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TheKaunas pogrom was a massacre ofJews living inKaunas,Lithuania, that took place on 25–29 June 1941; the first days ofOperation Barbarossa and theNazi occupation of Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred at the garage ofNKVD Kaunas section, a nationalized garage ofLietūkis, an event known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre.[1] There several dozen Jewish men, allegedly associates of NKVD, were publicly tortured and executed on 27 June in front of a crowd of Lithuanian men, women and children. The incident was documented by a German soldier who photographed the event as a man, nicknamed the "Death Dealer", beat each man to death with a metal bar. After June, systematic executions took place at various forts of theKaunas Fortress, especially theSeventh andNinth Fort.[2]
Relationship between Lithuanians and Jews prior to 1940
Before 1918 and in the first years of the country's independence, Lithuanians and Jews maintained a mostly stable relationship. After the1926 military coup, however, things started to change, as the country's nationalists intensified their antisemitic campaign. The economic crisis contributed in souring relationships, but up until 1940, Lithuanians still believed that their main enemies were the Polish, rather than the Jews.
1940: The Soviet occupation
After signing theMolotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in June 1940 theRed Army occupied Lithuania, and the country was formally incorporated to theUSSR as a federal republic two months later. The Soviet occupation brought large-scale terror with it, mainly persecuting theintelligentsia and rich landowners. Everyone else suffered as well, Jews included, for the USSR began social and political repression and a planned economy that resulted in a general impoverishment. On the other hand, however, the Soviets allowed the possibility of social progression for the Jews like never before, and antisemitism spread immensely among the enraged, starving population.
Having fled to Berlin after the Soviet invasion, many Lithuanian politicians and soldiers gathered together to found TheLithuanian Activist Front (LAF), a far-right organisation that started to operate underground to overthrow the current Lithuanian government and establish a state based onNazi Germany.
1941: The June Uprising
On the evening of 23 June 1941, the LAF took control of the city[3] and much of the Lithuanian countryside. NaziSSBrigadeführerFranz Walter Stahlecker arrived in Kaunas on the morning of 25 June. He visited the headquarters of theLithuanian Security Police and delivered a long anti-Semitic speech encouraging Lithuanians to solve the "Jewish problem". According to Stahlecker's report of 15 October, local Lithuanians were not enthusiastic to start antisemitic violence, so he askedAlgirdas Klimaitis to initiate pogroms. Klimaitis controlled a paramilitary unit of approximately 600 men that was organized inTilsit bySD and was not subordinated to the LAF.[4]
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Starting on 25 June, Nazi-organized units attacked Jewish civilians in Slobodka (Vilijampolė), a Jewish suburb of Kaunas that hosted the world-famousSlabodka yeshiva. According to RabbiEphraim Oshry, Germans were present on the bridge to Slobodka, but it was the Lithuanian volunteers who killed the Jews. The rabbi of Slobodka, Rav Zalman Osovsky, was tied hand and foot to a chair, "then his head was laid upon an open volume ofgemora (volume of the Talmud) and [they] sawed his head off", after which they murdered his wife and son. His head was placed in a window of the residence, bearing a sign: "This is what we'll do to all the Jews."[5]
As of 28 June 1941, according to Stahlecker, 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in other towns in the immediate region.[3] Some believe Stahlecker exaggerated his murder tally.[6][7]
Karl Jaeger, the Nazi commander of the mobile killing squadEinsatzkommando 3, wrote on December 1, 1941, that Nazis and Lithuanian partisans killed 7,800 Jews in Kovno between June 24, 1941, and July 6, 1941.[8] Jaeger recorded 4,000 Jews in Kovno that were killed exclusively by Lithuanian partisans.[8] (SeeJaeger Report).
The primary responsibility for initiating the massacres has been disputed, whether local Lithuanians or Nazi officials.[citation needed]
Memoirs of witnesses say that German Nazi soldiers in uniform participated in Lietūkis' sadistic tortures and massacres, but were also accompanied by Lithuanians recently freed fromKaunas Prison.[9]
Franz Walter Stahlecker's report of 15 October toHeinrich Himmler said that he had given instructions toAlgirdas Klimaitis to initiate pogroms. Stahlecker claimed to have given those instructions "in such a way that no German orders or instructions could be observed by outsiders."[4]
Author Masha Greenbaum, who survived the pogrom, noted that massacres began even before the Germans arrived. She points out that executions took place in the countryside and not just in the city of Kaunas.[10][11]
PhotographerStanislovas Žvirgždas suggested that many pictures from the Kaunas pogrom were falsified by gluing multiple pictures into collages, citing alleged discrepancies in the pictures. Additionally, he speculated that the "Death Dealer of Kovno" was German SS officerJoachim Hamann. Hamann was commanding officer ofRollkommando Hamann, a mobile killing unit attached toEinsatzkommando 3 that was active in the territory during the pogrom.[13] HistorianArvydas Anušauskas, rebutted this speculation, identifying the Death Dealer as a man named Juozas Surmas. In addition to the photos and the testimony of the photographer, Wilhelmas Gunsilius, there are witness testimonies attesting that the Death Dealer was Lithuanian.[12] Specifically, Gunsilius saw the man play the Lithuanian national anthem on the accordion while standing among the corpses. Another witness recalled a "Lithuanian blonde man, with rolled up sleeves and armed with a crowbar" beating Jews to death. Another told Gunsilius that the man's parents were executed by the NKVD two days earlier because they were nationalists. German colonel Von Bisschoffshausen observed a blonde man executing Jews with a "long iron bar as thick a human arm," with the crowd around him cheering during the executions.[14] Juozas Surmas was later identified as a member of theLithuanian TDA Battalion, and confessed to murdering Jews in Kaunas.[15]
Again for some unknown reason, Stahlecker exaggerates his statistics. The account by L. Shauss to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission stated that in "the first pogrom on June 25–26, in the Kaunas suburb of Slobodka (Vilijampolė), 600 Jews were killed on Arbarski, Paverski, Vilyuski, Irogalski streets."
On the other hand, notwithstanding a number of such incidents, the available evidence does not support the image of huge mobs of locals hunting down Jews by the thousands even before the arrival of the Germans as some have claimed.
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