The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre-1940: Gargždai (Yiddish: Gorzd), town, Kretinga apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Gargždai/Gargzhdai, Kretinga uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Garsden, Kreis Kröttingen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Gargždai, Klaipeda rajonas and apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

The town of Gargždai is located roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) northwest of Kaunas.

In 1939, Gargždai’s Jewish community experienced a downturn when Germany annexed the Memel district, cutting off the town’s strong economic ties with that region. As a result, some Jews, mostly younger members of the community, migrated to Kaunas in search of work, and the population declined from the 1923 figure of 1,049. On the eve of the German invasion in 1941, the community’s population was estimated to be about 500, including some refugees from the neighboring Memel district.

German troops of the 61st Infantry Division captured Gargždai on June 22, 1941, following a brief but fierce battle with resisting People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) troops, which resulted in much of the town catching fire. Over the following 24 hours, men of the German Grenzpolizei (Border Police) in Memel, assisted by German customs officials, rounded up much of the town’s population and selected out the male Jews, together with a few non-Jews suspected of being Communists. The other non-Jews were released, but the Jewish women and children were confined to a barn 300 meters (328 yards) east of the town. At this time, Lithuanian nationalists formed a local administration and established a militia or “partisan” force. It appears that the Lithuanian auxiliaries did play some role in the arrest of the Jews. Both groups of Jews were then held captive for another day with little food and water.¹

These arrests were conducted on instructions from the State Police office (Stapostelle) in Tilsit, commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans-Joachim Böhme, which had received authorization from the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin on June 23 and 24 to conduct “pacification Aktions” against Jews and Communists inside a 25-kilometer-wide (15.5-mile-wide) strip of occupied Lithuania.

On June 24, 1941, a German detachment of the Stapostelle Tilsit, led by Böhme and reinforced by about 25 men of the Schutzpolizei from the Memel district, arrived in Gargždai in a number of vehicles. The male Jews were then escorted to an antitank ditch and forced to broaden and deepen it. Once they had completed this task, they were led in groups to the edge of the ditch and shot by members of the Schutzpolizei operating under Böhme’s command. Some of the German policemen from the Memel area even knew the victims personally. One Jew called out to his former friend and neighbor, “Gustav, aim well!” After the shooting, some German policemen moved among the bodies, delivering the final blow to any survivors. After all 201 prisoners (including one woman, the wife of a Soviet commissar) had been shot, [End Page 1052] the unit was distributed a ration of schnapps and retired to eat lunch.²

After the mass shooting, the surviving women and children were imprisoned in empty storehouses on the Aneliškiai Manor. This “ghetto” existed for slightly more than two months, during which time the adult women were required to work on forced labor projects. The children were so hungry that they had to pull up grass to eat.

At the beginning of August 1941, local Lithuanian officials in the Kretinga district met with Gestapo officials to discuss the situation of the remaining Jews. Gestapo official Behrendt recommended that the Lithuanians should murder the Jewish women and children, as they could not perform useful work and were “useless mouths.” The Lithuanians wanted to obtain approval from the Lithuanian administration in Kaunas. After the chief of police in Kaunas replied that the decision was to be left to the local officials, plans were made for the Lithuanian forces to kill the remaining women and children in September 1941.³

The ghetto was liquidated between September 14 and 16, when the Lithuanian police and partisans wearing white armbands convoyed the remaining 200 women and children to the Vėžaitinė Forest, 11 kilometers (7 miles) outside the town, and shot them there. Some sources mention that the Lithuanians were drunk during the Aktion and that some of the victims, probably the children, were bludgeoned to death. According to the account in the yizkor book, the children were shot first and then the women two days later. The Aktion was conducted by Lithuanians under the command of Ildefonsas Lukauskas. In the postwar evidence of Bronnius Salyklis, no mention is made of Germans being present. Only one prisoner, Rachel Yomi, survived the mass shooting and was later hidden by a Lithuanian family. Following the liquidation of the ghetto, the Jewish cemetery was destroyed, along with the Jewish homes. The empty lots were used as farmland by residents of Gargždai.⁴

After the war, the Jewish community was not reconstituted in the town, and only a memorial to the victims remains to mark their former existence. On August 29, 1958, a court in Ulm, Germany, sentenced eight men to various terms of imprisonment for their participation in the murder of the Jews in Gargždai and other similar Aktions in the region during the summer of 1941. On February 5, 1963, a court in Dortmund, Germany, sentenced another former official of the Stapo Til-sit, Wilhelm B.W. Gerke, to three years and six months in prison for participating in the anti-Jewish Aktions on the Lithuanian border between June and September 1941.