The Ponary massacre begins

On 2 July 1941, eight days after the Wehrmacht marched in, the main body of Einsatzkommando 9 reached Wilno (Vilnius). It was a unit of the German Security Police and SD whose task was to murder Jews, communists and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Reich. A few days later, in the forest at Ponary just outside the city, in pits dug a year earlier by the Soviets for aviation fuel tanks, mass executions began. Until the middle of July hundreds of victims a day were killed there, almost exclusively Jewish men dragged from their homes and off the streets. So began the Ponary massacre, the largest crime of the German occupation in the north-eastern lands of pre-war Poland. By July 1944, according to the most recent estimates, some 80,000 people had been killed there, the overwhelming majority of them Jews from Wilno and its surroundings, along with Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, communists of various nationalities and Roma.

Popular war chronologies state that the killing began on 2 July with the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war, followed by the transport of hundreds of Jews to the pits, where they were shot or buried alive. This shorthand needs several qualifications. 2 July is the date on which the unit that began the executions arrived in the city, not the date of the first documented execution. The monograph on the massacre by Monika Tomkiewicz, published by the Institute of National Remembrance, considers 4 July the most likely date of the first shooting at Ponary. Soviet prisoners of war were indeed killed at Ponary in the first months of the occupation, but the sources do not allow us to say that they were the first victims; the first executions described in German reports concerned Jews. Accounts of people buried alive do appear in the testimony of witnesses and survivors, but they describe the atrocities of particular executions, not their usual course.

The “base” in the forest

Before the war Ponary (Lithuanian: Paneriai) was a small summer resort by the railway station on the line from Wilno to Grodno and Kaunas, some ten kilometres south-west of the city centre. After the Red Army occupied Lithuania in 1940, the Soviet authorities began building underground fuel stores in the forest there for a nearby military airfield. The area was fenced off with barbed wire and the residents of the nearest houses were removed. The local people called the place “the base”. The construction was not finished before war broke out. What remained were six deep pits, the largest about 40 metres across and 5–6 metres deep, connected by trenches dug for pipelines.

The Germans chose the site deliberately. It lay close to the city, beside the Grodno road and the railway line; it was fenced and hidden in the forest; and the ready-made pits were suitable as mass graves. Soon the area was surrounded by a new, higher fence and partly mined, and the local residents were warned that anyone who came near the “base” would be shot.

Einsatzkommando 9 in Wilno

From its first day the German attack on the USSR was a war in which the murder of civilians was part of the plan. Behind the armies came four Einsatzgruppen, task forces of the Security Police and SD subordinate to Reinhard Heydrich and, in the final analysis, to Heinrich Himmler. It was precisely on 2 July that Heydrich sent the Higher SS and Police Leaders a written summary of the instructions issued orally before the invasion: he ordered the shooting of Comintern and Communist Party functionaries, people’s commissars, “Jews in party and state positions” and “other radical elements”, while at the same time not hindering the “self-cleansing efforts” of the local population – in other words, pogroms that were meant to look spontaneous. In practice the units killed far more widely from the outset than this list implied, above all Jewish men of working age.

In June 1941 Wilno was home to some 58,000 Jews according to official figures, and according to other estimates as many as 70,000–80,000, including refugees from occupied Poland. The city had belonged to Poland since General Żeligowski’s action in 1920; in the autumn of 1939 Joseph Stalin handed it to Lithuania, and in the summer of 1940 it became the capital of the Lithuanian SSR. A week before the outbreak of war the NKVD deported thousands of inhabitants of the Wilno region, of various nationalities, into the interior of the USSR in the June deportations. Many of the Lithuanian nationalists who on 22 June had launched an uprising against the Soviets held the Jews collectively responsible for Soviet repression, and German propaganda deliberately fostered the identification of Jews with communism. Unlike Kaunas, however, Wilno saw no great pogrom; the killing was organised from the start.

Wilno lay in the zone of Army Group Centre, followed by Arthur Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B. The first of its sub-units to reach the city, at the end of June, was Walter Blume’s Sonderkommando 7a. It was replaced by Einsatzkommando 9, some 120 men strong and commanded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Alfred Filbert, a lawyer and formerly an SD intelligence officer. According to the findings of German historians, the unit reached Varėna (Orany) on 1 July, from where Filbert sent detachments to Grodno and Lida, and its main body entered Wilno on 2 July. It remained there until about 20–23 July and then moved on to Vileyka and Molodechno, and in August to Vitebsk.

