LITHUANIA REGION (GENERALKOMMISSARIAT LITAUEN)
Pre-1939: Lithuania and parts of Poland; 1940–1941: Lithuanian SSR and parts of the Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Generalkommissariat Litauen, including part of the initial territory of Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien (transferred on April 1, 1942), Reichskommissariat Ostland; post-1991: Republic of Lithuania and part of Hrodna voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
The German and local Lithuanian authorities established around 115 ghettos in Generalkommissariat Litauen. Of these, 38 were established in what became under the German civil administration, Gebiet Schaulen-Land; 25 in Gebiet Kauen-Land; and 22 in the area of Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, which was not formally split off from Gebiet Schaulen-Land until November 1941. In Gebiet Wilna-Land, as it existed initially in August 1941, there were 15 ghettos; another 15 ghettos, holding around 7,000 Jews, were added, however, when a strip of territory was included from Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien in April 1942.
Ghettoization began within a few days of the occupation in these regions and was effectively completed by the end of September 1941, when a remnant ghetto was formed in Święciany. The more than 80 ghettos and temporary holding camps established for Jews in a number of smaller Lithuanian towns and villages in the summer of 1941 were almost all liquidated within a few weeks or months by November 1941. The Telšiai ghetto outlasted most other short-lived ghettos by a few weeks, with the last inmates being shot at the end of December 1941. Effectively these sites were destruction ghettos, serving the purpose of concentrating the Jewish population prior to the killing Aktions. By January 1, 1942, the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators had murdered more than 150,000 Jews in the territory of Generalkommissariat Litauen.
Many of the smaller temporary ghettos in Lithuania were established in synagogues, prayer houses, farm buildings, or barracks or on a few streets in the poorer section of town. The ghetto in Kaišiadorys, for example, consisted of a large grain storage building, where Jews from the town and other places nearby were held for two weeks under appalling living conditions.
From the end of 1941 until late 1943, most of the remaining Jews in Lithuania (ca. 43,000 people) were confined within the three main ghettos of Wilno, Kaunas, and Šiauliai. The only other ghetto that continued to exist until 1943 was the Święciany ghetto. However, some of the 15 ghettos added from Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien in April 1942, including those of Oszmiana, Michaliszki, and Soly, survived for another year. These ghettos were subordinated administratively to the Wilno ghetto and gradually consolidated in the fall of 1942. The Germans liquidated them in March and April of 1943, with some of the inmates being transferred to the Wilno ghetto or to labor camps in Lithuania, while several thousand were murdered at Ponary.
Including Jewish refugees from Poland who arrived following the September Campaign of 1939, more than 200,000 Jews were residing in Lithuania on the eve of the German occupation of the country in late June 1941. The Soviet deportation of people from Lithuania in 1940–1941 was blamed by many Lithuanians on the Jews, even though a considerable proportion of those deported were themselves Jewish. Following the German invasion, more than 8,000 Jews managed to flee into the interior of the Soviet Union, but many were turned back at the Latvian border or were overtaken by the rapid German advance. Some Jews fleeing on the roads were killed by Lithuanian partisan units, which were patrolling in search of Red Army stragglers.
In Lithuania, the arrival of German forces in late June 1941 was accompanied by the rapid establishment of a local Lithuanian administration and police forces, supported by the partisan units (often recruited from former Lithuanian riflemen’s organizations [Šaulys]) that had formed on the Soviets’ retreat. These interim organizations played an important role in the implementation of a wide range of anti-Jewish regulations and measures, including the ghettoization and mass murder of Jews in a number of Lithuanian towns.
Initially, Lithuania came under the German military administration, run mainly by the offices of the military commandants (Ortskommandanturen and Feldkommandanturen) based in the towns. However, from the start, units of Einsatzgruppe A (German Security Police) played a major role in security matters, especially the arrest and shooting of Jews. During the summer, authority was transferred to a German civil administration, headed by Generalkommissar Theodor Adrian von Renteln, which completed the process of ghettoization together with the local Lithuanian administration and police, subordinated to the German Gebietskommissare and the Kreischefs.
