The Germans take Wilno

At dawn on 24 June 1941, the third day of the German–Soviet war, the first German motorcycles and tanks drove into Wilno (Vilnius). The city, which in less than two years had been in turn Polish, Soviet, Lithuanian and Soviet again, passed under its fourth master without a fight: the Red Army had withdrawn the day before. Some of its Lithuanian inhabitants greeted the Germans with flowers as liberators. For Wilno’s Jews, numbering close to sixty and perhaps as many as eighty thousand, the day marked the beginning of their destruction. On 24 June itself Lithuanian “activists” were shooting the Jews and communists they had seized, and the Germans took hostages from among the Jews and the Poles. In the days that followed, round-ups went on in the streets, and from the beginning of July those detained were taken to the forest at Ponary (Paneriai) (PL). By the end of 1941 most of the city’s Jewish population had been killed there.

A city of three occupations

Before the war Wilno was the capital of the Polish Wilno Voivodeship, and it had belonged to Poland since General Żeligowski’s operation in 1920 and the incorporation of Central Lithuania in 1922. According to the 1931 census, Poles made up about two-thirds of the inhabitants, Jews 28 per cent and Lithuanians less than 1 per cent. The city was at once an important centre of Polish culture, home to Stefan Batory University, and one of the foremost centres of Jewish learning and culture in Europe, known as the “Jerusalem of the North”. Lithuanians regarded it as their historic capital, unlawfully taken from them.

After the invasion of 17 September 1939 the Red Army occupied Wilno, and in October Joseph Stalin handed it over to Lithuania in exchange for its consent to Soviet garrisons. The Lithuanian administration closed the Polish university, introduced Lithuanian in public offices and refused citizenship to many inhabitants, treating them as newcomers. The Poles received the new authorities with reluctance, often with hostility, and the disputes and clashes of 1939–1940 poisoned Polish–Lithuanian relations in the city for a long time. Thousands of refugees from occupied Poland, many of them Jews, found shelter in Wilno.

In June 1940 the Red Army occupied the whole of Lithuania, and Wilno became the capital of the Lithuanian SSR. The NKVD arrested Polish officers, officials and members of the underground, Lithuanian politicians, and also activists of Jewish parties, Zionists and Bundists. In mid-June 1941 thousands of people of various nationalities were deported from Wilno and its region into the interior of the USSR in the June deportations. As it withdrew in June 1941, the NKVD took some of its prisoners east with it and, according to some sources, murdered at least several hundred people in Wilno’s prisons and jails.

24 June

The German attack on the USSR took the city by surprise. On Sunday 22 June many inhabitants mistook the squadrons over the Porubanek airfield for Soviet exercises. In the evening the bombing began. On 23 June thousands of people tried to flee east on foot, by cart and on the last trains. According to a chronicle compiled from the accounts of survivors of the Wilno ghetto, about three thousand Jews got away east at that time, but many had to turn back, because Soviet border guards on the former Polish–Soviet frontier let through only holders of Soviet passports. The same day Lithuanian insurgents of the June Uprising came out in the city, seized the post office and the radio station, and hoisted the Lithuanian flag on Gediminas’ Tower.

On the morning of 24 June the vanguard of the 7th Panzer Division entered Wilno; it belonged to General Hermann Hoth’s Panzer Group 3, part of Army Group Centre. The divisional command had expected resistance and was preparing to shell the city, but this proved unnecessary. Over the following days columns of German motorised infantry rolled east through its streets.

That same day Lithuanian “activists” wearing white armbands began rounding up people they deemed communists, and Jews. The chronicle mentioned above records that from the morning they were shot in the courtyard of the Franciscan church on Trocka Street, that several dozen people were killed, and that satisfied onlookers watched the executions. The number of victims cannot be established precisely today, but the killing of Jews in the streets of Wilno in the first days of the occupation is confirmed by other accounts as well.

Almost immediately the German military authorities took hostages, who were to answer with their lives for order in the city. Sources differ on their number: Monika Tomkiewicz’s monograph on the Ponary massacre, published by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), speaks of 60 Jews and 20 Poles, the ghetto chronicle of 60 Jews and 30 Poles. The same chronicle states that only six of the Jewish hostages came back; this has not been confirmed in scholarly studies, and the fate of most of those detained remains unknown.