The Germans did not have to start from scratch. From the first days of the occupation hostages had been taken in the city and people killed in the streets, and from 27 June groups of young men with white armbands, mostly Lithuanians, roamed Wilno seizing Jewish men in the streets and in their homes; the Jews called them chapunes, “snatchers”. On German orders the Lithuanian police drew up lists of political activists, members of the intelligentsia and the well-to-do. Those detained were taken to Łukiszki prison. At the turn of June and July a special unit subordinate to the German Security Police was formed from Lithuanian volunteers and policemen, known as the Ypatingasis būrys. At first some fifty men joined it, and it was commanded by a German SS non-commissioned officer, Martin Weiss. The people of Wilno called its members the “Ponary riflemen” or “Szaulisi” (Riflemen).

The first executions

Detainees were held at Łukiszki for anything from a few hours to several weeks and then taken by lorry or driven on foot to Ponary. They were told they were going to work. On arrival they were led to the pits in groups of a few or a dozen or so and shot, at first with machine guns. A few men from each batch were forced to cover the bodies with earth and were then killed as well. In July the executions were carried out by a squad of Einsatzkommando 9 men supported by Lithuanian auxiliaries; from 23 July, after Filbert’s unit had left, the shooting was done almost exclusively by men of the Ypatingasis būrys under the supervision of a few Germans.

According to Tomkiewicz, the first execution probably took place on 4 July. Residents of the settlement remembered first hearing shots from the “base” at the beginning of July, when it was not yet as closely guarded as it later became; one of them even managed to get inside and find carelessly covered traces. German reports show that 321 Jews had been shot at Ponary by 8 July. From 11 July some 500 people a day were being killed, and by 20 July the number of victims had reached about 5,000. According to some studies, as many as 10,000 people were killed there in July alone; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a figure of about 5,000 Jewish men for that month. Women and children were not yet being murdered in July. For the families of the men taken away a time of uncertainty began: throughout the summer rumours circulated among the Jews of Wilno that those taken were working in a camp near Ponary or in Minsk.

Besides Jews, those killed at Ponary in the first months of the occupation included communists and officials of the Soviet administration who had not managed to escape, among them members of the authorities of the Lithuanian SSR, as well as the wives of Red Army officers. Soviet prisoners of war brought from nearby camps were also killed there. From 17 July an order from Heydrich instructed Security Police commandos to comb the prisoner-of-war camps and shoot selected prisoners: commissars, party functionaries and Jews. The great majority of the prisoners who did not survive captivity, however, died of hunger and disease in the camps. How many prisoners of war were murdered at Ponary cannot now be established precisely: Tomkiewicz estimates their number at about 5,000, while other studies give up to 7,000–8,000. A stone commemorating the prisoners starved and shot in 1941 now stands on the site of the former “base”.

The first Judenrat

In parallel with the executions, the Germans were bringing the city’s Jewish community under their control. On 3 July the military commandant of Wilno ordered Jews to wear a distinguishing mark, soon replaced by an armband with the Star of David. On 4 July, according to historians of the Wilno ghetto, two Germans came to the community buildings by the synagogue on Żydowska Street and demanded that the shammes (the synagogue beadle), Chaim Meir Gordon, name representatives of the community. That day a ten-member Jewish council, a Judenrat, was set up, headed by Szaul Trocki, with Anatol Fried as his deputy. At the end of July the council was enlarged to 24 members; the sources differ on the dates of the individual stages. Many of those invited to serve hesitated for a long time and agreed only under pressure from those around them, for everyone understood that they would be personally answerable for carrying out German orders.

The council was to supply people for labour, collect from the community whatever the occupiers demanded and pass on their orders. Its members hoped that cooperation would make it possible to limit the round-ups and save at least some people. They did not yet know where the transports from Łukiszki were going. The first Judenrat lasted less than two months. During the so-called Great Provocation at the turn of August and September, the Germans arrested Trocki and more than a dozen council members during a meeting and murdered them at Ponary. Fried then became head of the Judenrat of the so-called large ghetto, and in July 1942 he was replaced by Jakub Gens, until then commander of the Jewish police.

