Free Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes Page A

confiscated by a hovering SS officer, indicating just how “spontaneous” these early public massacres were. Bystanders he questioned claimed that the death-dealer’s parents “had been taken from their beds two days earlier and immediately shot”—presumably by departing NKVD— “because they were suspected of being nationalists, and this was the young man’s revenge.” The death-dealer, the photographer adds, “within three-quarters of an hour . . . had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people in this way,” after which “the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem.”
    There were other murderers busy at the garage at other times that day. A Gentile Lithuanian, Julius Vainilavicius, described the scene:
    I was returning home after angling. Going past the garage I saw some civilians working there. The Germans were treating them roughly. The Jews were removing [horse] dung with naked hands and putting it into a heap. Yielding to curiosity, I walked into the schoolyard and over the fence kept on watching them. The work being finished, the people were ordered to wash themselves. . . . Here a great massacre began. The Germans and ten to fifteen Lithuanians, who happened to be in the garage at this time, swooped down on the Jews, belaboring them with rifle butts, spades, sticks and crowbars. About fifty people were wounded. They lay on the ground, groaning and crying. Then the water hose was brought and cold water turned onto them. Those who regained consciousness were beaten to death on the spot. After all the Jews were killed, a truck with a group of Jews [i.e., prisoners] came into the yard. They loaded the corpses onto the lorry and drove away. A few minutes later the Germans dispersed the onlookers.
    Between these public spectacles, the SS advance detachment organized the Lithuanian irregulars. Einsatzgruppe A leader Stahlecker explained in a follow-up report that “it was not easy at first to set any large-scale anti-Jewish pogrom in motion [in Kaunas].” But the SS found early collaborators in Algirdas Klimaitis, a Lithuanian journalist who led one of the four groups of local irregulars, and a physician, Dr. Zigonys. Under Klimaitis’s command, Einsatzgruppe A organized six hundred of the most reliable irregulars into an auxiliary police force; under Zigonys’s command, another two hundred. On the night of 25 June 1941, the auxiliaries bombed or set fire to several Kaunas synagogues and burned down sixty houses in the Jewish quarter. That same night they began rounding up Jews, plundering their houses and murdering them — 1,500 victims on the night of 25 June; on succeeding nights another 2,300. The Wehrmacht colonel reports seeing “long columns consisting of some forty to fifty men, women and children, who had been driven out of their homes . . . herded through the streets by armed civilians. . . . I was told that these people were being taken to the city prison. I assume, however, that the route they were taking led directly to their place of execution.”

    “During the last three days,” Einsatzkommando 1b reported to Berlin on 30 June 1941, “Lithuanian partisan groups have already killed several thousand Jews.”
    The Lithuanian auxiliaries justified their arrests and executions by claiming that Jews had been shooting from their windows at the German troops. A Jewish eyewitness, William Mishell, a draftsman in an engineering office, dismisses the accusation as “utterly ridiculous: first of all, the Jews never had arms in Lithuania; and secondly, no German soldiers were present where most of the Jews were being arrested, beaten up and manhandled. Saturday [28 June 1941], the Jewish Sabbath, only made the partisans’ zeal higher. Groups of Jews were made to dance in front of jeering crowds and then were beaten in full view of the population, including Germans, but