The Great Provocation in Wilno

On Sunday 31 August 1941, in the centre of Wilno (Vilnius), at the corner of Wielka Street and Szklana Street, several shots were fired from the window of a tenement house towards German soldiers standing outside a cinema. Moments later Germans and Lithuanian policemen dragged two Jews out of the building, accused them of the attack, beat them and shot them in the street. That same day mass arrests began in the Jewish quarter of the Old Town. For three days men, women and children were seized from their homes and marched to Łukiszki prison, and from there to the forest at Ponary. According to a German report, 3,700 Jews were shot there on 2 September, including more than 2,000 women and more than 800 children, as a “special action because Jews had fired on German soldiers”. The shots from the window, however, had been staged: they were fired by men acting on behalf of the occupiers themselves. The Jews of Wilno called those days the “Great Provocation”, and historians regard them as a turning point in the destruction of Jewish Wilno.

The essence of the matter is clear: the German authorities faked an attack by Jews on their soldiers in order to arrest, in “reprisal”, the inhabitants of the old Jewish quarter and murder them at Ponary. Two qualifications are needed. First, according to German documents the main execution took place on 2 September, two days after the provocation, and the killing of those arrested stretched into the first days of September. Second, the “reprisal” was only a pretext: the real aim was to empty the block of streets in which the Germans had decided to set up a ghetto.

Wilno under civil administration

When the Wehrmacht took Wilno on 24 June 1941, at least 55,000–60,000 Jews were living there, including refugees from German-occupied Poland – according to some estimates, as many as 70,000–80,000. Lithuanian activists who during the June Uprising had hoped to rebuild their own state took over the city administration, but it soon became clear that Berlin had no intention of handing power to them. In July the Jews of Wilno were forced to wear identifying badges, the first Judenrat was set up with Shaul Trotsky at its head, and Lithuanian “snatchers”, on the orders of the German Security Police, dragged Jewish men from their homes and off the streets. Most of them died at Ponary (Paneriai), where from the beginning of July victims were being shot in pits left over from unfinished Soviet fuel tanks. According to the notes of Kazimierz Sakowicz, who watched the executions from his house, some 5,000 Jews were killed there in July and some 2,000 in August; in mid-August children and teenagers were killed at Ponary for the first time.

In the summer the occupation administration changed. Lithuania was incorporated into Hinrich Lohse’s Reichskommissariat Ostland, and Theodor Adrian von Renteln became its Commissioner General in Kaunas. In August power in Wilno was taken over by the district commissioner (Gebietskommissar) Hans Christian Hingst, an NSDAP activist and SA officer from Schleswig-Holstein, while Jewish affairs were handled by his deputy, the Austrian Franz Murer, later known as “the butcher of Vilna”. Lohse’s provisional guidelines of August 1941 envisaged that the Jews would be isolated in ghettos and used for forced labour. The Germans decided to place the ghetto in the historic Jewish quarter of the Old Town, in the block formed by Żydowska, Szklana, Gaona, Jatkowa, Rudnicka, Straszuna and Oszmiańska Streets, between Wielka, Niemiecka and Dominikańska Streets. Several thousand people, most of them poor Jews, had been living there until then. In order to squeeze tens of thousands of people from the whole city into this area, the occupiers first wanted to get rid of its existing inhabitants.

The German Security Police and SD were represented in Wilno at that time by a detachment of Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3, which had taken over the city after Einsatzkommando 9 left. The executions at Ponary were carried out above all by a Lithuanian special unit, the Ypatingasis būrys, whose men were supervised at the pits by a few Germans.

Shots at the corner of Wielka and Szklana

The course of the provocation itself is known from witness accounts and from the findings of historians, above all Yitzhak Arad, himself a survivor of the Wilno ghetto. On the Sunday afternoon of 31 August two Lithuanians in civilian clothes entered a flat in a tenement at the corner of Wielka and Szklana Streets, in the very heart of the area earmarked for the ghetto. They fired several shots from the window towards a group of German soldiers standing in the small square outside the cinema, then ran out into the street shouting that Jews had fired at the Germans. They came back with soldiers who had been waiting nearby; the soldiers dragged two Jewish men out of the building, beat them and shot them on the spot. Other residents of Szklana and Jatkowa Streets were beaten, and their flats were looted by Lithuanian policemen and members of auxiliary units.

Almost all researchers agree that it was a carefully prepared act. This is indicated by the scene itself – shots fired by unknown perpetrators in precisely the place that the German authorities had just chosen for the ghetto – and by the speed and scale of the operation, which began immediately and covered the entire block. The organisation of the provocation is attributed to Hingst and Murer, and its execution to Horst Schweinenberg (also spelled Schweinberger in the sources), an officer of the German Security Police in Wilno who also directed the operations of the following days. Lithuanian studies name Murer and August Hering alongside him. Some of the literature also lists among the perpetrators Martin Weiss, the SS NCO who supervised the Ypatingasis būrys and who in the following years became one of the chief tormentors of the Wilno ghetto; his involvement in this particular action is, however, less well documented.

The Germans officially presented the events as a Jewish attack. The Jäger Report of 1 December 1941, a tally of the executions carried out by Einsatzkommando 3 in Lithuania, recorded the massacre of 2 September as a “special action” carried out because “Jews had fired on German soldiers”.