In the first weeks of occupation, Einsatzgruppe A, supported by SS, Order Police, Wehrmacht units, and Lithuanian auxiliaries, conducted a number of killing Aktions in Lithuania directed mainly against suspected Communists and adult male Jews accused of having supported Soviet rule.
At this time, orders were issued for Jews to wear yellow stars. Jews were strictly forbidden to leave their places of residence without an official permit, to engage in any form of business, to attend the market, or to use the sidewalk. Local authorities imposed additional restrictions that varied somewhat from place to place. Jewish stores were closed down; Jewish men were beaten, humiliated, and arrested; and Jewish homes were looted. Some synagogues were burned down shortly after the start of the German occupation.
Forced labor for Jews was also imposed quickly in most towns, often organized with the assistance of a Jewish Council (Judenrat). Jews were employed mainly on clearing rubble, [End Page 1032] construction work, cleaning streets, and other public projects in the towns; sometimes they worked in agriculture or other labor outside the towns, such as road repairs and digging peat. In some places, local farmers could rent Jews as day laborers.
The process of ghettoization in Lithuania is relatively well documented in each of the four separate subdivisions (Gebiete). The earliest improvised ghettos were reportedly established at the end of June or early July 1941 as, for example, in Vyžuonos and Palanga. Planning for a ghetto in the city of Kaunas began in early July, and on August 7, orders were issued for the resettlement of Jews into ghettos in Kreis Kauen by August 15, the date set for closing the Kaunas ghetto. The same order also included instructions for the establishment of small units of Jewish Police (5 to 15 people) and Jewish Councils (of about 12 people) to manage the internal affairs of the ghettos.1 In Garliava, in mid-August 1941, local policemen and partisans forced the Jews of the town and neighboring villages into the local synagogue, where they were confined for around two weeks in an improvised ghetto. The local chief of police then requested instructions from his superiors as to what should happen with the imprisoned Jews, as there were problems feeding them and no more suitable accommodations were available.2
Throughout Gebiet Kauen-Land, ghettos were set up somewhat sporadically over the period from mid-July until mid-September, when the ghetto in Lazdijai was established. This was also among the last ghettos to be liquidated in early November 1941. A number of ghettos in the area were liquidated in quick succession in early September 1941, including those in Vilkaviškis, Butrimonys, Alytus, and Merkinė. This intense wave of killings was coordinated by Einsatzkommando 3, assisted by Lithuanian policemen. As throughout Lithuania, however, the destruction often took place via a series of Aktions spread over several weeks. In Jonava, for example, 497 Jewish men and 55 Jewish women were shot on August 14, and only then were the remaining Jews, mostly women, children, and the elderly, confined to a remnant ghetto for two more [End Page 1033] weeks before they were shot in early September. Some ghettos, such as that in Krakės, were also used as collection points for Jews from a number of surrounding places, although in the case of Marijampolė the designation of the cavalry barracks as a “ghetto” was deliberately intended as a ruse to allay Jewish fears shortly before their destruction. The Jews from Kalvarija were brought here just two days before they were shot.
