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

Pre-1940: Naumiestis (Yiddish: Neishtot-Tavrig), town, Tauragė apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Naumiestis/Naumestis, Taurage uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Neustadt, Kreis Tauroggen, Gebiet Schaulen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: Žemaičių Naumiestis, Šilute rajonas, Tauragė apskritis, Republic of Lithuania

Naumiestis is located 150 kilometers (93 miles) west-northwest of Kaunas. According to the 1923 census, there were 667 Jews living in Naumiestis, 37 percent of the town’s total population. About 120 Jewish families remained in Naumiestis by the time of the Soviet occupation in June 1940.

German forces captured the town on the morning of June 22, 1941, the first day of their invasion of the USSR. Following the killing of 14 German soldiers by gunfire, probably from Soviet stragglers, the Germans arrested a number of Jewish men as hostages, holding them in the Lutheran church. However, after the local Lithuanian priest avowed that the Jews were innocent, the men were released to return home.

Immediately after the occupation of the town, Lithuanian nationalists formed a local authority and a police force, which, together with the German Ortskommandantur (military commandant’s office), introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures. Jews had to report daily to the Ortskommandantur, where they were assigned to perform forced labor. The tasks included sweeping the streets, road repairs, work in a German field kitchen, and the burial of fallen soldiers. The Jews were required to wear yellow patches on their clothes and were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks. At the end of June, the Jews were forced to remove the Torah scrolls and even the benches from the synagogue and burn them.

In early July 1941, all the town’s Jews were concentrated in a few houses on Pigs Street, a derelict quarter near the Sustis River, which became the ghetto.¹ The Germans and Lithuanians removed five Jewish girls from the ghetto, and they were never heard from again.

The first Aktion took place on July 19, 1941. Initially, all Jewish males older than 14 were assembled at the synagogue. From this group, 27 able-bodied men were selected and put in the barracks. They were subsequently taken to the Heydekrug (Šilute) labor camp. Of the remaining Jewish males, 10 were sent back to the ghetto, while the others, about 70 in all, were shot near Šiaudvyšiai along with more than 100 male Jews brought there from Vainutas. The shooting was carried out by Lithuanian police and members of the 2nd SS-Reitersturm, SS-Reiterstandarte 20. The Reiterstandarte was commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Struve; the Reitersturm, by SS-Untersturmführer Theodor Werner Scheu. Other participants in the killing were members of the 2nd SS-Sturmbann, SS-Standarte 105, and two officials of the Tilsit Gestapo.²

During the mass shooting, at least one Jew tried to flee, but he was chased down and shot, and his body was also thrown into the mass grave. One of those selected for labor, Esriel Glock, heard the shooting in the distance (about 4 kilometers [2.5 miles] away) and learned from one of the Lithuanian guards what had happened to the other group of men. After a few hours, the SS men returned to the barracks from the shooting site. The forced laborers were then permitted to return home briefly to the ghetto to fetch some additional clothing before they were sent to the Heydekrug camp.³

According to Pinkas ha-kehilot, other Jews from Pajūris, Švėkšna, Veivirženai, Kvėdarna, and Laukuva were also brought to the killing site at Šiaudvyšiai on trucks and were shot there. These were probably male Jews who had been sent initially to the Heydekrug labor camp at the end of June 1941 and after four or five weeks had been deemed unfit, following a medical examination. Apparently these men were shot, probably at Šiaudvyšiai, in the second half of July.⁴

The remaining Jews in the ghetto continued to perform forced labor and suffered from hunger and abuse. The ghetto existed until September 25, 1941, when all the Jews were taken out and shot at the Šiaudvyšiai killing site.

The male forced laborers from Naumiestis were kept at the Heydekrug labor camp until the summer of 1943, when they were sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Here, according to Pinkas ha-kehilot, 99 men from the group were sent to the gas chambers, and the remainder were sent in October 1943 to clear out the rubble from the Warsaw ghetto. Of the men originally from Naumiestis, only 7 are believed to have survived the war, some of them being liberated by the U.S. Army in Bavaria, after having been transferred to a Dachau subcamp.