The capture of Kaunas

On the morning of 1 August 1944 divisions of Colonel General Nikolai Krylov’s Soviet 5th Army (PL) took the last districts of Kaunas (Kowno) on the left bank of the Neman. Lithuania’s second-largest city, its capital between the wars, and for the German command the last major road and rail junction before the border of East Prussia, passed into the hands of Army General Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front. In the evening Moscow celebrated the victory with a salute: Joseph Stalin’s order spoke of the storming of “the city and fortress of Kaunas”, and 224 guns fired twenty salvoes in its honour.

The troops who entered the city found almost none of its former Jewish inhabitants. Three weeks earlier the SS had begun liquidating the concentration camp into which the Kaunas ghetto had been turned, deporting the prisoners to Germany and blowing up and burning the district itself. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians, fearing the return of the Soviet rule they had known in 1940–1941, also fled west with the Germans.

It is often said of this date that by taking Kaunas the Red Army cut the Baltic states off from East Prussia. This shorthand needs qualifying. Kaunas did indeed fall on 1 August, but the land link between the German Army Group North in the Baltic states and the Reich had been severed a day or two earlier by another front – Army General Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front, whose spearheads reached Tukums and the coast of the Gulf of Riga on 30–31 July. The Germans briefly restored that link in August with the Doppelkopf counter-offensive.

The provisional capital

Kaunas, which lies at the confluence of the Neris (Wilia) and the Neman, had been a Russian border fortress until 1915; its ring of forts, built from the 1880s onwards, still surrounded the city in 1944. In 1920, when General Lucjan Żeligowski’s troops occupied Wilno (Vilnius), the Lithuanian authorities declared Kaunas the provisional capital. The constitution continued to name Wilno as the capital of the state, but for twenty years the presidents – among them Antanas Smetona – the government and the Seimas, the parliament, sat in Kaunas. The city grew rapidly: according to some accounts its population rose from about 90,000 to about 150,000, and new government buildings, banks and schools gave it a modernist appearance that is now on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Kaunas was a multinational city. Lithuanians formed the majority, but every fourth or fifth inhabitant was Jewish; there was also a sizeable Polish community with its own secondary school and press, although Polish–Lithuanian relations, poisoned by the dispute over Wilno, led several times to anti-Polish outbreaks. In March 1939, under pressure from a German ultimatum, Lithuania ceded Klaipėda (Memel) to the Reich, and that autumn, under a treaty with the USSR, it received Wilno from Moscow in return for agreeing to Soviet military bases. The government began moving its offices to Wilno, but in June 1940 the Red Army occupied the whole country. After rigged elections, a “People’s Seimas” meeting in Kaunas asked for Lithuania to be admitted to the USSR, which was approved in August 1940. A year of Soviet rule brought nationalisation, arrests and – in June 1941 – mass deportations into the interior of the USSR.

The pogrom, the ghetto and the Ninth Fort

The Wehrmacht entered Kaunas on 24 June 1941, but even before that an anti-Soviet uprising of Lithuanian partisans had broken out in the city. In the last days of June, at German instigation and following German instructions, armed Lithuanian groups carried out a pogrom in which, according to various estimates, between about 2,500 and 3,800 Jews were killed (the higher figure was given in a report by the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Franz Walter Stahlecker). From July to mid-August the survivors, some 29,000–30,000 people, were crowded into a ghetto in the poor district of Vilijampolė (Slobodka) on the right bank of the Neris. It was run by a Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) chosen by the Jews themselves and headed by the physician Elchanan Elkes (PL).

The forts of the old fortress became places of execution, above all the Ninth Fort on the north-western edge of the city, an NKVD prison in 1940–1941. The killings were directed by the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger, and carried out largely by Lithuanian policemen and volunteers. On 4 October 1941 the so-called small ghetto was liquidated and its hospital burned. On 28 October a selection of all the ghetto’s inhabitants was carried out on Democrats’ Square, and the next day some 9,200 people, among them several thousand children, were shot at the Ninth Fort – a crime that Jäger recorded in his report of 1 December 1941. Jews deported from Germany and Austria (in November 1941) were also brought to the Ninth Fort, and in May 1944 so was a transport of men from the French camp at Drancy. According to the most frequently cited estimates, between 45,000 and 50,000 Jews were murdered there during the occupation.

In the autumn of 1943 the SS took over the ghetto and turned it into the Kauen concentration camp (KL Kauen) under SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Göcke; some of the prisoners were dispersed to subcamps, and in October more than 2,700 people were deported – those fit for work to camps in Estonia, children and the elderly to Auschwitz. In December 1943 a commando of prisoners worked at the Ninth Fort, forced to dig up mass graves and burn the corpses as part of the operation to erase the traces of the crimes directed by Paul Blobel; on Christmas night 64 of them managed to escape from the fort. On 27–28 March 1944 the SS carried out the so-called Children’s Action (Kinderaktion) in the camp: children up to the age of twelve and older people were taken away and murdered – about 1,300 people according to some accounts, and according to figures from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cited by other sources about 2,500 in all, including some 1,600 children. Several dozen Jewish policemen who refused to reveal hiding places were also killed.

Several hundred young people from the ghetto had earlier managed to escape to the partisans in the forests south-east of Kaunas. As the front approached the city in July 1944, the SS began evacuating the camp on 8 July: the women were deported to Stutthof, the men to subcamps of Dachau around Kaufering in Bavaria. Elkes died there in October 1944. The Germans destroyed the area of the former ghetto with grenades and explosives to drive people out of their hiding places; according to estimates, up to 2,000 people were killed in the process, by fire or by bullets. It is estimated that about 500 Jews survived in Kaunas, in the forests and in the last undiscovered bunker, and that only some of those deported to Germany lived to see the end of the war. According to some accounts, of about 37,000 Kaunas Jews around 3,000 survived the Holocaust.

