 Complete the following phrase:  In May 1937, Berman was appointed head of the NKVD in Belorussia Belarus. In this role, he is said to have been the first official to order his staff to use torture, and was sadistic even by NKVD standards. His victims included a group of former high ranking communists, writers and poets, executed on 2930 October 1937. In January 1938, he reported at a conference of regional NKVD chiefs that his staff had arrested 60,000 people over the previous eight months. Bermans mass killings in Belarus purposefully targeted the educated elite and representatives of Belarusian culture. Simultaneously, Berman supervised the 