Authors: Prit Buttar
Tags: #Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II
Between Giants (20 page)
Jäger arrived in Kaunas with his unit after the initial wave of killings of Jews by Klimatis and his men. The first section of
Einsatzgruppe A
to arrive in Kaunas was
Einsatzkommando 1
, which now handed over the area to Jäger’s men. Jäger later noted that Jews were still moving about freely in the city – perhaps in keeping with Roques’ instructions that the establishment of ghettos had a low priority – and he swiftly took measures to establish a ghetto and to restrict their movements and activities. The early killings were used as a justification for the establishment of the ghetto – only in this way, Jäger stated, could Jews be protected from further pogroms. This was a well-practised argument, and had been used during the 1930s in Germany itself.
The pretence of protecting Jews in the ghetto lasted barely a day. Two days after his arrival in the city, Jäger recorded that 463 Jews had been killed ‘by Lithuanian partisans’, a number that rose to over 2,500 within the next two days.
19
By December 1941, about 22,000 Jews had been executed, leaving about 15,000 Jews in the ghetto; the list of victims is chronicled in a report that Jäger wrote at the end of the year, listing with painstaking detail the locations, dates, and nature of the victims, dividing them into men, women and children.
20
The report also lists the killings in Vilnius and Minsk, and if these are added to those killed in Kaunas, the number exceeds 133,000. The report concludes with the words: ‘Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.’
21
These chilling sentences mean that between 22 June and 1 December, over 120,000 Lithuanian Jews had been killed. Jäger participated in some of the shootings himself, and ensured that all of his officers did so too. Those who showed reticence were threatened.
22
Jäger himself appears to have been affected by these experiences. He told Heinz Jost, who succeeded Stahlecker as Jäger’s superior, that he couldn’t sleep, and was haunted by visions of dead women and children.
23
None of these feelings seems to have interfered with his ability to continue with the killings. He remained in Lithuania for two years before being assigned a variety of administrative roles in Germany.
Outside the large cities of Lithuania, special measures were taken to facilitate the killing of Jews. One example was the
Rollkommando Hammann
, a mobile killing squad of less than a dozen German officers and about a hundred Lithuanians, mainly members of Bronius Norkus’
Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos
(‘National Security’) battalion. During the latter half of 1941, the
Kommando
was active in over 50 locations, in both Lithuania and southern Latvia, accounting for the deaths of over 9,000 Jews. The Jäger report describes in detail the preparations required for this unit to function:
The implementation of such actions is primarily a question of organisation. The objective of systematically rendering every district free of Jews required thorough preparation of every individual task and investigation of the prevailing circumstances in the relevant district. Jews had to be assembled at one or more locations. On the basis of their number, locations for the required graves had to be identified and dug.
24
In Vilnius, the German authorities rapidly introduced a series of measures for Jews to wear identifying symbols, such as six-pointed stars and armbands. These were changed frequently in the early stages of the occupation, causing panic amongst the Jews as they struggled to find material of the appropriate colour. Jews began to be moved to designated buildings in mid-July as the first phase of the creation of a ghetto; the formal establishment of the ghetto occurred in September. 403rd Security Division and
Einsatzkommando 9
both reported that they were working smoothly together, with the division stating that in August and September 1941 it executed 45 military commissars and 197 civilian communist officials; many of this latter group were Jews.
25
The
Einsatzkommando
, which arrived on 2 July, executed 321 Jews between 4 and 8 July, and later achieved figures of 500 killings per day. By 19 July, it had accounted for over 7,600 individuals.
26
Wolfgang Ditfurth, commander of 403rd Security Division, reported in mid-July that he had reduced rations to the Jewish part of the population by 50 per cent. He was aware of the shootings carried out by the
Einsatzkommando
and its Lithuanian auxiliaries, but requested that these were carried out in locations out of sight of his men.
