The small town of Krasnapolle in the Mogilev region (Belarus) was captured by German troops in mid-August 1941. The occupation authorities appointed local resident Avraam Baev as burgomaster. As in other captured settlements, in Krasnapolle the occupation administration almost immediately began to carry out activities aimed at terrorizing the local population and genocide of the Jewish community. To implement this, as well as to carry out various kinds of punitive actions, special punitive teams of SS men were sent to the city. Also, the police was created from local collaborators and simply dubious elements.

It is worth noting that the exact number of Jews by the beginning of the occupation remained unknown, since many managed to leave even before the arrival of the Germans. We only note that according to some sources, in 1939 a little more than a thousand Jews lived in the town.

As part of the implementation of their Nazi program to exterminate the Jewish population in the occupied territories, almost in the first days of the occupation, the Nazis organized ghettos. Jews had to sew six-pointed stars on their clothes and not leave the territory of the ghetto without the permission of the occupation authorities. Ghetto prisoners were forced to do hard physical labor, they experienced difficulties with food and medicine. Under fear of being shot on the spot, they were forbidden to remove their badges, change their place of residence inside the ghetto quarter, move along the sidewalks of the streets, visit public places and schools. The Germans' persecution of the Jews in the Krasnapolle ghetto lasted more than two months, but then the worst began. At the end of October 1941, a gendarme unit arrived in Krasnapolle, which immediately began the selection of elderly Jews of both sexes, motivating this by sending them to some light work in another area. But instead they were loaded onto carts, taken to a suburban forest and shot. About 250 Jews died that day.

In November, the Germans and policemen herded some of the Jews who remained in the ghetto into the premises of the People's House. They built people in a column. The punishers brought them to the outskirts of the town and shot them in front of the cemetery, dropping the bodies into an anti-tank ditch. At the same time, some of the bodies were covered with earth, but many bodies remained lying near the moat and their bodies were then dragged away by hungry dogs. Decomposition went on for many days, and the cadaverous smell lingered throughout Krasnapolle for several weeks. According to some reports, between August and September 1941, at least 1,000 Jews of the city were killed or tortured to death.