A witness at Ponary

The most important Polish witness to what went on at the “base” was Kazimierz Sakowicz, a pre-war Wilno journalist and publisher with links to the Polish underground. Financial difficulties forced him to move to Ponary, where he lived in a house less than a hundred metres from the killing site. From 11 July 1941 he watched the executions from his attic and recorded them on loose sheets of paper and in a diary: dates, numbers of victims, the numbers of lorries and railway wagons, conversations with the killers, several of whom he knew. He hid his notes in bottles buried in the garden. In the very first surviving entry, of 11 July, he wrote a sentence that has become one of the most frequently quoted testimonies to this crime: for the Germans three hundred Jews were three hundred enemies of humanity; for the Lithuanians, three hundred pairs of shoes, trousers and clothes. It referred to the plundering of the victims’ belongings, which the members of the special unit stripped from them and sold.

Sakowicz died in July 1944, shot, probably by members of the Ypatingasis būrys, who may have noticed his interest in their work. His notes from 1941–1943 were found in the garden after the war. They were deciphered and edited by Rachela Margolis, a survivor of the Wilno ghetto who had lost her family at Ponary. The diary was published in Polish in 1999 and later in Hebrew, German, English and Lithuanian. Ponary was also described at first hand by Józef Mackiewicz, who witnessed one of the executions, in his reportage “Ponary – Baza”, published in 1945.

Place in the war

The July executions near Wilno were part of the turning point reached in the occupied East in the summer of 1941. In those same weeks Einsatzgruppen commandos and their local auxiliaries were shooting Jewish men in Kaunas, in Riga, taken on 1 July, in Białystok, in Minsk and in dozens of smaller towns. From August women and children began to be killed as well, and operations aimed at “hostile elements” grew into the annihilation of entire communities. Historians such as Alex J. Kay, in his study of Einsatzkommando 9, see the unit’s actions in Wilno and Belarus as one example of the transition from selective murder to genocide.

In Wilno the turning point came after a staged “attack” on German soldiers on 31 August. In reprisal, according to German reports, 3,700 Jews were shot at Ponary on 2 September, including more than 2,000 women and more than 800 children, while Jewish sources speak of as many as 5,000. On 6 September those still alive were shut in two ghettos. In the autumn a series of “actions” liquidated the so-called small ghetto and murdered thousands of people from the large one. Estimates of the number of Wilno Jews killed by the end of 1941 range from about 33,500, the figure accepted by Yitzhak Arad on the basis mainly of the Jäger Report, to more than 50,000 in other studies. From the autumn Poles were also killed at Ponary: prisoners from Łukiszki, underground soldiers, priests and professors of the Stefan Batory University. The Wilno ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, and the last mass executions took place in the first days of July 1944, just before the Red Army arrived.

From the end of 1943 the Germans tried to cover their tracks. As part of Aktion 1005, prisoners, mainly Jews and Soviet prisoners of war, dug open the pits and burnt the bodies. During the night of 15–16 April 1944 some of them escaped through a tunnel dug with spoons and boards. Twenty-five men got out; twelve were killed in the pursuit, and eleven reached the partisans in the Rudniki Forest. The survivors’ accounts became one of the principal pieces of evidence of the crime. For a long time estimates of its scale relied on a figure of about 100,000 victims, which was also accepted in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which spoke of “Soviet citizens”. In her monograph published by the Institute of National Remembrance in 2008, Monika Tomkiewicz estimates the total at about 80,000, including about 72,000 Jews, about 5,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 1,500–2,000 Poles, about 1,000 communists of various nationalities and several dozen Roma.

Some of the perpetrators were brought to trial. Filbert was sentenced to life imprisonment in West Berlin in 1962, but was released after a dozen or so years. Martin Weiss received a life sentence in Würzburg in 1950 and was pardoned in 1977. More than twenty members of the Ypatingasis būrys were tried in the USSR, and a few in communist Poland; others fled to the West. For decades the Soviet authorities commemorated anonymous “victims of fascism” at Ponary, passing over the fact that most of those murdered had died because they were Jews, and that Poles were also among the dead. Only after 1990 were a monument to the Jewish victims, a cross and a plot for the Polish victims, and stones commemorating the prisoners of war and Lithuanians put up there. For the Jews of Wilno, once the “Jerusalem of the North”, Ponary became a symbol of the Holocaust; for the Poles of the Wilno region, one of the most important sites of remembrance of the occupation. The end of Jewish Wilno, which began in July 1941, changed the city for ever: of its tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants, a few thousand survived the war.