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Jews before execution at Ninth Fort massacre
On November 29, 1941, Nazi forces carried out their second mass killing of Jews in four days in Lithuania. The victims in both cases were German Jews who had been deported to Lithuania after the German conquest of that territory as part of the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941.
In the massacre at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania, Nazi paramilitary forces executed 693 men, 1,155 women, and 152 children, each with a single bullet to the neck, with the bodies heaped within giant earth pits dug by 300 enslaved Red Army prisoners. These Jews had been expelled from Vienna and Breslau. The earlier massacre at the same location on November 25 involved Jews from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. Almost five thousand Jews in total were murdered in the two Ninth Fort massacres.
The massacres were the first instance of the systematic killing of German Jews during the Holocaust. Concentration camps existed within Germany at the time, but not yet extermination camps.
Jews from Germany and Austria were called “Reich Jews” by the Nazi authorities. The deportation of the Reich Jews began in mid-October and continued until February 1942, 53,000 Reich Jews and 5,000 Gypsies were transported to Lithuania and murdered.
The Ninth Fort massacres were conducted by Einsatzkommando 3, a mobile killing squad and sub-unit of the larger Einsatzgruppen, led by Karl Jager. Jager, a Swiss-born devoted Nazi, was central to the almost total eradication of Lithuanian Jewry. His detailed reports of the murderous actions of his Einsatzkommando unit, including both German Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators, became known as the “Jager Report.”
The almost daily reports kept a running record of the murder of nearly 138,000 Jews. The unit killed mainly Jews, but also 1,000 communists, hundreds of disabled people, and scores of those deemed criminals. On 17 occasions, daily executions exceeded 2,000 people.
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