During World War II, the Nazis in Germany were a Jewish nightmare, and German fascists set up various notorious concentration camps, killing some 6 million Jews. The most famous is the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was founded in April 1940, and the Auschwitz concentration camp held millions of people before and after, where the German Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews in various cruel ways, becoming the largest "killing center" in Germany, known as the "death factory".
On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, in which only 7,000 people survived. Less well known is that not all of the 6 million Jews who were slaughtered died at the hands of German Nazis. A significant number of Jews also died in the accomplices of Nazi Germany, such as the small European state of Lithuania, and by the end of World War II, only 7,000 of the 80,000 Jews who had originally lived in Vilnius, lithuania, had survived. Lithuanian nationalists were actively involved in the extermination plan against Jews, and almost 94 percent of Lithuanian Jews were killed.
Lithuania, once an ancient country with a glorious civilization, has been competing with Russia in northern and eastern Europe. During World War II, it struggled to survive the German-Soviet game, and was annexed by Poland, Germany, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Sadly, after the German occupation, instead of rising up to fight for national independence and freedom, the Lithuanians slashed their butcher knives at their own people.
A team of Jewish women and children escorted by the pro-German Lithuanian Self-Defense Forces.
Why the German Nazis exterminated the Jews is a very complex question, and there is a lot of research on this issue on the Internet. All in all, the German Nazis' massacre of Jews was a very thorough "extermination operation."
In October 1920, only two years after the restoration, Poland sent troops to occupy the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and the eastern region. In September 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany divided Poland, and the previously Polish-controlled eastern part of Lithuania was occupied by Soviet troops. In August 1940, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian Parliament declared itself a republic of the Soviet Union. In June 1941, after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, an uprising broke out in Lithuania to cooperate with the German army, and the whole territory of Lithuania was occupied by the German army.
During World War II, Lithuania, as a republic of the Soviet Union, was the most densely distributed area of Jews in the Soviet Union, and the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius (also the second largest city in Lithuania), was even known as the "Jerusalem of the North". Lithuania was between Germany and the Soviet Union, and it was difficult to stand alone, and the Jews in lithuania psychologically supported the Soviet occupation because of the massacre of Jews by the German Nazis. However, the Lithuanian nation in Lithuania was hostile to the Soviet Union because of the Soviet occupation and regarded the Jews in the country as "traitors".
Personally, I believe that this is the helplessness of a weak country, but also the sadness of the people of a small country, and under the game of great powers, the tragedy of national vendetta is inevitably staged.
In the ghettos of Warsaw, the SS stared at a group of captured Jews. After its resistance, the quarantine was purged.
On June 22, 1941, the Germans launched the Barbarossa Plan and launched a fierce military offensive against the Soviet Union. The Lithuanian nationals did not put up any resistance and were soon occupied by the Germans. The happy Lithuanians formed a provisional government and declared independence from the Soviet Union, who knew that Germany would directly dissolve the provisional government of Lithuania and directly submit it to the leadership of the German government, in fact, declaring the fall of Lithuania.
At that time there were more than 150,000 Jews in Lithuania. On June 24, the first massacre of Jews in Lithuania began, in the Lithuanian coastal city of Palan, where 201 Jews were brutally murdered by Lithuanian ultra-nationalists.
On 25 June, the Germans invaded all of Lithuania and decided to hunt down and massacre Jews throughout Lithuania. Franz Walter Stahlecker, one of the leaders of the SS brigade, in order to set an example, came to Kaunas to give a passionate speech, "calling on" Lithuanian nationalists to take up butcher knives and massacre Jews, and selected the veteran (national extremist) Algirdas Klimaitis as a typical representative.
Franz Walter Starlek
After retiring from the army, Clematis ran a tabloid newspaper to make a living, which was an ideological "anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet" radicalist, when the German army was occupied and the Soviet army was defeated, he pulled up a "puppet army" of more than 600 people, sneaked into the Soviet army, and was appreciated by the German army, and Germany authorized him to lead the team to maintain law and order in Kaunas.
