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

Pre-1940: Kaunas (Yiddish: Kovne), city, apskritis center and provisional capital, Lithuania; 1940–1941: uezd center, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Kauen, city and Kreis center, Gebiet Kauen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Kaunas, rajonas and apskritis center, Republic of Lithuania

Kaunas is located 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) west-northwest of Wilno. Prior to the war, roughly 40,000 Jews lived in Kaunas—about one quarter of the city’s population. The Soviet occupation of Lithuania in the summer of 1940 aggravated antisemitic sentiments in the country. Soviet repressive and economic measures affected the Jews just as much as, if not more than, non-Jewish Lithuanians.

Two days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on the evening of June 24, 1941, the 2nd Corps, part of the 16th Army in Army Group North (General von Leeb) occupied Kaunas. Security Police and SD units charged with “special tasks” followed on the heels of the Wehrmacht; when the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, SS-Brigadegeneral Dr. Walter Stahlecker, reached the city about one day later, anti-Jewish violence was already in full swing. As elsewhere in Lithuania, nationalists took advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops to instigate pogroms against Jewish men. In Kaunas, one of the best-documented pogroms took place at the Lietukis garage, where Jews were beaten to death in front of German and Lithuanian spectators.

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Jews are gathered at an assembly point in the Kaunas ghetto during a deportation Aktion, probably to Estonia, October 26, 1943.

USHMM WS #10687, COURTESY OF GEORGE KADISH/ZVI KADUSHIN

Stahlecker’s unit swiftly channeled uncoordinated violence into organized terror and transformed bands of Lithuanian collaborators into regular auxiliary police units that helped kill Jews in old forts (Forts IV, VII, and IX) outside the city. SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, leader of Einsatzkommando 3—a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A—based in Kaunas, reported that 4,000 Jews had been killed in pogroms prior to his arrival in early July. With the consolidation of German rule, the death toll in Lithuania rose to more than 136,000 Jewish men, women, and children by December 1941. More than any other killing site in or around Kaunas, Fort IX became synonymous with German genocidal policies; the Germans murdered an estimated 50,000 people there, including Jews deported from other countries, during the war. By late 1941, except for the surviving Jews in the few remaining ghettos, the “Jewish question” in the region was already regarded as solved.¹

Following the model that the Germans first adopted in occupied Poland in late 1939, the Nazi authorities in the major cities of Kaunas and Wilno, as well as in a number of other localities, registered, marked, and resettled the Jews into ghettos to work for the German war effort.² To organize the relocation of the 35,000 Jews in Kaunas to the designated area known as Slobodka in Yiddish, or Vilijampolė in Lithuanian, a part of town north of the Neris River that some 8,000 people (both Jews and Christians) had previously occupied, a Jewish committee was formed in early July 1941, headed by the well-known physician Elchanan Elkes (born 1879). This committee provided the nucleus for the Jewish Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) that was officially established on August 8, 1941. Despite protests by the committee about the lack of all vital preconditions (such as plumbing, sewers, and adequate housing) for the mass resettlement into Slobodka, the Lithuanian auxiliary city administration ordered on July 10, 1941, that the relocation had to be completed by August 15, the day on which the ghetto would be sealed off.³

The newly appointed German civil administration under Hans Cramer (former mayor of Dachau) as Stadtkommissar officially confirmed the Lithuanian mayor’s resettlement order on July 31, 1941, and assumed authority over the emerging ghetto, while security matters remained in the hands of Jäger’s police forces. A succession of German units and their Lithuanian helpers not only controlled the outer fence and the gates of the ghetto but, in January 1942, also set up a guard post within the ghetto. (The ghetto was guarded first by the 3rd Company of Reserve Police Battalion 11, followed by the 4th Company of an NSKK [Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, a motorized unit of the Nazi Party] detachment and from late August 1942 by Schutzpolizei from Vienna together with Lithuanian auxiliary policemen.)⁴ For less than [End Page 1066] two months after its enclosure, the ghetto consisted of two separate areas: the “large ghetto” alongside the Neris River and the “small ghetto” to the west, connected by a wooden footbridge. Until its transformation into a concentration camp in the fall of 1943, the ghetto was reduced in size several times; simultaneously, the living space officially allocated to each ghetto inmate shrank dramatically.⁵

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Group portrait of staff from the Bikur Holim Jewish hospital in Kaunas, 1933. Seated at center is Dr. Elchanan Elkes, later chairman of the Kaunas Jewish Council of Elders.

