The Baltic states under German occupation: from the June Uprising through the Holocaust to the retreat of 1944

The June Uprising and the Summer War (June–August 1941)

Before dawn on 22 June 1941 the German Army Groups North and Centre drove into Soviet Lithuania. The deportation of some 17,000 people to Siberia only a week earlier was the single most important event that rallied support for an uprising and goodwill towards the invaders. The Lithuanian Activist Front, founded in Berlin by Kazys Škirpa in the autumn of 1940, launched the revolt it had been preparing, and on the morning of 23 June Leonas Prapuolenis read the declaration of independence and the list of the provisional government over Kaunas radio. The insurgents took Kaunas and Vilnius before the Wehrmacht arrived, and within a week the Red Army was gone from the whole country. After 1990 historians revised the émigré figures of 90,000 or more participants down to 16,000–20,000, with some 600 dead. The retreating NKVD massacred prisoners at Rainiai, Pravieniškės and elsewhere. 1 2

With Škirpa under house arrest in Berlin, Juozas Ambrazevičius became acting prime minister of a government that issued over 100 laws in six weeks, among them decrees returning nationalised land and enterprises. The Germans did not recognise it but did not dissolve it by force either; after setting up their civil administration on 17 July they stripped its powers step by step, for instance by barring its decrees from the newspapers and the radio. Refusing to become a puppet, the government signed a protest against the Germans’ usurpation of its powers and disbanded itself on 5 August; the Activist Front was banned in September. The government has been criticised for antisemitic decrees such as the Regulations on the Status of Jews of 1 August, and its National Labour Defence Battalion (TDA) was soon employed by German commandos to shoot Jews at the forts of Kaunas. 1 3 2

The occupation of Latvia was complete on 10 July. In Estonia, the last to be reached, Soviet destruction battalions burned villages and killed civilians after Joseph Stalin’s call of 3 July for scorched earth, and Forest Brothers who had taken to the woods fought them; their strength is given as anywhere from about 12,000 to 50,000. The Omakaitse (Home Guard), first organised at Kilingi-Nõmme on 3 July, drove the Soviets out of Tartu after two weeks of fighting under Major Friedrich Kurg, and Estonian and German forces took Narva on 17 August and Tallinn on 28 August. Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister, asked the Germans on 29 July to let him form an independent government and was refused, and he declined their offer to head a self-administration. The Germans disarmed the partisan groups and replaced the Estonian flag with the German one. 4 5 6 7 8

Reichskommissariat Ostland and the self-administrations

A decree of Hitler’s on 17 July 1941 made Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German born in Reval (Tallinn), minister for the occupied eastern territories, and under him Reichskommissariat Ostland was formed from the Baltic states and western Belarus. Hinrich Lohse, appointed Reichskommissar on 25 July, kept his post as Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein and shuttled between Riga and Kiel. The Reichskommissariat was divided into four general districts: Estonia under Generalkommissar Karl-Siegmund Litzmann, Latvia under Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, Lithuania under Theodor Adrian von Renteln and White Ruthenia under Wilhelm Kube. But the Wehrmacht and the SS controlled military and security matters and other central agencies controlled labour and the economy, and the SS seized police powers in the vacuum before the civil administration arrived. 9 10 11

Under the Nazi Generalplan Ost the Baltic lands were to become a Germanised protectorate and then part of Germany. In April 1941 Rosenberg envisaged the Germanisation of “racially suitable” elements, colonisation by Germanic settlers and the removal of undesirables, and he considered the Estonians “the most Germanic” of the Baltic peoples, already 50 per cent Germanised. The plan called for the “removal” of half of the Estonians and Latvians, and there were proposals to call Estonia “Peipusland” and Latvia “Dünaland”. Lohse confiscated Soviet state and party property on 15 November 1941; the administration returned nationalised farmland and small businesses to their former owners but confiscated Jewish property. 5 9 4