In Kreis Schaulen, the local Lithuanian authorities, in coordination with the German military commandant’s office (Feldkommandantur), ordered on July 23 that all Jews should be moved into a locally established ghetto by August 15. Jews were also given until July 25 to wear the Star of David on their clothing.3 The implementation of ghettoization, however, was delayed in most places until the German civil administration took over in August. In Jurbarkas, according to postwar testimony by the former chief of the police, “after the first shootings in June, mass arrests were carried out by … the police. The arrested Jewish men were transferred to two ghettos on Dariaus and Gireno Streets.”4 Another local policeman described conditions in one of the Jurbarkas ghettos: “The Jews with their children and the elderly were placed in the ghetto, which was a building surrounded by barbed wire…. There the Jews lived under prison conditions. The diet was poor, consisting of cabbage soup and a little bread. They were driven to work under guard and had to clean rubbish from the houses and the streets and do other disgusting and difficult work, with food being scarce.”5
In mid-August 1941, Gebietskommissar Schaulen-Land Hans Gewecke ordered the establishment of Jewish ghettos in the larger towns of the Gebiet.6 Subsequent local orders for Kreis Schaulen instructed that all Jews and half-Jews had to reside in ghettos and were obliged to be available for forced labor. All of their possessions were to be inventoried, including those items already in the hands of non-Jews. By August 30, all the Jews had to reside in enclosed ghettos, especially in Radviliškis, Joniškis, and Žagarė. The Jews could only take with them some clothes, household equipment, and up to 200 Reichsmark (RM) per family.7
In August 1941, the Gebietskommissar Wilna-Land, Horst Wulff, also issued various instructions relating to the imminent confinement of Jews within ghettos. These were then passed down to the Kreischefs at the local level. On August 19–20, Wulff visited the Traken, Schwentschionys, and Wilna Kreise. Shortly thereafter, new restrictions were imposed on the purchase of food by Jews.8 Then instructions were issued for Jews to be clearly segregated from non-Jews and for the locations of ghettos to be determined by September 5, 1941. Detailed instructions regarding the confiscation of all Jewish property soon followed.9 Pursuant to these orders, the Jews of Gebiet Wilna-Land were concentrated in more than 10 short-lived ghettos, established mostly between late August and late September 1941.
On September 19, Wulff again urged the Kreischefs to isolate all Jews who were not yet residing in segregated districts. The Jews were to be placed behind barbed wire and guarded, and only those with a certificate from the German police would be permitted to leave the ghettos to go to work. [End Page 1034] However, this final push to concentrate and isolate all Jews, accompanied by the seizure of their property, only served as a cover for the murder of nearly all the Jews of the Gebiet living outside the Wilno ghetto. The Jews of Kreis Wilna were then murdered at several different sites on September 20–22. Prior ghettoization could only be documented for the Jews of Mejszagoła.10 The concentration and murder of Jews at the Veliušionys estate near Nowa Wilejka (Naujoji Vilnia), where some Jews resisted and a few managed to escape, occurred so rapidly (within a few days) that it is not possible to use the term ghetto for this killing site. In Kreis Traken, the Jews of Žiežmariai had already been ghettoized and murdered in the second half of August. Then the remaining Jews of the Kreis were concentrated in at least four ghettos before being murdered at two separate sites at the end of September 1941.
In Kreis Schwentschionys, temporary ghettos were set up in a number of towns by early September, in preparation for the transfer of the Jews to a site of concentration in Nowe Święciany at the end of September. Here several thousand Jews were crammed into an overcrowded barracks at a military camp (or shooting range) also known as the Poligon transit camp. Then on or around October 9, 1941, most of the Jews of the Kreis were shot, apart from a few hundred (mainly craftsmen and their families) preserved in the Święciany ghetto.
In what was subsequently to become Gebiet Ponewesch-Land, ghettoization mainly took place during July and August. In the area around Rokiškis the town authorities confined all the Jews in two separate ghettos in early July. They put the Jewish men into Count Przeździecki’s stone stables, and the women and children up to the age of eight were moved to the Antanašė estate, between Rokiškis and Obeliai. Other Jews from the surrounding area were also brought to these two rural ghettos prior to their destruction. The men were shot first on August 15–16 and the women and children on around August 25.11
In contrast to most other regions, ghettoization in Lithuania was a very short-lived and improvised process that ran parallel to, and became an integral part of, the program of mass killing in the second half of 1941. Many of the makeshift places of confinement can hardly be described as ghettos, as they resembled more labor camps, prisons, or staging areas for the Jews, just prior to the mass shootings. However, the extensive use of the term ghetto to describe many of these camps in the orders of the German and Lithuanian administration, as well as in the testimonies of survivors and bystanders, necessitates the inclusion of many such improvised sites from Lithuania in this volume. Some, such as that in Ylakiai, are described in the immediate postwar Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) reports as “ghettos.”12 Nonetheless, a number of similar sites have not been included, either because the period of incarceration was too short (less than 10 days), the descriptions indicated a labor or other type of camp, or there was simply insufficient information to establish that a ghetto existed. A few questionable cases have been included, which help to demonstrate the difficulties in making such decisions.