27
The experiences of the child Mascha Rolnikaite and her family in Vilnius are in many ways typical of Jews caught up in the German takeover. She was nearly 14 years old when the Germans arrived in Vilnius. She was the daughter of a Jewish couple; her father was a lawyer, who worked for the Soviet authorities. As the Red Army began to leave the city, he left his family to organise transport for them to leave. The family waited in vain for him to return, and watched the first German troops arrive. The following day, they learned that the new authorities had ordered shops and restaurants to reopen, but restaurants and cafes had to display a sign stating that entry of Jews was forbidden. When Rolnikaite attempted to return to school to collect documents that her mother thought would be important, she was shocked when a Lithuanian boy confronted her:
‘What do
you
want here? Go, back the way you came!’
I asked him to let me past. But he snatched my cap from my head.
‘Get away! And stop plaguing our school!’
28
She feared the reaction of her teacher, but to her relief, he helped her recover her documents, and even accompanied her on her way home.
Perella Esterowicz was slightly younger than Mascha Rolnikaite, the only child of the local representative of the Hungarian firm Tungsram, as well as western battery and tyre manufacturers. Growing up in Vilnius in the 1930s, when the city was under Polish control, she remembered seeing anti-Semitic graffiti even as a small child. After the city was assigned to Lithuania by the Soviet Union, her father lost contact with his foreign suppliers, but established a new business. The communist authorities nationalised this the following year after the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, and as a ‘bourgeois’ family, the Esterowiczes had to give up a large part of their luxurious apartment. Despite being unemployed, her father managed to avoid deportation to Siberia, though her aunt and uncle only escaped by fleeing their house when the NKVD came to arrest them. Tragically, their escape indirectly led to their deaths; the Germans shot her uncle within a few weeks of their arrival, and her aunt died in the ghetto in 1943.
As German troops approached Vilnius, the communist official who had taken possession of the bulk of the Esterowicz apartment fled to the east. Perella’s father was arrested on suspicion of signalling to Soviet aircraft by leaving his apartment light burning at night, and suddenly found himself facing a hostile group of German officials. When they realised he could speak excellent German, and that he had been a customer in a coffee house in Berlin where one of the Germans had worked, he was released. A Polish garage-owner, who had been Esterowicz’s customer before the war, provided him with a document showing that he worked in the Polish garage which was now helping repair Wehrmacht vehicles, thus protecting him from further arrest.
29
News spread by word of mouth through the Jewish community of attacks and pogroms. Soon, the Rolnikaite house was searched for radios and other forbidden items. There were repeated searches, and all items in the house were recorded in an inventory – except the best furniture, which was immediately removed. Jewish families were warned that if they attempted to sell any of their furniture, they would face severe punishment, even death. They were required to hand over all jewellery and cash in excess of 30 Reichsmarks. Later, there was a demand that all Jews pay an additional large sum of cash or face immediate arrest. This was almost impossible for many, who had already been robbed or had handed over their valuables; to the relief of the Rolnikaite family, Mascha’s schoolteacher, Hendrikas Jonaitis, appeared at their house and gave her mother the required cash. Like a substantial minority of Lithuanians, he was prepared to risk his own life to help protect others.
30
Restrictions continued to increase in both number and severity. Shortly after Rolnikaite’s 14th birthday, a month after the invasion had begun, Jews were forbidden from walking on pavements. The day before the Vilnius ghetto was established, Rolnikaite ventured out on the streets in search of Jonaitis, her schoolteacher, without the obligatory insignia of a Jew. He looked after her overnight, but the following day, when she attempted to return to her family, she found that the ghetto had been established, with barbed wire across the streets. There were actually two ghettos, a small one and a large one, separated by a single road. Rolnikaite entered one of the ghettos, and when she couldn’t find her family, succeeded in crossing to the other; she was fortunate that she recognised one of the guards as the schoolboy who had attempted to turn her away from her school, and managed to persuade him to let her pass. It was several days before the family was reunited in the crowded ghetto.