The Germans set up native self-administrations. In Estonia Hjalmar Mäe, who had been imprisoned in the 1930s for his part in the fascist-leaning Vaps movement and had gone to Germany, returned with the German army to head the Estonian Self-Administration; in Latvia the half-German General Oskars Dankers and in Lithuania the First General Adviser Petras Kubiliūnas played similar roles. The Estonian International Commission found that the Estonian directorate exercised a significant measure of autonomy within the framework of German policy. Lithuania’s General Advisers were largely a rubber stamp that the Germans used as scapegoats for unpopular decisions, and four who protested against German policies were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. Even so, Lithuanian local officials helped obstruct the raising of a Waffen-SS division and the forced-labour quotas for Germany. 5 9 12 2 13 14 15

“Self-cleansing”: the killings begin (June–July 1941)

Of the Einsatzgruppen of the SS Security Police and SD, Einsatzgruppe A under Walter Stahlecker followed Army Group North into the Baltic states. Its first massacre, at the border town of Gargždai on 22 June, killed some 200 Jews. Stahlecker came to Kaunas on 25 June and made antisemitic speeches, and when local Lithuanians proved unenthusiastic he had the unit of Algirdas Klimaitis start a pogrom. In the Kaunas pogrom of 25–29 June, several dozen Jewish men were beaten to death with a metal bar before a crowd at the Lietūkis garage on the 27th. Figures range from Stahlecker’s report of 3,800 dead in Kaunas and 1,200 in nearby towns to 1,500–3,800 in other sources, and Stahlecker is suspected of exaggerating. In his report of 15 October he wrote that it had been made to look as though “the liberated populations themselves” took the most severe measures against their Communist and Jewish enemies, so that German direction could not be found out. 16 17 18 19

In Latvia the first killings took place in the Grobiņa cemetery on the night of 23–24 June. On 1 July the former policeman Viktors Arājs met Stahlecker and assembled a unit from student fraternities and the far-right Pērkonkrusts — the Arajs Kommando — which Stahlecker told to unleash a pogrom that looked spontaneous. On 4 July Riga’s synagogues were set on fire with Jews trapped inside; the date is now Latvia’s Holocaust Memorial Day. In July some 4,000 Jews were murdered in the Biķernieki forest outside Riga, and the Jews of Liepāja, Daugavpils and Rēzekne died at the hands of the German SD and Latvian Selbstschutz and auxiliary police. The Nazis tried to make the local population appear responsible, but Stahlecker himself acknowledged that the incitement to “self-cleansing actions” had failed in Latvia. 20 21 22

In Estonia Martin Sandberger’s Sonderkommando 1a, helped by the Omakaitse and local police, began rounding up and killing Jews, Roma and alleged Communists in July. Most of Estonia’s roughly 4,500 Jews of 1939 had left during Soviet rule and the first weeks of the war, and the 950–1,000 who remained (921 by Sandberger’s count, 963 by Stahlecker’s) were almost all killed by the end of 1941; fewer than a dozen Estonian Jews are known to have survived the war in the country. At the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 Estonia was already reported “judenfrei”. Separately, the occupiers killed some 6,000 ethnic Estonians and 1,000 Russians as alleged Communists or Communist sympathisers. 23 5 24 6

The Ninth Fort, Ponary and Rumbula (July–December 1941)

In Lithuania there was no gradual sequence of stripping rights, ghettoisation and deportation to camps, as elsewhere: from the first days of the war Jews were shot in pits near their homes. Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 and Joachim Hamann’s mobile killing squad swept the countryside with Lithuanian police battalions, and by the end of August most rural Jews had been shot. At the Ninth Fort outside Kaunas, where on 28 October more than 9,200 people, nearly 4,300 of them children, were selected in the ghetto square and shot the next morning in the “Great Action”, the dead numbered more than 30,000 according to the memorial on the site and 45,000–50,000 according to other accounts. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, only around 2,500 of the some 30,000 people imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto survived the war. 2 25 26 27 28 29

