It cannot be forgotten: 83 years ago, the Nazis destroyed the Vilnius ghetto
August 6, 1943 — the day of the Vilnius ghetto tragedy. Some of his prisoners were resettled in concentration camps in Germany, while the rest were shot in Lithuania. Only a few managed to escape — those who managed to escape to the partisans. On this day, Izvestia recalls the tragic fate of Jews in Lithuania.
The Vilnius fork
In 1939, Lithuania, thanks to Moscow's position in the emerging global confrontation, received a new capital — the city of Vilnius (formerly Vilna as part of the Russian Empire and Poland). It is a fundamental acquisition for the small Baltic republic. Lithuania had claimed Vilnius for decades before that. The capital of independent Lithuania was Kaunas.
By the way, along with Vilnius, Lithuania acquired tens of thousands of citizens of "non—titular" nationality - mostly Poles and Jews, as well as Ukrainians and Russians. And a significant part of the young Lithuanians who fell under the influence of brown ideas were annoyed about this. But when Lithuania became part of the USSR in 1940, the nationalists had to go underground.
In Germany, Lithuania's accession to the Soviet Union was viewed with irritation. The Germans tacitly supported the "Lithuanian Activist Front," which clandestinely fought against Soviet innovations. Lithuanian nationalists considered Jews to be the culprits of joining the USSR. They accumulated hatred for them and hoped for Hitler's Germany.
The time of murderers and looters
The Jewish pogroms in Kaunas and other Lithuanian cities began with lightning speed — on June 23, 1941, as soon as the Red Army left their places of deployment. Jews were attacked with axes and crowbars. There were no Germans in the republic yet, there were thugs from the "Front of Lithuanian Activists" and just looters. The Lithuanians also created the first concentration camp for Jews before the arrival of the Germans. This was the decision of the Provisional Government of Lithuania, headed by Juozas Ambrazevicius.
Lithuania became a kind of training ground for the National Socialist Party of Germany, where they practiced methods of exterminating the undesirable — primarily Jews, communists, and partisans. That is, the national criterion was used, both political and police. On July 24, in the garden of the Franciscan Church on Trokskaya Street, Lithuanians shot several dozen Jews and captured Soviet soldiers and commanders.
On June 25, SS Brigadefuhrer Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, arrived in Kaunas. He was satisfied with the actions of local activists. And he tried to give their punitive actions organization and scope. "When the German troops entered the territory of Lithuania, the hatred of Lithuanians towards Jews led to effective pogroms <...> As a result of the pogroms, which were nevertheless carried out with significant action by the security police and the SD, the Lithuanians eliminated 3,800 Jews in Kaunas and about 1,200 Jews in small towns" — this is their report of the operational group "A" of the German the security police. Police units of Lithuanian nationalists led by Algirdas Klimaitis actively operated side by side with the SS. Mass executions of Jews, including children, took place day and night in the forts of the Kaunas Fortress.
It is not for nothing that the concept of the "Kaunas pogrom" has been preserved in history. Residents of Vilnius were wary of this, but no anti-fascist underground arose in those days. In the future, resistance in Lithuania existed only under red flags, only with the support of the Red Army and its intelligence. For modern Lithuanian political ideology, this is an inconvenient truth, which they have turned into a figure of silence. Today's Lithuania identifies itself with the forces that chose Berlin during the Great Patriotic War.
The atrocities in Lithuania have become unprecedented even by the standards of the Second World War. Until December 1941, more than 150,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed in Lithuania during massacres and summary executions. Although Gypsies, prisoners of war of the Red Army, communists and those suspected of sympathizing with the Soviet government were also shot. In those days, such mass killings of civilians, unnoticed in the resistance to the Nazi regime, were still rare. The Germans simply would not have had the resources for these bloody operations if it had not been for the enthusiasm of Lithuanian volunteers, who were driven to crimes primarily by the thirst for profit. After all, they got the victims' property. As Polish publicist Kazimierz Sakowicz wrote, "for Germans, 300 Jews mean 300 enemies of humanity, for Lithuanians — 300 pairs of shoes, 300 trousers."
From Lithuanian collaborators, the Germans formed 22 battalions of auxiliary police — Schutzmannschaft battalions, with 500-600 fighters each. More than 20,000 Lithuanians passed through them.
"The lot has fallen on us"
In Lithuania, already in the summer of 1941, several ghettos were organized in which Jews lived as outcasts, obeying laws that limited their rights. The occupation authorities used them for heavy work of "military significance." The largest ghettos, through which more than 80,000 people passed, were located in Vilnius and Kaunas.