USHMM WS #10191, COURTESY OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE LITHUANIAN JEWS IN ISRAEL

Elkes and his Ältestenrat met for the first time on August 17, 1941, before the Germans initiated a series of mass executions that claimed the lives of almost half the Jewish population in Kaunas. In an atmosphere dominated by confusion, fear, and desperation, the disparate gathering of men that formed the Jewish Council established a range of institutions designed to reconcile the irreconcilable: to alleviate the plight of the ghetto inmates, on the one hand, and to fulfill German demands, on the other. In 1942, the council supervised through its secretariat (headed by Avraham Golub [later Tory]) the work of the ghetto police and offices for health, labor, economics, food supply, housing, and welfare; there was also a fire brigade, a paint and sign workshop, a pharmacy, a hospital, a statistics office, and at times, a court, as well as education and residents’ records offices.⁶ (After August 1942, the Ältestenrat consisted of Elkes as chairman, his deputy Leib Garfunkel, Jacob Goldberg, and Avraham Golub as secretary.)⁷

Invariably, the administration of shortages and hardship affected some groups—the old, the young, the poor, and those without connections to the ghetto leadership—more than others. The Ältestenrat and its agencies, most notably the ghetto Jewish Police, could not avoid becoming key instruments for the implementation of German policies. In the eyes of most ghetto inmates, however, Elkes’s personal integrity remained untarnished at the time as well as after the war, in contrast to the experience of certain other major ghettos in Eastern Europe. Avoiding the abuse of its powers, the Ältestenrat tried to uphold minimal legal standards and to appeal to the sense of duty of those administering its decisions. Perhaps the most symbolic measure taken by the Ältestenrat with a view towards fostering a sense of collective identity was the swearing in of the police on November 1, 1942; roughly one week after the Jewish Police had rounded up those Jews who were to be deported to Riga.⁸

Another aspect specific to the Kaunas Ältestenrat was its support for the underground inside and outside the ghetto. Resistance groups had emerged in the ghetto shortly after its closure and by early 1942 had consolidated along Zionist and leftist lines. Under the circumstances, contacts had to be highly clandestine to prevent the Ältestenrat from being implicated in resistance activities by the Germans; yet Elkes as well as his deputy Garfunkel became members of the Zionist umbrella organization “Matzok,” and even the Jewish Police supported underground activities. The Ältestenrat also tried to document the ghetto history by secretly compiling evidence of German atrocities. Or ga nized resistance efforts focused less on preparing a mass uprising in the ghetto than on preparing the way into hiding for as many Jews as possible. In the summer of 1943, the underground established close ties with resistance groups outside the ghetto, especially in the forests, that helped hundreds of Jews to escape from the ghetto.⁹

As in other ghettos, in Kaunas work was perceived as the key prerequisite for collective survival: all men aged 16 to 57 and women 17 to 46 performed forced labor. Jews worked in ghetto workshops (established in December 1941) or, more frequently, outside in construction brigades. Several thousand Jews left the ghetto every day for the city and its surroundings, one of the most notorious assignments being the Aleksotas airfield construction site, with almost 3,500 laborers in the spring of 1942. Elkes and his men tried to rotate assignments to this brigade by alternating with people from other less-exhausting details; at the same time, the daily quota of workers set by the Germans had to be met.¹⁰

Against all odds, ghetto inmates tried to eke out a living and to uphold hope for survival. The Jewish Council added to the official starvation rations by cultivating gardens or smuggling in food; often transgressing the limits of its functions as defined by the Germans, it created facilities to educate children and to prevent the already appalling health conditions from further deteriorating and tried to preserve a minimum of cultural life, for example, through concerts by the police orchestra and observing religious holidays as well as through exhibitions of art created in the ghetto.¹¹ For a few weeks in the summer of 1942, there was even room for a unique pastime when the Jews were permitted to bathe in the Neris River.¹²

It is estimated that of the roughly 40,000 Jewish inhabitants of Kaunas, only 2,000 survived the war. Most of the victims were killed in mass executions in the first six months of the German occupation; ghettoization itself went hand in hand with the extermination of those regarded as either dangerous or useless. Three days after the ghetto was enclosed, 711 Jews were shot as members of the “intelligentsia”; on September 26, 1941, Jäger’s men murdered 1,608 more ghetto inmates, among them 615 women and 581 children, in an Aktion legitimized as a reprisal for an alleged attack on a German police officer.¹³ [End Page 1067] On October 4, 1941, 1,845 Jews, including 818 children, were killed during the liquidation of the “small ghetto.”

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A musical performance in the Kaunas ghetto, n.d.

