Burning of the Great Synagogue of Białystok

On the day the Wehrmacht entered Białystok, the order police battalion accompanying it rounded up Jews from the surrounding streets and locked them inside the Great Synagogue — one of the largest in Eastern Europe, a wooden-domed centrally planned structure — before setting it ablaze and shooting those who attempted to escape through the windows. The surrounding neighborhood burned along with it.

The episode became a landmark in historiography because it was carried out not by a special unit but by an ordinary police battalion composed of middle-aged reservists: it is the case upon which Christopher Browning based his demonstration of the participation of men without particular convictions. The ghetto of Białystok, established in the weeks that followed, would rise up two years later.