At Ponary (Paneriai) outside Vilnius the shootings began when Einsatzkommando 9 arrived on 2 July, with most of the killing done by the Ypatingasis būrys, a squad of Lithuanian volunteers; six large pits dug by the Soviets for oil tanks became the graves. Estimates of the Jews killed at Ponary by the end of 1941 diverge widely, from 21,700 (Timothy Snyder) to 33,500 (Yitzhak Arad) and about 40,000 (US Holocaust Memorial Museum). By 1944 the victims of Ponary numbered an estimated 70,000–100,000, about 70,000 of them Jews and the rest mainly Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. From 1943 the Nazis tried to erase the evidence by exhuming and burning the bodies. 30 31 32

In Riga some 30,000 Jews were shut into a ghetto at the end of October. Lohse wanted to seize Jewish property, confine the Jews to ghettos and use them as labour; Stahlecker protested and demanded that the extermination continue, and on 15 November Lohse asked Rosenberg whether all Jews were to be killed regardless of economic considerations. To make room for German and Austrian Jews to be deported to Riga, Heinrich Himmler brought in Friedrich Jeckeln, who had directed massacres in Ukraine: “Tell Lohse it is my order, which is also the Führer’s wish.” On 30 November and 8 December some 24,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto and about 1,000 Jews just transported from Berlin — some 25,000 people in all — were shot in the Rumbula forest south of Riga. Himmler’s telephone order not to kill the Berlin transport came after they were already dead. The shooting was done by Jeckeln’s German men, and the Arajs Kommando drove the columns to the pits. 20 22 33 21

On 1 December 1941 Jäger wrote a nine-page report tallying 137,346 people executed in his unit’s zone since 2 July; in February 1942 he updated the total for Stahlecker to 138,272, including 136,421 Jews. The report concluded that Lithuania was free of Jews apart from some 34,500 in the Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettos, though it left out killings by other units. Stahlecker reported that by the winter of 1941 Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Einsatzgruppen organised and helped carry out the shooting of more than half a million people, the vast majority of them Jews, in the first nine months of the war against the Soviet Union. 29 18 19

Ghettos, camps and resistance (1941–1944)

The 40,000–43,000 or so Jews left alive in Lithuania at the end of 1941 were confined in the Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai and Švenčionys ghettos and labour camps and worked for the German war economy. The Kaunas ghetto crammed some 29,000 people into the run-down houses of Vilijampolė, and its Jewish council under the physician Elkhanan Elkes sent labourers to build a military airfield, hoping productivity would forestall killing. Jacob Gens, the head of the Vilnius ghetto, opened a theatre that had given 111 performances and sold 34,804 tickets by January 1943. In Riga the 4,000–5,000 Jews who survived Rumbula were held in a “small ghetto”, and some 20,000 Jews deported from Germany, Austria and Bohemia filled the rest. From 1942 to the spring of 1943 the mass killings paused in a period of “ghetto stabilisation”. 25 2 28 27 34 33

On 21 June 1943 Himmler ordered all remaining ghettos in the east liquidated. The Vilnius ghetto was destroyed on 23–24 September: its inhabitants were sent to labour camps in Estonia or shot at Ponary, and the old and sick were sent to a killing centre (Treblinka according to English Wikipedia, Sobibor according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum). The Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettos became concentration camps. Kaiserwald, opened on the edge of Riga in March 1943, held up to 12,000 prisoners, and from August 1943 a complex of 22 camps centred on Vaivara put some 20,000 Jews to work in Estonia’s oil-shale industry. In September 1942 some 1,700 Jews from Czechoslovakia and Berlin were shot on arrival in the sand dunes of Kalevi-Liiva. At Salaspils near Riga an estimated 2,000–3,000 people died of the appalling conditions. 34 32 2 35 36 23 37