Three days of round-ups

On the evening and night of 31 August German and Lithuanian policemen and members of auxiliary units began surrounding the houses in the block of the future ghetto. Whole families were dragged from their flats, regardless of age or sex. The work certificates that in July and August had protected at least some of the men from deportation counted for nothing this time. The abandoned flats were looted immediately afterwards. The round-ups went on until 2 September, and according to some sources until 3 September. Panic seized Jews in other parts of the city, since no one knew whether the operation would be confined to the Old Town.

Those arrested were driven to Łukiszki prison. The cells and the courtyard were overcrowded, and the prisoners were beaten and kept without food. From there they were taken to Ponary: men usually on foot, women, children, the elderly and the sick in lorries. Sakowicz noted that on 2 September the column of people being led to the “base” stretched for about two kilometres; his neighbour, the keeper at a railway crossing, estimated their number at 4,000. On arrival the victims had to undress and were then shot in groups at the edge of the pits, first the men, then the women and children. The shooting was done mainly by men of the Ypatingasis būrys under German supervision.

Among those murdered were members of the first Judenrat. On 2 September Schweinenberg entered the council’s offices and took away the sixteen people present, including ten of its members and the chairman, Shaul Trotsky. None of them returned; they died at Ponary. In this way the Germans deprived the community of its representation just as they were preparing the most important operation of the summer: confining the Jews in the ghetto.

How many victims

The most precise figure is given by the Jäger Report itself: on 2 September, in “the city of Wilna”, 864 Jewish men, 2,019 Jewish women and 817 children were shot, a total of 3,700 people. For the first time in Wilno, women and children made up the majority of the victims of a single execution. Jewish sources and some studies give higher figures. According to survivors’ accounts, some 5,000 people may have died, and some publications, including Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, speak of some 8,000 murdered at Ponary between 31 August and 3 September. The discrepancy probably arises because the German tally covered only one, the largest, execution, and also from uncertainty about the number of people killed in the city and on the way. Historians generally take the figure in the Jäger Report as their basis, noting that it is a minimum.

At the beginning of September six wounded women and girls who had survived the execution – having lain beneath the bodies of the dead and, once the shooting was over, climbed out of the pits and escaped from the “base” – made their way back to Wilno. The youngest was eleven. They were hidden in the Jewish hospital, and the hospital staff long kept their accounts secret for fear that the Germans would kill the witnesses. These were among the first direct testimonies that those taken to Ponary were not going to a labour camp, as many of the city’s inhabitants still believed, but to their deaths.

Confined in the ghettos

The emptied flats of the Old Town waited only a few days for new occupants. Early in the morning of 6 September the Germans and the Lithuanian police began herding all the Jews of Wilno into two blocks fenced off from the rest of the city and separated from each other by Niemiecka Street. People were given a few minutes or a few hours to move; the ghetto chronicler Herman Kruk wrote that the streets were packed with crowds driven along by soldiers “like cattle”. Some 29,000–30,000 people ended up in the so-called large ghetto and some 10,000–11,000 in the small one, mainly people unfit for work. Several thousand others were detained and held in Łukiszki; according to the Jäger Report, more than 3,300 Jews from Wilno were shot at Ponary on 12 September. Thus, in less than two weeks after the provocation, several thousand more people were killed at Ponary, and the rest found themselves behind the barbed wire of the ghetto.

Place in the war

The Great Provocation was one of many episodes in which the occupiers justified murder by the alleged resistance of the victims. The pattern was similar everywhere: an alleged attack, alleged shots, an alleged crime for which all the Jews of a given place paid. In Wilno the staged incident served both to “clear” the ghetto area and to terrorise the whole community just before it was imprisoned. In a wider perspective it was part of the turning point reached in the occupied east in the summer of 1941: units that in July had been murdering mainly Jewish men were, from August, increasingly killing women and children as well, and local “actions” grew into the annihilation of entire communities. A few weeks earlier Hermann Göring had authorised Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question”.

For the Jews of Wilno the provocation began the worst autumn in the city’s history. In October – including on Yom Kippur – and in subsequent “actions”, the Germans and their Lithuanian auxiliaries liquidated the whole of the small ghetto and murdered thousands of people from the large one, selecting the victims according to the type of work certificate they held. By the end of 1941, according to Arad’s estimates based mainly on the Jäger Report, some 33,500 Wilno Jews had been killed; other studies give more than 50,000. The ghetto survived until September 1943. Of the tens of thousands of Jews living in Wilno in June 1941, a few thousand survived the war.

The organisers of the provocation bore little or no responsibility. In 1948 a German court dealing with members of organisations declared criminal sentenced Hingst to seven years in prison; after his release he worked as a travelling salesman. Murer was recognised in Austria in 1947 by one of the survivors. Handed over to the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag, but in 1955 he returned to Austria under the agreements accompanying the State Treaty, and in 1963 a jury court in Graz acquitted him. Martin Weiss was sentenced to life imprisonment in Würzburg in 1950 and pardoned in 1977. The memory of those days survived above all in the diaries and accounts of ghetto survivors and in Sakowicz’s notes, hidden in bottles buried in his garden at Ponary.