Kovno Ghetto
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The Kovno Ghetto was a ghetto established by Nazi Germany to hold the Lithuanian Jews of Kaunas (Kovno) during the Holocaust. At its peak, the ghetto held 29,000 people, most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps, or were shot at the Ninth Fort. About 500 Jews escaped from work details and directly from the ghetto, and joined Jewish and Soviet partisan forces in the distant forests of southeast Lithuania and Belarus.
Monument of the Kaunas Ghetto
Civilians and German soldiers looking at the massacre of 68 Jews in the Lietukis garage of Kaunas on June 25 or 27, 1941, during the Kaunas pogrom
Tanchum Aharonsteim, Deputy Chief of Kaunas Ghetto Jewish Police and Commander of the Public Order Service, subordinate to Gestapo, with a baton in the Kovno Ghetto in 1944
Aharon Barak, survivor of the Kovno Ghetto and later President of the Supreme Court of Israel (1995–2006)
The military occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany lasted from the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, to the end of the Battle of Memel on January 28, 1945. At first the Germans were welcomed as liberators from the repressive Soviet regime which had occupied Lithuania. In hopes of re-establishing independence or regaining some autonomy, Lithuanians had organized a Provisional Government. It lasted six weeks.
Lithuanian Jews and a German Wehrmacht soldier during the Holocaust in Lithuania (June 24, 1941)
Communist Party of Lithuania leader Antanas Sniečkus initiated the first mass deportations of Lithuanians in June 1941.
Kaunas pogrom in German-occupied Lithuania, June 1941. Photograph attributed to Wilhelm Gunsilius.
Lithuanian collaborators (with white armbands) arresting the Jews in July 1941