USHMM WS #10920, COURTESY OF GEORGE KADISH/ZVI KADUSHIN

At the end of October, the ghetto went through what survivors remember as the “large Aktion”: on October 28, German police selected from among the ghetto population assembled in Demokratu Square roughly 10,000 victims as “unfit for labor,” almost half of them children. An estimated 30 people died from exhaustion on the assembly square; those who had tried to hide were killed in their houses, the 10,000 “unfit” were escorted to Fort IX, where they were shot into mass graves one day later. According to Jäger, some 15,000 “work Jews” (Arbeitsjuden) and their families were left alive for the time being.¹⁴ Not only in scale but also in the manner of their conduct, these mass murders set a pre ce dent; they incorporated elements that later became standard features of the “Final Solution” all across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. The expansion of the killings to include women and children on a massive scale and the “selection” of the “unfit,” as performed during the “large Aktion” in the Kaunas ghetto, resembled the procedure adopted much later at the “Rampe” in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau killing center.

In Kaunas, a so-called quiet period followed the organized carnage of the second half of 1941: a time span of almost two years in which the brutal and often deadly “normalcy” of ghetto life replaced the mass killings of ghetto inmates. In this phase, everyday persecution took the form of countless German orders, for example, stipulating that Jews caught trying to smuggle food would be shot, or of assaults on the ghetto inmates.¹⁵ At the same time, Kaunas remained the site of mass killings: in November 1941, almost 5,000 deported German Jews bypassed the ghetto and went straight to the killing fields at Fort IX; other transports from the west followed.¹⁶ Bitter cold, starvation, disease, and desperation continuously drained the life of the ghetto inmates; for the period between June 1942 and July 1943, the Ältestenrat reported an average monthly death rate of roughly 20 people.¹⁷

The separation of tasks that the Germans enforced after the establishment of the Kaunas ghetto—with Jäger’s office in charge of security matters, the Stadtkommissariat regulating the ghetto administration, and the Ältestenrat as executor of German demands—remained in place until the summer of 1942, when the civil administration and the Security Police curtailed the functions of Elkes’s council. The civil administration took over the management of the large ghetto workshops in mid-June 1942; less than two months later, an identification card was introduced for all ghetto inhabitants. In early July 1942, the Security Police gave additional powers to its collaborators Joseph Serebrovitz (aka Caspi) and Benno Lipzer vis-à-vis the Ältestenrat and supported “clandestine agents” in the ghetto.¹⁸

In a seemingly “stable” situation, characterized, in the words of Avraham Tory, by “ ‘normal’ arrests, various persecutions, and excesses,” the determination of the Germans to finish what they had started became visible in a number of incidents: the deportation of several hundred ghetto Jews to work in Riga in late October 1942; the public hanging of Nahum Meck in November 1942 for smuggling, accompanied by the arrest of three members of the Ältestenrat; and the execution of several dozen Jews in the “Sta lin grad Aktion” of February 1943.¹⁹ As planned by Jäger and Stahlecker as early as the summer of 1941, pregnancies and births in the ghetto were officially prohibited in July 1942; whoever violated this order was threatened with the death penalty.²⁰

In the spring of 1943, following mass executions in other ghettos in Lithuania, organized efforts to escape from the Kaunas ghetto to the forests intensified, with the help of the Ältestenrat.²¹ Simultaneously, German persecution increased as a result of Himmler’s order of mid-June 1943 to transform all ghettos in Reichskommissariat Ostland into concentration camps. In Kaunas, the transition from ghetto to concentration camp was extended over several months. The formal transfer of authority to the SS under concentration camp commander Wilhelm Göcke took place on September 15, 1943. For information about this transition and the period of the concentration camp, readers are referred to the entry in Volume I of this series (Kauen Main Camp, pp. 848–852).

While survivors of the Kaunas ghetto played a major role after 1945 in collecting testimonies on German crimes in Lithuania,²² it took de cades until the history of the ghetto received appropriate attention in public memory. Until the early 1990s, the official Soviet commemoration of Nazi crimes and the sentencing of Nazi collaborators dominated perceptions in Lithuania. Lithuanians felt more reluctant to deal with the issue, but since the country became independent in 1991, discussion of Lithuania’s role in the Holocaust has been more critical.²³

The efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice remained haphazard, as many successfully escaped their responsibility. Karl Jäger committed suicide in June 1959 when German prosecutors started investigating the wartime activities of his unit in Kaunas. Against Helmut Rauca, a former member of Jäger’s Security Police office who supervised the “selection” of ghetto inmates during the “large Aktion,” investigations were initiated in his new homeland, Canada, as well as in [End Page 1068] Germany, where he died in custody in 1983. The U.S. Department of Justice has conducted several denaturalization proceedings since the 1970s against former members of Lithuanian auxiliary police units. Together with the archival documentation and survivor testimonies available, partly in published form, the material generated in the course of postwar investigations provides unique insights into the history of the Kaunas ghetto.