With The support of Stalek, Clematis led a nationwide search for Jews, and in order to stir up fanaticism, Clematis tied the jewish leader of Kaunas, Rabiraf Zalman Osowski, to a chair, and then stomped their heads on the Jewish scripture Gemara with his feet, and sawed their heads off little by little with a saw in the street full of crowds of onlookers.
After the execution, the bodies of Theosovsky's family of three were hung on a prominent building in the downtown area, next to a huge sign that read: "We will deal with the Jews like this!" ”
With the demonstration effect, the mad massacre was out of control. The Jewish community in Kaunas became a hell on earth, the Lithuanians tortured and killed Jews by all means, and their criminal acts were not stopped, let alone condemned, as if everything was taken for granted and justified, and no one felt that their "sin" was "sin", and no one felt that they were "wrong".
"Death Trafficker" photo
Thousands of Jews sit in their homes, and the only evil that comes from heaven is their identity: Jews. In order to encourage the "hunting" of more Jews, the German Nazis sent reporters to the scene of the massacre to cover the "massacre deeds", one of the Lithuanians was called "death dealer", his hobby was to beat the Jews to death with a thick iron rod, and he was tireless, and the German reporter took pictures of him and widely publicized it.
Four days later, the massacre came to an end, with more than 5,000 Jews in and around Kaunas being slaughtered. However, the more frantic slaughter is behind, and we look at a set of data:
In July 1941, tens of thousands of Lithuanian volunteers executed 50,000 Jews in the Bonauri Forest. Over the next three years, 95 percent of Lithuanian Jews were killed, most of the actions against Jews spontaneously before German orders were issued by Lithuanians, and what was even more surprising was that many Jews eventually died at the hands of their Lithuanian neighbors. By the end of World War II, only 7,000 of the 80,000 Jews who had originally lived in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, had survived. At the Ninth Fortress of Kaunas, a total of 80,000 Jews died tragically at the butcher's knife of Nazi and Lithuanian nationalists. The Sixth Fort killed 35,000 people and the Seventh Fort massacre killed 8,000 people. In October 1941, Germans and Lithuanians took 10,000 Jews from the Kaunas slum for massacre, and 40,000 were sent to Germany for forced labor. ……
Jews were tied together by Lithuanian second-class soldiers in 1941.
The "fortress", which was previously a place where the Soviets held and transported prisoners, was converted into a concentration camp after the German occupation, and on October 29, the massacre of Jews was staged again in the ninth fortress of Kaunas, and a total of 9,200 Jews were executed, of whom 2,007 were men, 2,920 were women, and 4,273 were children.
Regardless of whether men, women, old or young, all of them are brutally tortured and killed, and they become devils at the slightest thought, and some people kill their former neighbors, and after being incited by national sentiments, they become bitter enemies without revenge, and they must be put to death and then quickly, what a terrible thing.
Lithuanian nationalists were very active in the massacre of Jews, not only at home, but also (in October 1941) formed a lithuanian battalion of combat troops and went abroad to participate in the massacre.
The scene of the Kaunas Massacre
Kaunas Holocaust Memorial
In October 1941, a Lithuanian battalion of volunteer-formed combat units, together with the Germans, went to Belarus to sweep up Soviet partisans and executed 9,000 Soviet prisoners of war in Minsk and 5,000 Jews in Slutsk. In July 1942, the Lithuanian battalion went to Poland to participate in german operations that drove all warsaw Jews into concentration camps. Beginning in 1943, a small number of Lithuanians joined the SS Grenadier Divisions formed in Latvia and Estonia to continue fighting the Soviets.
In October 1944, the Soviets defeated Lithuania, which was once again occupied by the Soviets and incorporated into the Soviet union. Looking at Lithuania's behavior during World War II, it was simply "dancing with the devil", and the act of raising a butcher's knife to kill innocent civilians in its own country was only done by Nazi Germany, which was really despicable and hateful.
The massacre of Jews has also become an indelible historical stain on Lithuania, showing that the sins and unbearable aspects of this nation can never be washed away.