such as the one written by Finkielsztejn , were encouraged by CKŻP as possible backup for exit visas . They weren ' t utilized because of the free - passage decree issued by Gen . Spychalski . According to Finkielsztejn , the advancing German troops soon moved on leaving behind Nazi police presence . In the second week of the German occupation , a Polish militia was formed on the order of German gendarmerie . It consisted of " local thugs " , wrote Finkielsztejn . On July 5 , 1941 , this unit surrounded Wąsosz to prevent Jews from escaping , and a house to house pogrom began . The actual description of the pogrom remains unverified to this day and , as noted by Polish and American scholars , it might have been rewritten by Jewish custodians of the original document . As Finkielsztejn writes – on July 6 , 1941 , the Jews who escaped from Wąsosz , arrived in the neighboring town of Radziłów , but the next day pogrom broke out there as well . According to his deposition 1 , 500 local and refugee Jews were burned there in a barn . However , there ' s also an early Polish monument on the outskirts of Radziłów which reads , " In August 1941 fascists murdered 800 persons of Jewish descent [ undated ] , 500 of them were burned alive in a barn . " The date on the monument is incorrect but historical research confirms that Jews were killed in Radziłów on July 7 , how many , and under what circumstances , remains unknown . The pages from Finkielsztejn ' s paper describing the actual pogrom vanished from the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw in the following years . According to the remaining page , the Germans found later , that allegedly only fifteen Jews were left alive in Wąsosz . The Jews stayed in the town until June 1942 under the supervision of German gendarmerie who " behaved properly " ( whatever it means ) ; and were used by the Nazis for forced labor purposes . Finkielsztejn insisted that all criminals were Polish , even those who had Russian names , or were driving German tanks , while armed to their teeth by the Gestapo . His paper ends there . In November 1942 the survivors were moved to the Bogusze transit camp and in January 1943 sent to Majdanek or Treblinka extermination camp s . Investigation . The crimes committed in Wąsosz are being investigated by Institute of National Remembrance of Poland , under the direction of the IPN prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew who earlier investigated the atrocities in Jedwabne . Ignatiew pointed to the role of the Gestapo agent Mieczysław Kosmowski a . k . a . " Gienek " ( born 1913 ) renamed Walter Krause and paid 250 Deutsche mark s per month by the Gestapo for his denunciations of Poles and Jews in the Białystok region . The IPN chief prosecutor in Białystok , Zbigniew Kulikowski , named agent Kosmowski ( last seen in Bydgoszcz in 1944 ) , as the main instigator of the Nazi German raid on the Jewish community of Wąsosz . According to Alexander B . Rossino , historian at the Washington Holocaust museum , the atrocities committed in Radziłów near Wąsosz were likely perpetrated by the Gestapo paramilitary " Einsatzgruppe Zichenau - Schroettersburg " under SS - Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper . The methods used by his death squad in Radziłów were identical to those employed in Jedwabne only three days later – as shown by the evidence collected in West Germany between 1964 - 1976 .