M.41.BGOMIVOv - Documentation of the Belorussian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) The history of the museum starts with the establishment of a Documentation Collection Committee regarding the Great Patriotic War, 02 June 1942. The museum was established by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Belorussia which was in Moscow at that time. V. D. Stalnov, the Committee Secretary, was appointed the first director of the museum. A short while after the liberation of Belorussia, the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Belorussia decided to establish a museum of the history of the struggle of the Belorussian people against the German invader. When the Central Committee, the Committee of People's Commissioners and the Supreme Council of BSSR returned [from Moscow] to Minsk in 1944, the Belorussian government allotted a building for the future museum: the Vocational Unions building at Svobody Square, which had remained intact in the destroyed city of Minsk. There are 140,000 items preserved in the museum, and its exhibition space is 3,600 square meters. The museum first opened its doors to visitors in October 1944. In the Yad Vashem Collection there are testimonies and memoirs regarding the Jewish life and resistance activities in the Minsk Ghetto, an article concerning Nazi criminals in the Belorussia area, State Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Nazi War Crimes in the Soviet Union (ChGK) documentation, partisan documentation including orders, placards, newspapers, information from the partisans, the Communist Party committees and members of the Komsomol and the central headquarters of the anti-German Partisan Movement in Belorussia, as well as orders and directives issued by the German occupation authorities regarding the establishment of ghettos, collection of taxes, the struggle against the partisans and forced drafting of the local residents to forced labor in Germany.