Pogroms and Massacres in Kaunas
On June 25, 1941, encouraged by the SS, members of the Lithuanian Activist Front, a pro-German partisan organization, participate in a pogrom against Jews in Kaunas. They attack rabbis and their followers in the suburb of Vilijampole, known to local Jews as Slobodka. In a two-day pogrom, Lithuanian partisans set fire to all synagogues and burn down some 60 homes. They kill between 800 and 1,000 Jews.
On June 27, 1941, while crowds of spectators and many German soldiers look on, Lithuanian partisans kill 60 Jews at the Lietukis garage in central Kaunas, battering most of them to death with iron bars. German army photographers take pictures for use in German publications.
On July 4–6, acting under orders of the SS, Lithuanian partisan units shoot nearly 3,000 Jews at the Seventh Fort, one of the 19th-century fortifications surrounding Kaunas. Throughout the occupation of the city, the SS and police use several of the forts around Kaunas as prisons and sites for massacres.
On August 18, 1941 in what comes to be known as the "intellectuals' action," SS, police units, and Lithuanian partisans shoot hundreds of Jewish professionals at the Fourth Fort. Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) commander SS Colonel Karl Jäger reports that units under his command shot more than 1,800 Jews at the Fourth Fort on this date.
October 4. The SS and Lithuanian partisans kill about 1,800 Jews, destroying another small ghetto in Kaunas. The SS commando transfers to a large ghetto those Jews they deemed to be fit for work and shoots those without work certificates, mostly women and children, at the Ninth Fort. The SS also sets fire to the Hospital for Infectious Diseases with patients and hospital staff still inside.
October 28, 1941. In an operation that becomes known as "the Great Action," SS Sergeant Helmut Rauca of the Kaunas Gestapo (secret state police) conducts a selection in the Kaunas ghetto. All ghetto inhabitants are forced to assemble in a central square of the ghetto. Rauca selects more than 9,000 Jewish men, women, and children, about one-third of the ghetto population. The next day, SS and Lithuanian units shoot them at the Ninth Fort. This is the largest mass killing of Lithuanian Jews.
November 29. Two thousand Jews deported from Vienna and Breslau arrive in Kaunas. The SS and police shoot the Jews, including 1,155 women and 152 children, at the Ninth Fort. During the war, the SS and police kill more than 5,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, France, and Czechoslovakia at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas.
Read more about this topic: Lithuanian Partisans (1941)