Kaunas pogrom
The Kaunas pogrom was a massacre of Jews living in Kaunas, Lithuania, that took place on 25–29 June 1941; the first days of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred at the garage of NKVD Kaunas section, a nationalized garage of Lietūkis, an event known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre. There several dozen Jewish men, allegedly associates of NKVD, were publicly tortured and executed on 27 June in front of a crowd of Lithuanian men, women and children. The incident was documented by a German soldier who photographed the event as a man, nicknamed the "Death Dealer", beat each man to death with a metal bar. After June, systematic executions took place at various forts of the Kaunas Fortress, especially the Seventh and Ninth Fort.
Background
Relationship between Lithuanians and Jews prior to 1940Before 1918 and in the first years of the country's independence, Lithuanians and Jews maintained a mostly stable relationship. After the 1926 military coup, however, things started to change, as the country's nationalists intensified their antisemitic campaign. The economic chrisis contributed in souring relationships, but up until 1940, Lithuanians still believed that their main enemies were the Polish, rather than the Jews.
1940: The Soviet occupation
After signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in June 1940 the Red Army occupied Lithuania, and the country was formally incorporated to the USSR as a federal republic two months later. The Soviet occupation brought large-scale terror with it, mainly persecuting the intelligentsia and rich landowners. Everyone else suffered as well, Jews included, for the USSR began social and political repression and a planned economy that resulted in a general impoverishment. On the other hand, however, the Soviets allowed the possibility of social progression for the Jews like never before, and antisemitism spread immensely among the enraged, starving population.
Having fled to Berlin after the Soviet invasion, many Lithuanian politicians and soldiers gathered together to found The Lithuanian Activist Front, a far-right organisation that started to operate underground to overthrow the current Lithuanian government and establish a state based on Nazi Germany.
1941: The June Uprising
On the evening of 23 June 1941, the LAF took control of the city and much of the Lithuanian countryside. Nazi SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker arrived in Kaunas on the morning of 25 June. He visited the headquarters of the Lithuanian Security Police and delivered a long anti-Semitic speech encouraging Lithuanians to solve the "Jewish problem". According to Stahlecker's report of 15 October, local Lithuanians were not enthusiastic to start antisemitic violence, so he asked Algirdas Klimaitis to initiate pogroms. Klimaitis controlled a paramilitary unit of approximately 600 men that was organized in Tilsit by SD and was not subordinated to the LAF.
Massacre
Starting on 25 June, Nazi-organized units attacked Jewish civilians in Slobodka, a Jewish suburb of Kaunas that hosted the world-famous Slabodka yeshiva. According to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, Germans were present on the bridge to Slobodka, but it was the Lithuanian volunteers who killed the Jews. The rabbi of Slobodka, Rav Zalman Osovsky, was tied hand and foot to a chair, "then his head was laid upon an open volume of gemora and sawed his head off", after which they murdered his wife and son. His head was placed in a window of the residence, bearing a sign: "This is what we'll do to all the Jews."As of 28 June 1941, according to Stahlecker, 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in other towns in the immediate region. Some believe Stahlecker exaggerated his murder tally.
Karl Jaeger, the Nazi commander of the mobile killing squad Einsatzkommando 3, wrote on December 1, 1941, that Nazis and Lithuanian partisans killed 7,800 Jews in Kovno between June 24, 1941, and July 6, 1941. Jaeger recorded 4,000 Jews in Kovno that were killed exclusively by Lithuanian partisans..
Controversy
The primary responsibility for initiating the massacres has been disputed, whether local Lithuanians or Nazi officials.Memoirs of witnesses say that German Nazi soldiers in uniform participated in Lietūkis' sadistic tortures and massacres, but were also accompanied by Lithuanians recently freed from Kaunas Prison.
Franz Walter Stahlecker's report of 15 October to Heinrich Himmler said that he had given instructions to Algirdas Klimaitis to initiate pogroms. Stahlecker claimed to have given those instructions "in such a way that no German orders or instructions could be observed by outsiders."
Author Masha Greenbaum, who survived the pogrom, noted that massacres began even before the Germans arrived. She points out that executions took place in the countryside and not just in the city of Kaunas.