Jacob Gens
Jacob Gens was the head of the Judenrat and Jewish Ghetto Police of the Vilna Ghetto. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked several jobs as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
When Germany invaded Lithuania, Gens headed the Jewish hospital in Vilnius before the formation of the ghetto in September 1941. He was appointed chief of the ghetto police force, and in July 1942, the Germans appointed him head of the ghetto Jewish government. He attempted to secure better conditions in the ghetto and believed that it was possible to save some Jews by working for the Germans. Gens and his policemen helped Germans in rounding up the Jews for deportation and execution in the Ponary massacre in October–December 1941 and in liquidating several smaller ghettos from late 1942 to early 1943. His policies, including the attempt to save some Jews by surrendering others for deportation or execution, continue to be a subject of debate and controversy.
Gens was shot by the Gestapo on 14 September 1943 shortly before the ghetto was liquidated and most of the residents were sent either to labor camps or to execution at an extermination camp. His Lithuanian wife and daughter escaped the Gestapo and survived the war.
Early life
Gens was born on 1 April 1903 in near Šiauliai in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Lithuania. His father was a merchant and Gens was the oldest of four sons. Gens attended a Russian-language primary school and then a secondary school in Šiauliai. He was fluent in Lithuanian, Russian, German, and Yiddish, and knew some Hebrew, Polish, and English. In November 1920, he volunteered for the Lithuanian Army and sent to study at the War School of Kaunas. N. Karni, who was a cadet with Gens, said that he "had great personal charm. I do not remember him ever being in a bad mood." Karni also felt Gens had "leadership qualities, he had personality, he was a man of principles". Upon graduation in December 1921, he was promoted to lieutenant and assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment. In January 1925, he was promoted to senior lieutenant and in March 1925 he requested to be transferred into the army reserves.Gens then moved to Jurbarkas to teach physical education and the Lithuanian language at a Jewish school. In 1924, Gens married Elvyra Budreikaitė, a non-Jewish Lithuanian. He appears to have wanted to transfer from the infantry into the Lithuanian Air Force, but at the time it was accepting only unmarried men. The couple had a daughter, Ada, in 1926, and moved to Kaunas the following year. There Gens worked as an accountant at the Ministry of Justice from 1927 to 1935. He studied at Kaunas University and graduated in 1935 with a degree in law and economics. He worked for the Shell Oil Corporation for two years from 1935, then took a job with, a Lithuanian co-operative. In October 1938, he joined the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union and a month later was promoted to reserve captain.
Gens was a Zionist, and was a follower of the Revisionist Zionism school, which called for most European Jews to immediately emigrate to create the State of Israel in what were then the League of Nations mandates of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. He belonged to Brith ha-Hayal, a Jewish organization for military reservists.
Administrator of Jewish hospital
After the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union and the formation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic in July 1940, Gens was fired from his job. He was unable to secure a work permit nor was he allowed to continue to live in Kaunas. He went to live with his brother, Solomon, in Vilnius, and although Gens was on a list to be sent to Soviet labor camps, he managed to secure an unregistered job at the Vilnius health department through an old military colleague, Colonel Juozas Ūsas. Gens was not on the official payroll, which meant that the political officer attached to the hospital did not need to be informed of his employment. During June 1941, when thousands of the Lithuanians were exiled to Siberia, Gens remained in hiding and was not deported.The German Army entered Vilnius on 24 June 1941, as part of their invasion of Russia in World War II. After their arrival, Gens was put in charge of the Jewish hospital. The occupying authorities ordered the creation of the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, with community-selected members. In early September 1941, the Germans murdered most of the Judenrat, which left the Jewish community leaderless before and during the relocation of the Jews into two ghettos in Vilnius. During this period, the hospital sheltered several prominent Jews from Vilnius. When the ghettos were formed, the Jewish hospital was included within the confines of the larger ghetto, an unusual arrangement for a Nazi-period ghetto. Most ghettos were organized to exclude any Jewish hospitals, forcing the inhabitants to either do without a hospital or set up a makeshift one.
Chief of the Vilnius Ghetto police
In September 1941, Gens was named the commander of the Jewish Ghetto Police for the Vilnius Ghetto by the head of the new Judenrat, Anatol Friend. Officially, the duties of Gens and his policemen were to carry out German and Judenrat orders and provide law enforcement for the inhabitants of the ghetto. Included in their first duty, and considered by the occupiers as the single most important task, was the uncovering of any anti-German activity in the ghetto.The police force comprised around 200 men at the start, and Gens appointed Salk Dessler as his deputy commandant. Other chief subordinates included Joseph Muszkat and Meir Levas. Dessler was a Revisionist Zionist, and Muszkat and Levas had been members of the Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist Zionists. The police force included many other former Betar members, and this may have been because Gens favored people coming from his own political leanings. This led to a conflict with the Bund, another Jewish political group. The Bund appears to have wanted the police force to be more of a militia, with Gens and his supporters wishing it to be a more conventional police force. After some initial political wrangling, Gens' faction won, but the Bundists remained strong in the Judenrat.