The Kaunas operation

After the capture of Wilno on 13 July, Chernyakhovsky’s troops reached the Neman and seized bridgeheads on its western bank, but for the next two weeks they advanced slowly. Facing them was Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Third Panzer Army, made up of the remnants of divisions shattered in Belarus in June, a few fresh units and hastily assembled battle groups; since the end of June the whole of Army Group Centre had been commanded by Field Marshal Walter Model. Kaunas, with its old forts and the rivers shielding it from the east and north, was a natural barrier in front of East Prussia.

On 28 July the Supreme High Command (Stavka) ordered Chernyakhovsky to take the city “no later than 1–2 August” with the 39th Army attacking from the north and the 5th Army from the south, and then to reach the Raseiniai–Suwałki line by 10 August and go over to the defensive there before entering Germany. So began the Kaunas operation, which by Soviet reckoning lasted until 28 August. On 29 July, after a forty-minute artillery preparation, two groupings of the 5th Army moved off: the 72nd Rifle Corps north-east of the city, towards the Neris, and the 45th and 65th Corps from the bridgeheads across the Neman, to outflank Kaunas from the south and cut the roads to Marijampolė. In the south the 33rd Army, supported by the 2nd Guards Tank Corps committed to the breach, advanced rapidly westwards; on 31 July it took Marijampolė, and the threat of encirclement induced the Germans to withdraw from Kaunas.

During the night of 30–31 July the leading units of the 72nd Corps forced the Neris north of Kaunas, and the 277th Rifle Division took Vilijampolė – the district where the ghetto had existed only a month before. In the morning the 63rd Rifle Division broke through the defences near Palemonas station and burst into the city from the east; its infantry crossed the Neman in boats and on rafts and fought its way to the centre. At the same time the 144th Rifle Division entered Kaunas from the south, bypassing the strong Forts IV and V, while the 120th Tank Brigade, advancing along the western bank of the Neman, came out in the garrison’s rear. The Germans began withdrawing along the roads and railway towards Marijampolė, covered by tanks and assault guns; the 184th Rifle Division tried to cut off their retreat. By the morning of 1 August the city was in Soviet hands. The same day Kalvarija fell, followed the next day by Kėdainiai and Vilkaviškis. By the beginning of August the front had moved forward about 50 kilometres and its sector of attack had widened to 230 kilometres.

The retreating Germans blew up the bridges over the Neman and the Neris and some of the industrial plants. Soviet figures for enemy losses in the operation, given in Russian studies, are high and hard to verify; the German command was not then keeping complete records of the losses of units that had been fighting in continuous retreat since June.

The Baltic, Tukums and Doppelkopf

The capture of Kaunas did not in itself cut the Baltic states off from the Reich, although it closed the shortest route from Lithuania to East Prussia. The actual severing of Army Group North’s land communications was the work of Bagramyan’s armies. After taking Šiauliai on 27 July, the 3rd Guards Mechanised Corps turned north, and on 30 July its spearheads cut the last railway line linking East Prussia with Latvia near Tukums and then reached the Gulf of Riga. On 31 July, after heavy fighting, Jelgava (Mitau) fell. According to Russian studies, Hitler then spoke of a “hole in the Wehrmacht”. The two army groups were separated by a narrow but continuous belt of Soviet troops.

The German command would not accept this. On 16 August Reinhardt took command of Army Group Centre, and General Erhard Raus took over the Third Panzer Army. That same day its armoured grouping launched Operation Doppelkopf: a thrust from Courland and Samogitia towards Šiauliai and Jelgava. The attack on Šiauliai stalled, but on 20 August a battle group under General Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz, supported by fire from the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Gulf of Riga, retook Tukums and linked up with the Sixteenth Army. The narrow corridor along the coast survived until October, when the Red Army reached the Baltic near Klaipėda and finally cut off Army Group North in Courland.

The city after liberation

Kaunas came through the fighting in better shape than Wilno or Minsk, but it was depopulated. The Jewish community, which before the war had numbered several tens of thousands, had practically ceased to exist; individual survivors emerged from the forests and hiding places, and in the ruins of the ghetto buried diaries, drawings and photographs were found, hidden by its inhabitants for posterity. Part of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, officials and clergy left with the Germans; in the course of the summer of 1944, according to estimates by historians of the emigration, several tens of thousands of Lithuanians fled west, many of whom ended up after the war in displaced persons’ camps and later in the United States, Canada and Australia.

The authorities of the Lithuanian SSR and the NKVD returned to the city in the wake of the army. There began arrests of people accused of collaboration, conscription into the Red Army and – as earlier in Wilno – the disarming of all formations not subordinate to Soviet authority. Lithuanians who did not want to serve in the Red Army or to leave went into the forests in growing numbers; the Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans remained active for years to come. Vilnius remained the capital of the republic, and Kaunas became its second city.

Place in the war

The capture of Kaunas was one of the last successes of Operation Bagration, which from 22 June had shattered Army Group Centre and in July had given the Red Army Minsk and Wilno. Chernyakhovsky’s troops now stood less than a hundred kilometres from the border of the Reich. Over the following days his armies tried to break through the border fortifications near Vilkaviškis, and in mid-August units of the 5th Army reached the Šešupė on the frontier. The first attempt to enter East Prussia in October 1944, however, stalled after a few dozen kilometres, and the province was taken only in the winter offensive of 1945.

On the same day, 1 August 1944, the uprising broke out in Warsaw. The Red Army then stood simultaneously on the Neman at Kaunas, on the approaches to Warsaw’s Praga district, in bridgeheads across the Vistula and on the Gulf of Riga – and the question of how far and in which direction it would go next would now decide the fate of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.