This display case contains personal items from people murdered at Malý Trostinec. They were recovered from the mass graves located near Minsk in today’s Belarus.

There are two pots, two glass bottles, a comb, two coins and a box for tablets that had contained pain relief medication produced in Vienna. People had carried these items at the time they were murdered.

After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazi regime changed its strategy: from expulsion to mass murder. People were systematically deported to concentration and extermination camps, mainly in Eastern Europe.

As soon as the Jews who had been deported to Malý Trostinec arrived there, they were immediately killed in trucks rebuilt as gas chambers or shot in the woods. After Auschwitz-Birkenau, the greatest number of Austrian Jews were murdered in Malý Trostinec.

Ten transports, with around 1,000 people each, departed from Austria and arrived in Minsk or Malý Trostinec. The trains departed from Aspang Station in the heart of the Third District of Vienna. In plain view, people were driven in open lorries across the city to Aspang Station: the industrial mass murder began right before everyone’s eyes in broad daylight.

Alongside the Jews, Roma and Romnija and people with disabilities were systematically deported and murdered.

Those who opposed the Nazi regime, so-called “asocial”, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and men who refused to serve in the Wehrmacht were victim to incarceration in camps, persecution and murder.

The experience of the mass crimes by the Nazis led the world to fundamentally question the achievements of human civilization and—after the end of the Nazi regime—ultimately brought states together to cooperate in the form of the United Nations. One of the initial and most significant actions of the United Nations was its General Declaration of Human Rights.