Masters of Death (8 page)

A similar scene confronted a colonel who was adjutant to the staff of Army Group North on his arrival in Kaunas on the morning of 27 June 1941. He passed a filling station surrounded by a dense crowd and noticed women in the crowd who had “lifted up their children or stood them on chairs or boxes so that they could see better.” He thought he must be witnessing “a victory celebration or some type of sporting event because of the cheering, clapping and laughter that kept breaking out.” But when he asked what was happening, he was told that “the ‘Deathdealer of Kovno’ was at work and that this was where collaborators and traitors were finally meted out their rightful punishment!” He moved closer and witnessed “probably the most frightful event that I had seen during the course of two world wars”:

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting. The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest. At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead or dying people. Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully. Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission. In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.

A military photographer who photographed the scene (and who identified the murder weapon as an iron crowbar) nearly had his camera confiscated by a hovering SS officer, indicating just how “spontaneous” these early public massacres were. Bystanders he questioned claimed that the death-dealer’s parents “had been taken from their beds two days earlier and immediately shot”—presumably by departing NKVD— “because they were suspected of being nationalists, and this was the young man’s revenge.” The death-dealer, the photographer adds, “within three-quarters of an hour . . . had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people in this way,” after which “the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem.”

There were other murderers busy at the garage at other times that day. A Gentile Lithuanian, Julius Vainilavicius, described the scene:

I was returning home after angling. Going past the garage I saw some civilians working there. The Germans were treating them roughly. The Jews were removing [horse] dung with naked hands and putting it into a heap. Yielding to curiosity, I walked into the schoolyard and over the fence kept on watching them. The work being finished, the people were ordered to wash themselves. . . . Here a great massacre began. The Germans and ten to fifteen Lithuanians, who happened to be in the garage at this time, swooped down on the Jews, belaboring them with rifle butts, spades, sticks and crowbars. About fifty people were wounded. They lay on the ground, groaning and crying. Then the water hose was brought and cold water turned onto them. Those who regained consciousness were beaten to death on the spot. After all the Jews were killed, a truck with a group of Jews [i.e., prisoners] came into the yard. They loaded the corpses onto the lorry and drove away. A few minutes later the Germans dispersed the onlookers.

Between these public spectacles, the SS advance detachment organized the Lithuanian irregulars. Einsatzgruppe A leader Stahlecker explained in a follow-up report that “it was not easy at first to set any large-scale anti-Jewish pogrom in motion [in Kaunas].” But the SS found early collaborators in Algirdas Klimaitis, a Lithuanian journalist who led one of the four groups of local irregulars, and a physician, Dr. Zigonys. Under Klimaitis’s command, Einsatzgruppe A organized six hundred of the most reliable irregulars into an auxiliary police force; under Zigonys’s command, another two hundred. On the night of 25 June 1941, the auxiliaries bombed or set fire to several Kaunas synagogues and burned down sixty houses in the Jewish quarter. That same night they began rounding up Jews, plundering their houses and murdering them — 1,500 victims on the night of 25 June; on succeeding nights another 2,300. The Wehrmacht colonel reports seeing “long columns consisting of some forty to fifty men, women and children, who had been driven out of their homes . . . herded through the streets by armed civilians. . . . I was told that these people were being taken to the city prison. I assume, however, that the route they were taking led directly to their place of execution.”

“During the last three days,” Einsatzkommando 1b reported to Berlin on 30 June 1941, “Lithuanian partisan groups have already killed several thousand Jews.”

The Lithuanian auxiliaries justified their arrests and executions by claiming that Jews had been shooting from their windows at the German troops. A Jewish eyewitness, William Mishell, a draftsman in an engineering office, dismisses the accusation as “utterly ridiculous: first of all, the Jews never had arms in Lithuania; and secondly, no German soldiers were present where most of the Jews were being arrested, beaten up and manhandled. Saturday [28 June 1941], the Jewish Sabbath, only made the partisans’ zeal higher. Groups of Jews were made to dance in front of jeering crowds and then were beaten in full view of the population, including Germans, but nobody intervened.”

From the prison, the victims were marched to a secure facility where their systematic murder could be concealed. Kaunas was ringed with massive forts built by the Czar on the hills above the city prior to World War I and subsequently converted to warehouses or jails. Mishell describes these numbered forts as having “heavy masonry walls . . . topped with barbed wire and observation towers.” Bunkered underground barracks and protective earthen berms made the interior compound of a fort “an artificial valley.” Into one such valley of death, the Seventh Fort, located in the northeastern suburbs, the auxiliaries drove the crowds of Jewish civilians they had arrested, separating the men from the women and children. “Under heavy blows with the butts of the rifles, we [men] were chased down the slopes into the large hole,” a survivor of these early atrocities told Mishell soon after he escaped:

The entire area was full of humanity. The women and small children, we found out, were locked up in the underground barracks. Here we were now kept for days without even a piece of bread or a drink of water. On top of the slopes were hundreds of Lithuanian partisans with machine guns. Escape was totally impossible. We received strict orders to sit on the ground and not to talk. When somebody moved or was caught talking, the partisans would open automatic fire into the crowd. Not everyone was lucky enough to be killed outright. . . . Many of the wounded were twisting in agony and asking the bandits to kill them, but the bastards would laugh and say, “You were told to keep quiet,” but would not shoot, and instead let them die in pain.

