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On June 15, 1943 the commander of the German Security Police and SD in Bezirk Bialystok signed the announcement of the plan according to which criminal repressions were to be carried out as retribution for liquidating a few German functionnaries and a female Gestapo informer. That day in the area surrounding Białystok (in Bacieczki and Pietrasze) and in the vicinity of the larger towns of the district: Grodno, Łomża, Wołkowysk, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo and Sokółka, the Germans shot a few hundred hostages.

The announcement listed a thousand people from the "Łomża district, suspected of banditism or of belonging to the resistance movement” who were executed, the execution of more than 300 inhabitants of the village of Szaulicze near Wołkowysk, and the murder of 125 hostages from Białystok and Wasilków and 19 families from each of the more important towns in Bezirk Bialystok (Grodno, Wołkowysk, Łomża, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, and Sokółka). Among those shot were members of the Polish elite: i.e. teachers, doctors, and priests. For that reason historians compare the June massacre of 1943 in Bezirk Bialystok to the AB Aktion organized in 1940 in the General Governorate, which was a planned destruction of Polish intelligentsia.