''Aktions'' of 1941
The smaller ghetto was liquidated in mid-October 1941, which left the larger one. From late October to December 1941, the ghetto was subject to Aktions, selections of people for deportation and execution in Ponary. Gens was afraid that the actions of the Germans would result in a widespread massacre. He persuaded the Gestapo to let the Jewish police round up the deportees. Gens, backed by the Jewish police force, was responsible for deciding who was to be sent for resettlement and execution. In October, this brought him into conflict with the ghetto's rabbis, who argued Gens was acting against Jewish law. Gens disagreed and considered it to be lawful to sacrifice some people to save others.During the deportations, he tried to secure more work permits from the Germans but they refused to issue them. He attempted to protect those he could. During the Aktion on 3–5 November, in which the paperwork of everyone in the ghetto was checked, holders of work passes – which allowed the holder to protect a spouse and only two children under 16 – were checked and anyone not listed on someone's work permit was sent to Ponary. At one point, while Gens was checking permits, a family with three children went through the checkpoint, and Gens pulled aside the third child. Shortly afterwards, a family with only one child passed through the checkpoint. Gens began berating the father for losing track of his second child and pushed the third child from the first family into the second family. This incident took place under the supervision of German officials, who did not intervene.
All those removed from the ghetto were taken to Ponary where they were killed. The last deportation took place on 21 December 1941, leaving between 12,500 and 17,200 residents in the ghetto. Of those, about 3,000 were "illegal", or residents without a work permit. At least 60,000 Jews had lived in Vilnius when the German occupation began.
Gens and the Judenrat in the larger ghetto were aware of the executions in Ponary by the end of September 1941, when survivors began returning to the ghetto. The survivors, some of them wounded and all of them female, were mostly brought to Gens, and perhaps to the Judenrat, to whom they relayed their stories. Gens urged them to keep quiet, and some of the wounded were kept in the hospital to prevent them from repeating their stories. Knowledge of the massacres at Ponary became common in the ghetto by late December 1941 or early January 1942.
Relations with the Judenrat
After the Aktions in late 1941, no further large-scale deportations or other massacres took place in the Vilnius Ghetto. This period of calm lasted throughout 1942 and early 1943. During this period, Gens' department oversaw the three police precincts the ghetto had been divided into, as well as the ghetto's prison. The police force in early 1942 had about 200 policemen.During early 1942, Gens became involved in a power struggle with the head of the Judenrat, Anatol Friend. Friend had not been involved in Vilnius' Jewish organizations prior to the German invasion, and did not have much support from the ghetto's inhabitants. Gens was viewed favorably by the ghetto residents, partly because he lived in the ghetto when he could have escaped. Over time, Gens and the police force encroached on the functions of the Judenrat. The Germans backed Gens' efforts to secure more power, and implied that he was not responsible to the Judenrat, and that the Judenrat had no power over Gens or the Jewish policemen.
In February, the Germans allowed the Judenrat to set up a judicial system. Before this, justice was administered solely by Gens and his policemen; after this, Gens' department still retained some judicial functions over injuries to policemen, escapes from jail, or leaving the ghetto without leave. In June 1942, Gens took the responsibility for carrying out the death sentence imposed on five men from the ghetto who had been convicted of murder. A sixth man, convicted of committing a murder in another ghetto, was hanged at the same time. Some residents accused the Jewish police force of taking bribes at the gates leading into the ghetto. The police also organized parties which were occasionally attended by Gestapo.
Gens had a dispute with a tailor named Weisskopf, who ran a tailoring workshop in the ghetto. Weisskopf tried to increase his own power base by negotiating directly with the German Army and not going through the ghetto's Labor Department. When Gens ordered all work contracts to go through the Labor Department, Weisskopf appealed to his German contacts, but the Gebeitskommissar of Vilnius, Hans Hingst, preferred that control of such contracts go through his own office which worked through the ghetto's administration. Hingst thus ruled in Gens' favor. The ghetto police then searched Weisskopf's house, found contraband, arrested him, and jailed him for four days, after which he lost his position running the workshop.
Gens also came into conflict with the Judenrat and Friend over the Jewish policemen who guarded the gates into the ghetto. The Germans allowed the Jewish policemen to control access to the ghetto and conduct searches for contraband. Gens' policy was that when no Germans were present at the gates, the policemen would do minimal searches and would allow the smuggling of food and other necessary items. If Germans were present at the gates, the policemen conducted thorough searches and often beat up attempted smugglers. In Gens' view, if the Germans thought the Jewish policemen were not vigilant enough, the policemen would be replaced by German guards and any opportunity for smuggling would cease. He also claimed that even when the Germans were present, any confiscated items were brought into the ghetto, which would not be the case if there were German guards at the gates.