Video: 'The World at War: Genocide: 1941-1945 (20 of 26)' (Himmler's visit to Minsk at 21:46)

(Friday, August 15, 1941; during The Holocaust, part of World War II) — While inspecting the Shirokaya Street Concentration Camp today in Minsk, Belarus, Heinrich Himmler,  one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of The Holocaust,  asked to witness the shooting of 100 Jews, a sight that nauseated him when brain matter and blood sprayed his uniform.

Shirokaya was a labor camp that held up to 2,000 prisoners; skilled laborers from the Minsk Ghetto and captured Red Army soldiers who refused to work or operated with the partisans in the forests of Belarus.

Jews about to be shipped to the Sobibor or Auschwitz extermination camps from Belarus were also temporarily held there.

Eventually gas would be the preferred mode of execution during The Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews during World War II.