On 16 July 1941 the Wehrmacht took Nevel. The occupiers set up a transit camp for the town's Jews near a forester's house, a »blue dacha«, where on 6 September 1941 more than a thousand Jews were shot. The memorial was set up in the end of the 1940s, through the efforts of and with the financial support of the Jewish community. The memorial is three kilometers outside town, on the site of three mass graves, where women, children and men were buried in three separate groups. Four iron stelae, inscribed with the names and the ages of the victims, stand at the spot where the children and the men were shot; three more such stelae mark the spot where the women were shot. Two granite boulders with inscriptions in Hebrew and Yiddish honouring the »victims of fascism« have been placed beside the mass graves. In 2004 the staff of Nevel's history museum cleaned up the site at their own initiative.