In September, two ghettos were organized in Vilnius. The Jews were given 24 hours to move there. The first action of disobedience dates back to December 21. Two young men, Gauss and Goldstein, attacked the SS punishers and were killed.
The underground struggle began. In January, a proclamation issued by a youth organization went around the ghetto: "We will not allow ourselves to behave like sheep to the slaughter! Jewish youth, don't believe the liars. Of the eighty thousand Vilna Jews, only twenty survived. Our parents, brothers, and sisters were taken away before our eyes... Ponary is not a camp. They're shooting everyone there. Hitler planned to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. The first lot has fallen on us! Let's not let them behave like sheep to the slaughter!" There was a self-defense organization in the ghetto, led by Yitzhak Wittenberg, who died heroically in July 1943. He, like some other heroes, was betrayed by the ghetto leadership. They hoped that in this way they would save the lives of most of the prisoners. This bet didn't pay off.
The appeals of the underground, by and large, remained unanswered: most of the forces did not have the strength to resist. The executions continued. Most often, they are gratuitous, for the sake of intimidation. It's just that the Germans shot 500 or 100 people, randomly. They were killed, as a rule, near Vilnius, in Ponary, in the woods. Sometimes they staged performances — 100-200 people were selected, they were fed decently for several weeks, and then they were shown to distinguished guests, hoping for an international response. After such events, all selected exemplary ghetto residents were exterminated.
In the summer of 1943, fearing the partisans and the offensive operations of the Red Army, the Germans decided the fate of the Vilnius ghetto in their cannibalistic spirit. The ghetto prisoners understood that they were being transported to certain death. They tried to resist. For a month, the unfortunate were shot almost every day near Vilnius. The rest died in German and Estonian camps. Only a few escaped — those who managed to escape. During the three and a half years of the occupation of Lithuania, almost 95% of Lithuanian Jews died.
In all their torturous endeavors, local activists helped the Nazis. The fact that more than 90% of Lithuania's Jewish population died at the hands of executioners is a huge part of their fault.
The battle for memory
Of course, not all of Lithuania went into the service of the Nazis. There were also those who risked their lives to help ghetto prisoners and prisoners of war. Twelve Lithuanian Red Army soldiers and seven partisans were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for their exploits. During the occupation years, an underground Komsomol organization operated in Kaunas, uniting dozens of militant groups. They, the Soviet patriots, went to their deaths fighting the Nazis. The partisan Marita Melnikaite is called the Lithuanian Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. In recent decades, the Lithuanian authorities have been doing everything to erase these heroic pages from the national memory.
Back in 2000, the memorial museum of the village of Pirchupis, which was burned down in 1944, was closed. The last of Lithuania's similar memorials. On the map of Vilnius, we see Kazis Shkirpa Street, a Lithuanian nationalist who was perhaps the most influential ideologue of reliance on the Nazis. Both in the summer of 1941 and later. "It is necessary to create such a stuffy atmosphere for Jews in the country that no Jew would even dare to think that in the new Lithuania he would still be able to have at least minimal rights and generally the opportunity to live. The goal is to force all Jews to flee Lithuania along with the red Russians," was his credo. In 1995, his remains were solemnly reburied in Vilnius. This is just one colorful example out of many. The tendency to glorify Nazi collaborators, alas, has become one of the foundations of modern Lithuanian statehood. Admittedly, their idealization in Lithuania is not as demonstrative as in the neighboring Baltic republics. There is a system of double standards, omissions and falsifications.
The current Lithuanian government does not assess the criminal actions of the collaborators. It's not hard to explain. They linked the idea of their statehood too closely with the nationalist "Lithuanian Activist Front," whose members proved themselves to be the most inspired murderers during the war years.
Soviet symbols and symbols of victory in the Great Patriotic War are banned in the country, and even this decision alone excludes an objective understanding of the events of the Second World War. The condemnation of the Nazis and their accomplices, the condemnation of the crimes they committed, does not go along with the myth of Lithuania's long—term struggle for independence against the Russian and Soviet occupiers. With obligatory accusations of the USSR in the genocide of Lithuanians. In this logic, the activities of Nazi collaborators are perceived as something more useful and positive. And Nazism and fascism are not just pages from a history textbook and not an abstraction. This is a funnel that still sucks millions of people in our time. And modern Lithuania is somewhat reminiscent of the one that existed under the German boot.
The author is the deputy editor—in-chief of the magazine "Historian"
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
