Of the more than 1,168 people deported from Cologne-Deutz to Minsk/Malyj Trostenez on July 20, 1942, around 220 had previously been interned in the ghetto camp in the former Benedictine convent in Bonn-Endenich.

The exhibition shows the historical background to the German occupation in the Soviet Republic of Belarus. It introduces the people of Bonn who, after a four-day journey, were murdered by the National Socialists until the evening of July 24, 1942. Visitors also receive information about the extermination site of Malyj Trostenez, a site of Nazi crimes that is still little known to the public.

From 1942 to the summer of 1944, the camp and its execution sites were the largest Nazi extermination site in the German-occupied territory of the Soviet Union. In addition to Jewish victims of persecution, civilians, partisans and members of the resistance were also murdered there. Most of the Jews arriving in Bonn were murdered in the adjacent "Blagovshchina" forest. In total, more than 22,000 Jews were deported from Germany to Minsk and to what is now the Minsk suburb of Malyj Trostenez. In addition to Cologne, such trains also came from Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. Thousands were also deported to Belarus from Vienna, Theresienstadt, Poland and France.

In 2008, the cities of Cologne and Bonn and the Rhein-Sieg district unveiled a memorial stone at a site in the former Minsk ghetto. It was not until June 2018 that a memorial was opened at the historic site in the presence of high-ranking politicians from Germany, Austria and Belarus.