The Jews confined within the small, improvised regional ghettos suffered from severe overcrowding, inadequate food and clothing, unsanitary conditions, and often exposure to the elements. Little information is available concerning the existence of Jewish Councils or a Jewish Police in the smaller ghettos, but in some cases such structures are known to have existed. Jews in a number of short-lived ghettos continued to be exploited for forced labor and were subjected to beatings, robbery, and extortion. In the Mejszagoła, Vainutas, Šakiai, and other ghettos, Jewish women were sexually assaulted by the guards.
Einsatzgruppe A played a key role in organizing many of the Aktions, assisted by Lithuanian auxiliary forces. Prominent among the latter were the so-called Lithuanian Ypatingas Burys (special troops), which murdered tens of thousands of Jews at the Ponary killing site, and also the Rollkommando Hamann subordinated to Einsatzkommando 3, commanded by Karl Jäger. However, eyewitness descriptions from survivors also stress the key role played by local Lithuanian officials and partisan forces.
Jewish resistance in the smaller destruction ghettos consisted mainly of individual acts of defiance. Some Jews managed to escape from the ghettos when Lithuanian policemen turned a blind eye. Jews sometimes received warnings of forthcoming Aktions. However, hiding among the Lithuanian population was not easy, and despite selfless aid from individual Lithuanians, better chances of survival were offered by fleeing to other ghettos in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien in the fall of 1941. Jews from the ghettos in Holszany and Oszmiana even managed to get transferred to Wołożyn and Mołodeczno, respectively, at the time these ghettos were transferred to Generalkommissariat Litauen in April 1942, as the Jews greatly feared coming under Lithuanian control. In 1942–1943, a number of Jews managed to escape from the Kaunas and Wilno ghettos, as well as from other ghettos and camps in Gebiet Wilna-Land, to join the Soviet partisans in the Belorussian forests.
In Wilno, 40,000 Jews were enclosed within two separate ghettos on September 6–7, 1941. These Jews were assaulted in a series of Aktions during the fall, including the liquidation of the small ghetto. At this time, there were around 17,500 “working Jews” in the Kaunas ghetto, following a similar series of Aktions there, and about 5,500 in the two sections of the Šiauliai ghetto.
From 1942 until the summer of 1943, there was a period of comparative quiet in these three main ghettos, as the Germans were in need of the labor they provided. The Kaunas and Wilno ghettos supplied labor to a number of German offices, including work at construction sites and some labor camps outside the ghetto. Conditions in these three larger ghettos resembled those in other large ghettos, such as Warsaw, Białystok, or Riga. The Jewish Councils ran a number of separate departments, including housing, food supply, health, and welfare to organize the ghettos’ internal affairs. There were cultural activities, such as theater plays and concerts, the observance of religious holidays, and attempts to ameliorate conditions through smuggling and welfare efforts. Despite inevitable conflicts of interest between the Jewish Councils, the Jewish Police, and the various resistance movements, efforts at cooperation were at times attempted. [End Page 1035]
Resistance and flight to the partisans were strongest in the Wilno ghetto from the spring of 1943, following the murder in Ponary of several thousand Jews from the nearby smaller ghettos in early April. However, German fears of resistance getting out of hand in Wilno probably led to the liquidation of that ghetto in August and September 1943, with thousands of Jews being sent to the Vaivara camps in Estonia. At this time, responsibility for the Kaunas ghetto was transferred to the SS, and it was converted into a concentration camp. Its remaining labor outposts became subcamps of the Kauen main concentration camp, as was also the remnant of the Šiauliai ghetto. A few thousand survivors of the main Lithuanian ghettos ultimately entered the German concentration camp system from Kaunas and the camps in Estonia during the German retreat in 1944.