31
Ghetto life was difficult in the extreme. Mascha Rolnikaite, her mother, and her three siblings had to sleep in a room with several others, squeezed into a space between two beds; there were barely enough beds for the elderly and children. The Esterowicz family was lucky, in that they had been driven from their apartment when the ghetto was first established, and being amongst the first arrivals, were able to secure a room for themselves and their extended family. As more and more people were crammed into the ghetto, the family was forced to allow others to join them, and their room, measuring 6ft by 24ft became home to 26.
32
Most of the day-to-day running of the ghetto was in the hands of the
Judenrat
(Jewish council) and the ghetto police, which was headed by Jacob Gens, a former officer of the Lithuanian army. Both the ghetto police and the
Judenrat
were answerable to Standartenführer Franz Murer, who had been appointed Vilnius Commissar for Jewish Matters. Soon, those who had work were moved to one ghetto, while those without work were herded together into the smaller ghetto. There were repeated ‘actions’, a euphemism for the forcible round-up of a variable number of Jews, who were then taken away and executed. Various categories were selected – the infirm, the elderly, those without work. On other occasions, people were simply herded together regardless of their status. There was a pretence by the authorities that the infirm and elderly were being taken elsewhere so that they could receive better care, but those left behind had little doubt that they would never see their loved ones again. Rolnikaite described a typical ‘action’:
Once more an action. Not a big one, but an action nevertheless.
During the night, a taciturn troop of Lithuanian soldiers quietly slipped into the ghetto. They had instructed the ghetto police to remain at their posts while they themselves sought out predetermined addresses that each had been assigned.
They woke people quietly and politely and ordered them to take warm clothing with them, and waited as they dressed and packed their things.
The people only realised their situation when they reached the ghetto gate where they were to be loaded into trucks …
It turned out that Murer had ordered new victims from Gens. Gens therefore prepared a list of members of the so-called underworld – people who he saw as misfits or who had annoyed the ghetto police – and gave their addresses to the executioners.
33
Samuel Esterowicz, Perella’s father, working for his Polish acquaintance in the vehicle repair workshop, witnessed a body of ghetto inhabitants being marched away for execution:
In front of the windows of our workshop the Lithuanian police were driving down the street to the Lukiškės Prison a multitude of Jews from the second [small] ghetto – men, women and children. In the passing crowd I recognised some of my acquaintances. The scene of these innocent people, my fellow Jews, being driven to their deaths shocked me to the depth of my soul – this became even more poignant when I realised that the Polish workers in the workshop looked at this horrible injustice not with sorrow but with yells of joy and satisfaction. ‘Look,’ they were jumping with joy, ‘the Jews are taken to be killed.’
The exhibition of anti-Semitism was no great surprise for me. But what horrified me while I watched the delighted Polish workers was the depth of their hatred for us – it united all the surrounding nationalities and members of social classes. The Polish partisans, members of the AK [‘Armia Krajowa’, the Polish resistance army supported by the Western Powers] acted in accordance with this mood of the surrounding population. Though organized for the underground struggle against the Germans, mostly the AK was hunting the Jews who were hiding in the forest. Since they consisted mostly of local people, the Polish partisans were excellently oriented in the localities in which they operated and thus represented a greater peril for the Jews who tried to find refuge in the dense forest than did the Germans who did not dare to penetrate deep into the forest. The Lithuanians were exceptionally active in the matter of our annihilation.
34
The implication that the AK was involved in killing Jews is a controversial one. The resistance army fought against all it regarded as occupiers of Poland, including on occasion pro-Soviet partisans. Given that many of the pro-Soviet partisans were Jewish, it is likely that some Jews were killed by the AK, though it is equally likely that this was a result of activity that was not anti-Semitic
per se
. Esterowicz commented that anti-Semitism, while widespread amongst the local population, was by no means universal, and many locals quietly helped the Jews by providing food whenever they could. Nor were all Germans anti-Semitic: