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

[End Page 1064] Pre-1940: Kaltinėnai (Yiddish: Koltenian), village, Tauragė apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Kaltinėnai/Kaltinenai, Taurage uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kaltinenai, Kreis Tauroggen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Kaltinėnai, Šilalė rajonas, Tauragė apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Kaltinėnai is located about 48 kilometers (30 miles) south-southeast of Telšiai. The census of 1923 reported 130 Jews residing in Kaltinėnai, constituting about 20 percent of the total population. In 1940, about 15 or 20 Jewish families remained in the village.

German forces occupied Kaltinėnai shortly after they invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. At the end of June, Lithuanian partisans and SS men from Heydekrug (Šilutė) arrived in Kaltinėnai and arrested all the Jewish men over the age of 15. These men were transported by truck to a labor camp in Heydekrug. At the camp, the Jews, together with other Jewish men from the region, were forced to work from sunrise until late in the evening. A number of these Jewish prisoners were shot after only four or five weeks, and the others remained as forced laborers for more than three years. Their rations consisted of 300 grams (10.6 ounces) of bread and half a liter (half a quart) of watery soup per day. In the winter, they were forced to load trains. Some of these Jews ultimately ended up in the concentration camp system, passing through Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1943. From there a group was sent to clean up the area of the Warsaw ghetto.

On September 4, 1941, the remaining Jews in Kaltinėnai, mostly women and children, were isolated in an improvised ghetto located in an alley with the worst housing conditions.¹ The women and children were engaged primarily in agricultural work. On September 16, 1941, they were all taken to the Tūbinės Forest and murdered there along with Jews from the surrounding villages.