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Kaunas pogrom |
The Kaunas pogrom was the massacre of Jewish people living in Kaunas, Lithuania that took place in late June, 1941. Algirdas Klimaitis controlled a paramilitary unit of roughly 600 men that was organized from Tilsit by SD and was not subordinate to Lithuanian Activists Front, a faction operating out of the Lithuanian embassy in Berlin and inside Soviet Lithuania. On the evening of June 23, the LAF insurgents took control of the city 1 and much of the Lithuanian countryside, identifying themselves with white armbands. Nazi SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker arrived in Kaunas on morning of June 25 and held agitation speeches in the city to instigate the murder of Jews, initially in the former State Security Department building, but officials there refused to take any action. Later, he gave speeches in the the city. He succeded to convince Algirdas Klimaitis to start pogrom.2
In the October 15th report, Stahlecker wrote that they had succeeded in covering up their vanguard unit (Vorkommando) actions, and it was made to look like it was the initiative of the local population.3 Starting on June 25, Nazi organized Vorkommando attacked Jewish civilians in the Kaunas suburb of Slobodka (known to Lithuanians as Viljampolė, a Jewish suburb hosting the world-famous Slobodka yeshiva). SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, who arrived in Kaunas on June 25, later reported that he had trouble instigating pogroms against Jews by Lithuanian partisans initially, but succeeded after much effort and under supervision of Einsatzkommandos. Eyewitnesses reportcitation needed earlier killings, that opinion is supported by scholar Dov Levin and otherscitation needed. The exact number of victims pogrom varies by different authors between 600 and 1200.4
As of June 28, 1941, according to SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, 3800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1200 in other towns in the immediate region 1. According to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry and otherwho? eyewitnesses, there were Germans present on the bridge to Slobodka, but it was the Lithuanian volunteers who killed 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." Then they murdered his wife and son. His head was placed in a window of the residence with a sign: "This is what we'll do to all the Jews."5
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