Actions in the Wilno Ghetto in November

On 3 November 1941 the Germans ordered all holders of yellow work permits in the Wilno (Vilnius) Ghetto, together with the family members entered on them, to move into the area of the former small ghetto, empty since the murder of its inhabitants on 21 October. Those without a permit remained in the large ghetto on Rudnicka Street. Once the holders of the Scheine had left, Germans and Lithuanian policemen began searching houses, cellars and hiding places. The people they found were taken to Łukiszki prison and from there to Ponary (Paneriai). The action lasted until 5 November, when the permit holders returned to the large ghetto.

Some lists call this operation the “third yellow-permit action” and give 1,200 dead. The numbering depends on how the October round-ups are counted. Yad Vashem and the chronology of the Association of Jews of Vilna and Vicinity in Israel call it the second yellow-permit action, after the round-up of 24 October; it can be counted as the third if the deportation from the area of the former small ghetto on 29 October is counted separately. The figure of 1,200 comes from Jewish sources: the Association’s chronology gives “about 1,200” murdered on 3–4 November. The German record is somewhat higher. The report of Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, lists under 6 November in Wilno 340 men, 749 women and 252 children, 1,341 killed in all. Some studies, citing the German researcher Willi Dreßen, give as many as about 3,000 victims for these days, but neither the report nor accounts from the ghetto confirm so high a figure.

Sifting the ghetto

The November action completed the October selection. From 24 October only yellow-permit holders and their closest relatives, some 12,000 people in all, had the right to live in the large ghetto. Thousands of others, however, had survived the round-ups in malines, hiding places behind false walls, under floors and in attics. The Germans knew this. Dividing the ghetto into the “legal” and the “illegal” allowed them to search for the latter unhindered: once the permit holders had left, the only people remaining in the large ghetto were those who formally had no right to live.

The move to the small ghetto was controlled, under German supervision, by Jacob Gens and the Jewish policemen, who checked the permits and counted family members. Every child beyond the permitted number and every adult not on a permit was in danger. Accounts from the ghetto show that the policemen at the gate could both throw someone out of the column and smuggle someone into another family. On the German side the ghetto was supervised by Franz Murer, deputy for Jewish affairs to Hans Hingst, the district commissioner of Wilno, while the round-ups were carried out by members of the Security Police and of the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys unit, which conducted the executions at Ponary.

The action proved leaky. When the permit holders returned to the large ghetto on 5 November, nobody checked them any more. With them came people who had been hiding in the ruins of the small ghetto since its liquidation. For them this meant rescue, at least for a few weeks. For the Germans it was further confirmation that thousands of people without the right of residence were still living in the ghetto.

November outside the ghetto gate

The killings around Wilno did not stop after 5 November. Jäger’s report records under 19 November in Wilno another 171 Jews killed (76 men, 77 women and 18 children) together with six Soviet prisoners of war and eight Poles; under 20 November three prisoners of war; and under 25 November nine Jewish men, 46 women and eight children, plus one Pole shot for possessing a weapon. According to the chronology of the Association of Jews of Vilna, on 15 November all the local Jews of Werenowo and Bieniakonie (PL), south of Wilno, were murdered, and with them 265 Jews from Wilno. These crimes struck people caught after the main selections, fugitives from the ghetto and the inhabitants of small towns where no ghetto had ever been set up.

The report of 1 December

On 1 December 1941 Karl Jäger summed up five months of his unit’s work in a document that went down in history as the Jäger Report. In it he listed, day by day and place by place, the executions carried out by Einsatzkommando 3 and its Lithuanian auxiliaries up to 25 November: 137,346 killed in all, about 4,000 of them in pogroms and executions before he took over the tasks of the Security Police. Jäger stated that the goal, “the solution of the Jewish problem in Lithuania”, had been achieved: there were no longer any Jews in Lithuania apart from workers and their families. By his count some 34,500 of these remained, including about 15,000 in Wilno, 15,000 in Kaunas and 4,500 in Šiauliai. He wrote openly that he had wanted to kill them too, but the civil administration of the Reich Commissariat and the Wehrmacht had firmly forbidden it, because they needed them for labour. He therefore proposed the immediate sterilisation of the men, and announced that women who nevertheless became pregnant would be “liquidated”.

The report also speaks of something that went beyond Lithuania. Under 25 and 29 November Jäger recorded the shooting at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas of 4,934 Jews deported in five trains from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna and Breslau (Wrocław). They were the first Jews from the Reich to be murdered immediately on arrival. On that same 1 December Murer handed the deserted area of the former small ghetto in Wilno over to the city authorities, which were to settle it with a non-Jewish population.

December

In December the Germans twice more seized people from the ghetto on the basis of prepared lists. According to Yad Vashem, on 3–4 December some 150 people with criminal records were taken to Ponary, and on 15 December Jewish employees of the Gestapo and their families, previously protected by permits broader than usual, were taken to Łukiszki; about 300 of them were murdered. The Association’s chronology dates these actions to 4 and 5 December, which shows how hard it is to reconstruct the exact course of those weeks.

Family members of yellow-permit holders then received pink family permits; the Jewish council distributed about 1,600 of them, including among skilled workers, rabbis and activists without a yellow Schein. Thousands of people, however, were left with no document at all. On 20 December, during Hanukkah, Germans and Lithuanians entered the ghetto and over three days caught about 400 of them. On Szpitalna Street people concealed in one of the hiding places, led by Moshe Haus and Goldstein, threw themselves at the Lithuanian policemen and were shot dead in the struggle. It was one of the first attempts at resistance in the Wilno Ghetto.

Place in the war

The November and December actions closed the period of mass round-ups in Wilno. At the end of 1941, according to Yad Vashem, some 20,000 people were living in the ghetto, some of them illegally, while according to the estimates of Yitzhak Arad some 33,500 Wilno Jews had been killed in half a year. From the beginning of 1942 until the spring of 1943 came a period the inhabitants called “stabilisation”: the Germans needed workers, and Gens believed that work would save at least part of the ghetto. In January 1942, however, young activists formed the United Partisan Organisation (FPO), which concluded that this hope was an illusion.

Jäger’s report was only a local record of a process which in November 1941 encompassed all the occupied Soviet and eastern territories. On 30 November and 8 December most of the inhabitants of the Riga ghetto, some 25,000 people, were murdered in the Rumbula forest near the city (the Rumbula massacre), together with the first transport of Jews from Berlin. Figures from the Einsatzgruppen reports found their way into the summary prepared for the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, which stated that only 34,000 Jews remained in Lithuania.

The Wilno Ghetto survived until September 1943. When it was liquidated, those fit for work were deported to camps in Estonia and Latvia, while most of the rest, above all women with children and the elderly, were sent to their deaths in extermination camps or shot at Ponary. For years after the war Karl Jäger worked in West Germany as a farm labourer. Arrested in 1959, when his report came to light, he hanged himself in Hohenasperg prison before his trial. His report, with its precise columns of men, women and children, became one of the most important pieces of evidence of the Holocaust in Lithuania and was presented at many war crimes trials.