SOURCES
Secondary works dealing with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos of Lithuania include: Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982); Arūnas Bubnys, “Mažieji Lietuvos žydų getai ir laikinos izoliaviavimo stoyvyklos 1941–1943 metais,” in The Year Book of Lithuanian History, 1999 (Vilnius: Metai, 2000), pp. 151–179; Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006); Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011); Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Suziedelis, Persecution of Jews in Lithuania: Murders and Other Crimes Carried out during the First Days of the Nazi-Soviet War (Vilnius: Margi rastai, 2006); Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003); Irena Guzenberg et al., eds., The Ghettos of Oshmyany, Svir, Švenčionys Regions: Lists of Prisoners, 1942 (Vilnius: Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydu muziejus, 2009); Irena Guzenberg and Jevgenija Sedova, eds., The Siauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners, 1942 (Vilnius: Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydu muziejus, 2002); and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, ed., Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
Useful reference works include Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1968–2010); Dov Levin and Yosef Rosin, eds., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996); Guy Miron, ed., The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010); Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, The Annihilation of Lithuania Jewry (New York: Judaica Press, 1995); Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Shalom Bronstein, ed., Yahadut Lita: Lithuanian Jewry, vol. 4, The Holocaust 1941–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Lithuanians in Israel, 1984).
Relevant collections of testimonies and other primary sources include: B. Baranauskas and K. Ruksenas, Documents Accuse (Vilnius: Gintaras, 1970); B. Baranauskas and E. Rozauskas, eds., Masinės žudynes Lietuvoje (1941–1944): Dokumentu rinkinys, vol. 1 (Vilnius: Leidykla “Mintis,” 1965); B. Baranauskas and E. Rozauskas, eds., Masinės žudynes Lietuvoje (1941–1944): Dokumentu rinkinys, vol. 2 (Vilnius: Leidykla “Mintis,” 1973); Wolfgang Benz, Konrad Kwiet, and Jürgen Matthäus, eds., Einsatz im “Reichskommissariat Ostland”: Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Berlin: Metropol, 1998); Rima Dulkiniene and Kerry Keys, eds., With a Needle in the Heart: Memoirs of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps (Vilnius: Garnelis, 2003); Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002); Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Berlin: Hentrich, 1997); Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (New Haven, CT: YIVO, 2002); Josef Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006); Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Alt-man, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with USHMM, 2007); and Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Relevant documentation can be found in the following archives: BA-BL; BA-L; BA-MA; BLH; FVA; GARF; IfZ; LCVA; LVVA; LYA; MA; NARA; RGVA; USHMM; VHF; YIVO; and YVA.
NOTES
1. LCVA, R 1534-1-193, p. 40, letter from chief of Babtai Police, August 11, 1941.
2. Ibid., R 683-2-2, pp. 8, 76, Garliava police chief enquiries, August 20 and 28, 1941, as cited by Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, section F.1.2.5.
3. LCVA, R 1099-1-1, p. 41, Kreischef in Šiauliai, Order no. 6, July 23, 1941.
4. LYA, B.14142/3, pp. 47–48, interrogation of Mykolas Levickas, November 24, 1948.
5. Ibid., B.16816, pp. 69–70, confrontation of P. Kairaitis with witness J. Keturauskas, June 21, 1948. The date on which the ghettos were established is not clear from these testimonies.
6. LCVA, R 1753-3-4, pp. 36–37, order of Gebietskommissar Schaulen-Land, August 14, 1941.
7. Ibid., R 1099-1-1, pp. 130, 134, 149, 156, correspondence of Kreischef in Šiauliai, August 1941, as cited by Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, section F.1.2.2.
8. LCVA, R 691-1-20, p. 76, letter of Kalendra to Kreischefs, August 21, 1941; Baranauskas and Rozauskas, Masinės žudynes, vol. 1, pp. 107–108.
9. LCVA, R 685-5-4, pp. 4, 9, letters of Gebietskommissar Wulff to Kalendra, August 23 and 28, 1941, as cited by Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, section F.1.2.6.
10. YVA, M-1/E/1689 (USHMM, RG-68.095), testimony of David Rudnik.
11. M. Bakalczuk-Felin, ed., Yisker-bukh fun Rakishok un umgegnt (Johannesburg: Rakisher Landsmanshaft of Johannesburg, 1952), pp. 383–390; RGVA, 500-1-25, pp. 111–112, report of Einsatzkommando 3 (Jäger report), December 1, 1941; USHMM, RG-50.473*0100, testimony of Elena Zalogaite, born 1928.
12. GARF, 7021-94-423, pp. 28–35.