In the Vilnius ghetto, Communists and left- and right-wing Zionists founded the United Partisan Organisation (FPO) on 21 January 1942 under Abba Kovner’s watchword “We will not go like sheep to the slaughter”. In 1943 its commander Yitzhak Wittenberg was handed over to the Gestapo, and when the ghetto was liquidated the fighters slipped out to the forests to join the partisans rather than revolt. Some 500 Jews also escaped from the Kaunas ghetto to the Jewish and Soviet partisans in the forests of the south-east. Prisoners forced to burn the bodies broke out too: 64 escaped from the Ninth Fort on the eve of 1944, and on 19 April 1944 80 escaped from Ponary through a tunnel dug with spoons; the testimony of the 11 who survived helped reveal the massacre. 38 34 32 28 26 30

Collaboration and rescue

Large-scale local participation is a defining feature of the Holocaust in the Baltic states. In Lithuania ten of the 26 police battalions, with 12,000–13,000 men in all, are thought to have executed some 78,000 people together with German commandos, and the Lithuanian Security Police, subordinate to the German Security Police, and the Ypatingasis būrys helped arrest and shoot victims. In Latvia the Arajs Kommando, 300–500 strong during the killings and up to 1,500 at its peak, murdered some 26,000 Jews. Of Estonia’s roughly 40,000 Omakaitse members, 1,000–1,200 were directly involved in rounding up, guarding or killing Jews and Roma, and Estonian police battalions took part in killings in Riga, Vilnius and Belarus. Historians cite propaganda that equated Jews with communism and blamed them for Soviet rule, older antisemitism and greed for property, but the reasons for the collaboration are still debated. 2 16 21 7 23

The number of victims can only be given as ranges. Of the roughly 208,000–210,000 Jews in Lithuania at the German invasion, 190,000–195,000 were killed — more than 95 per cent — and historians’ estimates range from 165,000 to 254,000. In Latvia about 70,000 of some 93,000 prewar Jews were murdered (73,000–74,000 according to Arad), and the German occupation killed some 90,000 people in Latvia in all, among them about 2,000 Roma. In Estonia, besides the 950–1,000 Jews who had remained, some 10,000 Jews deported there from elsewhere were killed. Across Ostland the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions and local auxiliaries killed over a million Jews and others. 16 20 4 23 9

Some risked their lives to hide Jews. By 2017 Israel had recognised 891 Lithuanians as Righteous Among the Nations, and many members of Lithuania’s Polish minority also helped. Žanis Lipke, a docker in the port of Riga, took on contract work for the Luftwaffe and used it to smuggle Jewish workers out of the ghetto and camps, hiding them with his wife Johanna in places such as a bunker dug in their yard; the number he saved is given as 40 to about 55. In Vilnius the Wehrmacht major Karl Plagge shielded the Jewish workers of his vehicle repair camp. Separately, the Japanese vice-consul in Kaunas, Chiune Sugihara, helped some 6,000 Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas. Three Estonians, among them Uku Masing and his wife, have been recognised as Righteous. 16 39 40 4 34 5

Legions, boycott and partisans (1942–1944)

Short of troops, Germany drew the Balts into the Waffen-SS. The formation of an “Estonian Legion” was announced on 28 August 1942, and the forced mobilisation of March 1943 put 5,300 men into the Legion and 6,800 into Wehrmacht support units; thousands fled to Finland to avoid the draft and formed the Finnish Army’s Infantry Regiment 200. In Latvia the Latvian Legion was created in February 1943 on Hitler’s orders at Himmler’s request. Conscription, starting with men born in 1919–1924, was steadily widened; by July 1944 the Legion had 87,550 men, only about 15 per cent of whom had volunteered. Many legionnaires wanted an independent Latvia and saw German rule as the lesser of two evils. 41 5 42

Lithuanians boycotted the Waffen-SS mobilisation of 1943; fewer than 300 men reported. In reprisal the Germans deported 46 prominent intellectuals to Stutthof and in March closed all Lithuanian universities. In February 1944 the Lithuanian Territorial Defence Force was formed under General Povilas Plechavičius, which its organisers saw as a national force that would operate only in Lithuania, but in May, when the Germans tried to take direct command and send its men abroad, the general ordered his units to disperse. The Germans arrested its leaders, executed 86 of its men at Paneriai and deported 1,089 to concentration camps. In Estonia Uluots appealed by radio on 7 February 1944 for men born in 1904–1923 to answer the call-up, and 38,000 jammed the registration centres; he hoped that holding off a Soviet reoccupation would win Western support for independence. 15 2 5 8

