The Ablinga massacre

On 23 June 1941, the second day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Wehrmacht soldiers shot 42 people from the Lithuanian village of Ablinga and the neighbouring hamlet of Žvaginiai at three separate sites, and set fire to the buildings of Ablinga. The dead were 28 men and 14 women. Ablinga, a small village in western Samogitia, a few kilometres from the small town of Endriejavas (Polish: Andrzejewo) and some tens of kilometres east of Klaipėda, lay in the path of the German infantry advance in the first hours of the war. Its fate foreshadowed the way the Germans intended to wage war in the East: holding a whole village collectively responsible for shots fired nearby was, for them, not an exception but a method laid down in orders.

A village on the border

From the spring of 1939 the area around Ablinga lay right on the border with the Reich. In March of that year Lithuania, under pressure from Berlin, ceded the Klaipėda Region (Memelland) to Germany, and the new frontier ran close to the village. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied Lithuania and the country was incorporated into the USSR. The Soviets began to fortify the border with Germany. According to Lithuanian sources, the Soviet 295th Construction Battalion, whose men worked on the fortifications, was quartered in Ablinga. A week before the outbreak of war the NKVD carried out mass deportations from Lithuania into the depths of the USSR, which alienated the population from Soviet rule still further.

On the morning of 22 June 1941 the troops of Army Group North struck across the border, opening the war against the USSR on this sector. Along the coastal strip, Generalleutnant Kurt Herzog’s 291st Infantry Division of the 18th Army attacked from the Klaipėda area. Its regiments quickly took Palanga, Kretinga and Gargždai, pushing back units of the Soviet 8th Army, and drove north towards Liepāja in Latvia. Ablinga lay in the sector of the division’s 505th Infantry Regiment. At the same time, in Kaunas and other towns, Lithuanians rose in revolt against Soviet rule, hoping to restore an independent state.

23 June

The course of events is known chiefly from the accounts of survivors, collected years later by Lithuanian local historians. According to them, the Soviet commission that investigated the occupiers’ crimes in Lithuania after the war did not compile detailed documentation of the case, so some of the circumstances remain unclear. On their findings, Soviet soldiers who had stayed behind near the village during the retreat fired on a German bicycle unit, killing or wounding several of its men. The Germans concluded that the villagers had been helping the Soviets. They found weapons in some of the houses, and their reconnaissance reported that some of the villagers had been in contact with Red Army men and had given them assistance.

On 23 June soldiers surrounded Ablinga. The men were rounded up and locked in a building previously used by Soviet soldiers; women who refused to be parted from them were detained with them. They were shot at three sites. Forty-two people died: 33 inhabitants of Ablinga, among them 20 men and 13 women, six men from the neighbouring village of Žvaginiai, and two men and a woman who had come from elsewhere. The Germans then set the village on fire. About twenty of Ablinga’s inhabitants survived. Local memory preserved a detail that was later reflected in the memorial: a wedding was being prepared in the village for that very day.

Officers of the Gestapo and the SD from Tilsit, discussed below, also began operating in the border zone in those same days. The Lithuanian general encyclopaedia (Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija) and the regional museum in Gargždai, however, attribute the crime at Ablinga to Wehrmacht soldiers of the 291st Infantry Division, not to the Gestapo or to SS task forces. The general description of the perpetrators as “German soldiers”, found in chronologies of the war, is therefore consistent with these findings. The full motives of the commanders who gave the order remain unclear.

Licence for reprisal

Small as it was, the crime at Ablinga was neither an accident nor an act of indiscipline. Before the invasion of the USSR, the Wehrmacht high command had prepared orders that exempted soldiers in advance from responsibility for violence against civilians. The decree on military jurisdiction in the “Barbarossa” area, signed on 13 May 1941 by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, removed cases involving civilians from the competence of military courts: “partisans” suspected of attacking soldiers were to be killed on the spot, and against localities from which the Wehrmacht had been attacked, any officer from battalion commander upwards could order collective coercive measures. Prosecuting soldiers for crimes against civilians was not compulsory. Alongside it stood the Commissar Order, which required captured Red Army political commissars to be killed. Shots fired by scattered Red Army men and weapons found in a few farmsteads were enough, under these rules, to punish an entire village.

Remembrance

In Soviet times a monument bearing the names of the victims was erected on a hill at Žvaginiai, but the crime owes its special place in Lithuanian memory to an ensemble of sculptures created in 1972. On the initiative of local people, among them the folk sculptor Vytautas Majoras, a woodcarving workshop was organised at Ablinga. On the western slope of the nearby hill fort at Žvaginiai, 30 oak sculptures between five and eight metres high were set up, made by 25 woodcarvers and blacksmiths, mostly from Samogitia. They take the form of posts carved in relief with figures, scenes and symbols, echoing traditional Lithuanian crosses and wayside shrines. The sculptures commemorate individual victims; one of them depicts a matchmaker – a reference to the wedding that was to have taken place on the day of the crime – and the ensemble closes with a composition called “New Ablinga”. The names of all 42 dead are inscribed on the memorial.

It was the first monumental memorial in Lithuania created jointly by folk artists, and an example of the revival of traditional wood sculpture that inspired similar ensembles elsewhere. From 1984 to 1993 a museum devoted to the tragedy operated in Ablinga; after it closed, part of its collection went to the museum in Gargždai and to the Vytautas the Great War Museum in Kaunas. The village itself never regained its former size. In 1923 it had 87 inhabitants; the 2011 census recorded seven.

Its place in the war

Ablinga was one of the first places in Lithuania where the Germans massacred civilians, but it was not the first victim of what was happening behind the front line. A day later, on 24 June, in Gargždai, close to the former Klaipėda border, Gestapo and SD officers from Tilsit, together with policemen from Klaipėda, shot more than 200 people, most of them Jewish men. This execution, carried out by the ad hoc Einsatzkommando Tilsit with the approval of the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Stahlecker, is regarded as the first mass execution in the campaign of murder that the SS task forces began in the occupied territories of the USSR. By the end of September 1941 Einsatzkommando Tilsit alone had killed more than 5,500 people in the border zone, mostly Jews, according to Stahlecker’s report.

The Wehrmacht’s crimes in the villages and the security police’s crimes against the Jews had different perpetrators and different aims, but they grew from the same licence granted by the orders issued before the war. Collective punishment for attacks on soldiers became the rule in the occupied East. Hundreds of villages in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia fell victim to it, and in June 1944 the Germans burned the Lithuanian village of Pirčiupiai, south of Wilno (Vilnius), together with its inhabitants. Although it had fewer victims than many later crimes, Ablinga remained a symbol in Lithuania of those first days of the war, when for the people of the borderland one occupation gave way to another.