The occupation of the Belarusian Klimavichy by the Germans took place in early August 1941. By this time, there were almost no Jews left in the town, but many Jewish families from all over Belarus who tried to evacuate and did not have time to do so were driven by the Germans to Klimavichy. Immediately after the occupation, a police force was created from local collaborators and an order was issued prescriptive to the Jews not to leave their homes without the permission of the German authorities. Under the threat of execution, they were also ordered to sew a six-pointed star on their clothes and mark their houses with the same sign. To intimidate the Jews, 12 of its most authoritative members were shot, who were forced to persuade their fellow tribesmen to hand over gold and valuables to the invaders.

To implement their program to exterminate the Jews in Klimavichy, the Germans organized a ghetto. Its prisoners were forced to work every day, except for children and the elderly. The control over the execution by the Jews of the orders of the occupation administration was carried out by the Judenrat created by it. There were few who tried to escape from the ghetto: firstly, it was too risky, and secondly, in such cases, the Germans killed all the relatives of the escapee. And in case of success, there was nowhere to hide in particular - the surrounding villages were full of Germans and policemen, and there was little chance of surviving in the forest.

In early November 1941, young Jews from the ghetto were selected to work at the distillery. And the remaining prisoners, mostly old people and children, were taken out of their houses by the Germans and policemen and driven to the old airfield on the outskirts of the city. There, a large pit was prepared in advance, which became a mass grave. The unfortunates, stripped naked, were led one by one to the pit and shot. As eyewitnesses from local residents later testified, the Germans and policemen killed children with sapper shovels or simply threw them alive on the corpses. The execution lasted all day, and in the evening those who were left for work in the morning were also shot. The murder of Jews lasted two days - November 6 and 7. According to various estimates, from 800 to 900 people were shot.

After such an 'action', as the Germans called these murders, no more than 80 Jews remained in the ghetto, mostly those who were still needed to serve the needs of the occupiers. But already on November 20, all the surviving Jews were taken to the outskirts of Klimavichy, to a place called Melovaya Gora, and also shot.

During the occupation period, almost the entire Jewish population of Klimavichy was destroyed, and those few who miraculously managed to survive later joined the partisans operating in Belarus.

At the end of the 1950s, by the forces of relatives of Jews shot on the outskirts of Klimavichy, a monument with a Star of David and inscriptions in Russian and Yiddish was erected on a mass grave.