There was an artesian well within the Seventh Fort compound, the survivor told Mishell, but they were forbidden to drink from it; people who approached it were shot. Finally, desperate after several days without water, “a group got up and tried to attack the guards. But without guns, weakened by hunger and thirst, they were no match and were mercilessly gunned down by the bandits.” The guards gave the survivors some water and bread then, to prevent further mass revolts. After several more days, the stench of the corpses forced the guards to organize a Jewish burial team; when the dead had been removed and buried behind the artesian well, the guards shot the gravediggers.

Later that week, on 4 July 1941, the women and children were led out from the barracks and out of the fort. “They looked terrible,” the survivor remembered: “bloody, torn clothes, pale, shaky, barely walking.” As soon as the high iron gates closed behind the women and children, “without any warning the guards suddenly opened a murderous fire into the valley [where the men were confined] completely at random, just blanketing the area with bullets, covering the site with dead and injured.” Abruptly the shooting stopped. A party of high-ranking Lithuanian army officers had arrived. Their representatives ordered Jewish men who had served in the Lithuanian army to assemble at the gate. The veterans, Mishell’s informant among them, were taken to the Kaunas central prison to have their army records checked and to be set free. On 6 July 1941, the men left behind at the Seventh Fort, including Mishell’s father, were murdered. About fifteen hundred people died at the Seventh Fort during the first week of July 1941.

What became of the women and children? The survivor’s wife described their ordeal at the fort:

The women were immediately taken to the underground barracks, where we all lay down on the bare concrete, one on top of the other. For several days we had no food and no water. They would not even let us out. The children were crying and sobbing and were asking their mothers why they were not taking them back home. The weaker women fainted from the thirst and the horrible air. But the nights were even worse than the days. Partisans with flashlights would come in and rob the women of their jewelry. Then others would come and beat up the women because they had nothing to give them any more. A favorite sort of entertainment was to order the women to take off their clothes and dance. When they got sufficiently excited they picked up the more beautiful ones and took them out by force and raped them.

Some of the women the guards raped they then murdered. But the SS was not yet ready to risk the mass killing of women and children. For the time being, dependents who survived their ordeal at the fort were released and returned to Kaunas.

“It was thought a good idea,” Stahlecker wrote, summarizing these early Kaunas pogroms a few months later, “for the security police [that is, the SS] not to be seen to be involved, at least not immediately, in these unusually tough measures, which were also bound to attract attention in German circles. The impression had to be created that the local population itself had taken the first steps of its own accord as a natural reaction to decades of oppression by the Jews and the more recent terror exerted by the Communists.” Stahlecker’s explanation parrots Heydrich’s instructions to the Einsatzgruppen commanders before they departed Pretzsch, repeated on 29 June 1941 in a telegram:

The attempts at self-cleansing on the part of anti-Communist or antiSemitic elements in the areas to be occupied are not to be hindered. On the contrary, they are to be encouraged, but without leaving traces, so that these local “vigilantes” cannot say later that they were given orders or [offered] political concessions. . . . For obvious reasons, such actions are only possible during the initial period of military occupation.

By his own admission, Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe organized the early Lithuanian pogroms. Why were locals in the western territories of the Soviet Union willing to do the SS’s dirty work? Personal aggrandizement and enrichment, long-standing anti-Semitism, private scores to settle, jealousy and currying favor for national independence (a forlorn hope) were primary reasons, but “the more recent terror exerted by the Communists” was also a significant factor, especially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, where the SS’s pogrom efforts were most successful.

“When Lithuanian and Latvian forces were attached to the execution units,” Stahlecker wrote of the areas under his authority, “the first to be chosen were those who had had members of their families and relatives killed or deported by the Russians.” The deportations in particular had poisoned Jewish-Gentile relations in Lithuania. Jews were significantly underrepresented in the Lithuanian NKVD, not surprising given Russian anti-Semitism and Communist Party hostility to religion: of 279 Lithuanian NKVD senior officers, 148 were Russians and 111 were ethnic Lithuanians; the remaining 20 included Jews as well as other nationalities. One week before Barbarossa, on the night of 14 July, the NKVD had seized and deported to the Russian gulag some 35,000 Lithuanian citizens. Slightly more than half of the deportees were ethnic Lithuanians, the other half Jews and Poles, but the Lithuanian nationalists had blamed the deportations on the “Bolshevik” Jews. On the night before Barbarossa, William Mishell and his friend Nahum Shoham had stayed up late discussing the impact of these deportations on the Kaunas Jewish community: “Our conversation inevitably turned to the deportations. It worried us, because these deportations had suddenly created enormous strains on the Lithuanian society and increased very perceptibly the anti-Semitic feelings.”