Soviet partisans operated mainly in Latgale in eastern Latvia and in the Vilnius region. In November 1942 a Lithuanian partisan headquarters was set up in Moscow under Antanas Sniečkus, first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, and from 1943 the Latvian partisans were directly subordinated to the Moscow headquarters under Arturs Sproģis. In Estonia there were only 234 partisans even in 1944, all NKVD or Red Army personnel parachuted in. Germany’s Operation Winterzauber in early 1943 destroyed 99 villages in the eastern Latvian borderland, deported 6,000 villagers for forced labour and shot 3,600, with the Arajs Kommando in a leading role. In south-eastern Lithuania Soviet partisans clashed with the Polish Home Army, and reprisals between German-sponsored Lithuanian units and the Home Army ended in the massacres of civilians at Glitiškės and Dubingiai in June 1944. 43 2 4 21

From Narva to Courland: the retreat of 1944

After the siege of Leningrad was lifted in January 1944, Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front reached the Narva River on the Estonian border in February. The German Army Detachment “Narwa”, under Army Group North’s commander Walter Model, held the bridgehead for half a year with foreign volunteers and Estonian conscripts, then gave up Narva on 26 July and fell back 16 km west to the Tannenberg Line in the Sinimäed Hills. In the battle of 25 July – 10 August 22,250 German troops, roughly half of the infantry from the Estonian division, held off 136,830 Soviet soldiers; the Estonian historian Mart Laar puts Soviet casualties at about 170,000. Stalin’s aim of a quick recovery of Estonia was not achieved. 5 4 44) 45 46

In the south, Operation Bagration, launched on 22 June, shattered Army Group Centre. Soviet forces retook Vilnius after street fighting in July and Kaunas on 1 August, and at the end of July they reached the coast of the Gulf of Riga, briefly cutting off Army Group North. Retreating, the Germans emptied the Kaunas concentration camp in early July, sending its prisoners to Stutthof and Dachau, and dynamited the former ghetto to drive out the Jews in hiding. In the Baltic offensive of 14 September – 24 November, Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front and other fronts advanced, took Riga on 13 October and, reaching the sea near Klaipėda on 9 October, trapped Army Group North on the Courland Peninsula. Reichskommissar Lohse fled Riga without authorisation on 13 August and was removed. 4 25 27 47 48 11

When Finland left the war on 4 September, Germany began abandoning mainland Estonia in Operation Aster. On 18 September Uluots formed a government under Otto Tief as acting prime minister, and Tief proclaimed the restoration of independence on the basis of legal continuity. Estonian troops seized the government buildings on Toompea in Tallinn and raised the Estonian flag on the Pikk Hermann tower on 20 September, but on 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn and replaced it with the Soviet flag. At the Klooga camp some 2,000 remaining prisoners were shot and burned on 19–22 September; only 85 of 2,400 survived. The Germans evacuated their last foothold, the Sõrve Peninsula on Saaremaa, on 23 November. The Germans in Courland held out until the surrender of May 1945. 5 49 50 8 51 48

As the Red Army approached, a mass exodus followed. In what Estonians call the Great Flight, some 80,000 people left Estonia in 1944, of whom 6–9 per cent died on the way; about 40,000 reached Germany by ship or overland and nearly 30,000 crossed the Baltic in small boats to Sweden. The flight peaked on 19–23 September, and on 22 September the hospital ship Moero sank after a torpedo from a Soviet aircraft hit it, killing 1,237 people. Some 150,000 Latvians also went into exile in the West. The memory of the first Soviet occupation drove them out; those who stayed faced reoccupation, the resistance of the Forest Brothers and new deportations. 46 4