Kaunas pogrom

Massacre

Starting on 25 June, Lithuanian militia units organized by the Germans attacked Jewish civilians in Slobodka (Vilijampolė), 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 (volume of the Talmud) and [they] 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. (See Jaeger Report).

Responsibility

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.

Identification of the "Death Dealer"

Photographer Stanislovas Žvirgždas controversially suggested that many pictures from the Kaunas pogrom were falsified by gluing multiple pictures into collages, citing alleged discrepancies in the pictures. Additionally, he speculated that the "Death Dealer of Kovno" was German SS officer Joachim Hamann. Hamann was commanding officer of Rollkommando Hamann, a mobile killing unit attached to Einsatzkommando 3 that was active in the territory during the pogrom. Historian Arvydas Anušauskas, rebutted this speculation, identifying the Death Dealer as a man named Juozas Surmas. In addition to the photos and the testimony of the photographer, Wilhelmas Gunsilius, there are witness testimonies attesting that the Death Dealer was Lithuanian. Specifically, Gunsilius saw the man play the Lithuanian national anthem on the accordion while standing among the corpses. Another witness recalled a "Lithuanian blonde man, with rolled up sleeves and armed with a crowbar" beating Jews to death. Another told Gunsilius that the man's parents were executed by the NKVD two days earlier because they were nationalists. German colonel Von Bisschoffshausen observed a blonde man executing Jews with a "long iron bar as thick as a human arm," with the crowd around him cheering during the executions. Juozas Surmas was later identified as a member of the Lithuanian TDA Battalion, and confessed to murdering Jews in Kaunas.