Round-ups

At the end of June Sonderkommando 7a, a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe B under SS-Standartenführer Walter Blume, arrived in Wilno; at the beginning of July it was replaced by Alfred Filbert’s Einsatzkommando 9. According to Polish historians, in the first weeks of the occupation the two units arrested nearly 8,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. They did so chiefly through Lithuanian auxiliaries. From 27 June, as the ghetto chroniclers noted, groups of young men with white armbands, mostly Lithuanians but sometimes Poles as well, roamed the streets, seizing Jewish men in the streets and dragging them out of their homes. The Jews called them chapunes in Yiddish, “snatchers”. According to rumours at the time, 10 roubles were paid for each person caught. Those detained were taken to police posts and to Łukiszki (Lukiškės) Prison, from which almost no one returned.

At the turn of June and July a special unit subordinate to the German security police was formed from Lithuanian policemen and volunteers, known as the Ypatingasis būrys. The people of Wilno called its members the “Ponary riflemen”. For the next three years it carried out most of the executions at Ponary.

Poles and Lithuanians under the new authorities

In the first days of the occupation a Lithuanian city committee was set up in Wilno; with the goodwill of the German military command it took over the offices, the police and the schools and intended to complete the Lithuanisation of the city begun in 1939–1940. In practice Wilno did not obey the provisional government in Kaunas, because it lay in the rear of a different German army group. The Poles, although they formed the majority of the inhabitants, were excluded from the administration and once again, as under Lithuanian rule, felt like second-class citizens. The Germans confiscated radio sets from Jews and Poles alike.

Lithuanian nationalists tried to persuade the new occupiers to deal with the Poles, but without success. At that time the Germans’ priority was the murder of Jews and communists, and they regarded the Polish intelligentsia, thinned out by NKVD arrests and deportations, as harmless for the time being. Mass arrests of Poles began only in the autumn of 1941, when the German security police got on the trail of Polish underground organisations in contact with Warsaw, including the Union of Armed Struggle. The Polish–Lithuanian rivalry over Wilno, in which each side tried to win the occupier’s favour or avoid its wrath, lasted throughout the occupation and in 1943–1944 turned into open fighting between the Polish underground and Lithuanian police formations.

The “Nuremberg Laws” and the first decrees

It is often said that on 29 June the Nuremberg Laws were extended to the Jews of Lithuania, and of Wilno in particular. This shorthand does not reflect what actually happened. The German laws of 1935 were never formally introduced in Lithuania. The ghetto chronicle on which this claim rests records under 29 June “the beginning of the Nuremberg Laws” in a colloquial sense: it was then that the Lithuanian police began dividing bread queues into “Aryan” and Jewish ones, and Jews were formed into forced labour brigades.

The actual anti-Jewish regulations came in the following days from the German military command. On 3 July the city commandant ordered Jews to wear an identifying badge, and a few days later this obligation was replaced by an armband bearing the Star of David, compulsory for all from 8 July. On 4 July the Germans set up a Judenrat in Wilno, headed by Shaul Trotzki. Jews were dismissed from their jobs and deprived of their means of transport; they were allowed to shop only in designated shops and at designated hours, and they could not walk on pavements or main streets, use public transport, parks, cinemas or cafés, or be out in the streets in the evening and at night. In the Kaunas part of the country similar regulations on the status of Jews were adopted on 1 August by the Lithuanian provisional government, and in August the Reich Commissioner for the East (Ostland), Hinrich Lohse, issued general guidelines on the treatment of Jews.

Its place in the war

The German entry into Wilno opened the darkest chapter in the city’s history. The first execution in the forest at Ponary, in pits dug by the Soviets for unfinished fuel tanks, was probably carried out on 4 July 1941. According to German reports, 321 Jews had been shot there by 8 July; from 11 July about 500 were killed each day, and by 20 July the number of victims had reached about 5,000, most of them men. On 31 August the Germans staged shots fired at their soldiers – the so-called Great Provocation – and in reprisal murdered several thousand Jews, including women and children. On 6 September the survivors were shut into two ghettos in the old Jewish quarter. By the end of 1941 most of Wilno’s Jews had died at Ponary.

The Ponary massacre went on until July 1944. Monika Tomkiewicz estimates its victims at about 80,000, including about 72,000 Jews and 1,500–2,000 Poles; older estimates spoke of about 100,000. Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Roma were also killed there. The Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who lived near the killing site, recorded the course of the executions in his diary. The Wilno ghetto was liquidated in September 1943. Of the tens of thousands of Wilno’s Jews, a few thousand survived the war, mostly in hiding, with the partisans or in camps.

In July 1944 soldiers of the Home Army and the Red Army fought for the city. After its capture the NKVD disarmed and arrested the Polish soldiers, and Wilno once again became the capital of the Lithuanian SSR. Most of its Polish inhabitants had to leave for Poland in the years that followed. The city, Polish and Jewish before the war, became Lithuanian and Russian-speaking after it, and its Jewish world ceased to exist.