The Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, suffered some of the highest Jewish mortality rates of the entire Holocaust. Around 95 per cent of the pre-war Jewish population of Lithuania was murdered. Around 90 per cent of Latvia’s. The Jewish population of Estonia, which had been only around 4,500 to begin with, was almost entirely destroyed. The killing was almost entirely the work of the Einsatzgruppen and their local auxiliaries, in the open air, in the second half of 1941 and through 1942. Most of the Jews of the Baltic were killed before the death camps had been built. They never reached deportation.
Before the war
The Baltic Jewish communities were among the oldest in Europe. Lithuanian Jewry traced itself to the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania and had been one of the great centres of Jewish learning. The city of Vilnius, called Vilna in Yiddish, was sometimes called the Jerusalem of the North. Around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania in 1939. Latvia had around 95,000, mostly in Riga, Daugavpils and Liepaja. Estonia had a smaller community concentrated in Tallinn and Tartu.
The Baltic states had been independent between 1918 and 1940. The Jewish communities had had cultural autonomy and Jewish schools, newspapers and political movements operated freely. Antisemitism was a feature of the inter-war political culture, particularly in Lithuania, but the violence was generally social and economic rather than physical. The communities entered the war in their existing form.
The Soviet occupation, 1940 to 1941
Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the three Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 and incorporated into the USSR in August. The Soviet occupation was severe. Tens of thousands of Baltic citizens were arrested, deported to the Gulag, or shot. Property was nationalised. The Jewish communities were not specifically targeted by the Soviet occupation, though some Jewish businesses were nationalised along with non-Jewish ones. Some young Jews took up minor positions in the Soviet administration, in particular numbers in Lithuania, where the Soviet authorities were short of locally-recruited personnel and Jews were sometimes among the few who would work for them. This brief period would prove disastrous for the Jewish community: when the Germans invaded in June 1941, local Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian populations associated the Jews with the Soviet occupation and used the moment of German arrival to settle accounts.
The German invasion, June 1941
The German army crossed into the Baltic on 22 June 1941. The killing began within days, sometimes within hours of the Soviet retreat. In Kovno (Kaunas) on 25 to 27 June 1941, before the Germans had established control of the city, a Lithuanian mob beat to death around 50 Jewish men in a public square in the Slobodka district. The pogrom is one of the most-documented spontaneous local killings of the Holocaust because German army photographers recorded it; the photographs survive. Similar local pogroms took place at Lwow (Lviv), Jedwabne, Riga and dozens of smaller places.
The Einsatzgruppen followed the army into the Baltic and began the systematic killing. Einsatzgruppe A operated in the Baltic theatre, with subdivisions assigned to each of the three states. Local auxiliary units were recruited within days: the Lithuanian Activist Front, the Latvian Arājs Commando, and Estonian volunteer units. By the end of 1941, around 80 per cent of Lithuanian Jews and a similar proportion of Latvian Jews had been killed.
Lithuania
Lithuania saw the most extensive local participation in the killing. The Lithuanian provisional government formed in the days after the German arrival passed antisemitic legislation immediately. Lithuanian volunteer units carried out the round-ups and a substantial share of the actual shooting. Ponary, the killing site outside Vilnius, was operated almost entirely by Lithuanian auxiliaries under German supervision. The Vilna Jewish community of around 60,000 was reduced to under 3,000 by the end of 1942.
The Lithuanian killing has been particularly difficult for the country to confront in the post-Soviet period. The men who shot Jews at Ponary in 1941 included people who became prominent in Lithuanian emigre nationalist circles after the war. The Lithuanian state, since regaining independence in 1990, has struggled to reconcile its narrative of Soviet-era victimhood with the reality of Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust.
Latvia
The Latvian record is similar. The Arājs Commando, around 300 to 1,500 men under the lawyer Viktors Arājs, operated as the principal Latvian auxiliary unit attached to Einsatzgruppe A. The unit carried out the Rumbula massacre in late November and early December 1941, in which around 25,000 Riga Jews were murdered in two days, and dozens of smaller killings across Latvia and into the occupied Soviet territories. Arājs was tracked down to West Germany after the war, tried in Hamburg in 1979, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Estonia
The Estonian Jewish community of around 4,500 was small, urban and largely concentrated in Tallinn. By the time the Germans occupied Estonia in late summer 1941, around 3,000 Estonian Jews had managed to flee east into the Soviet Union. The remaining 1,000 to 1,500 were almost entirely murdered by Estonian volunteer units and the Einsatzgruppen by the end of 1941. The German administration declared Estonia Judenfrei (free of Jews) in early 1942, the first occupied territory to be so declared. Around 10,000 Jews from elsewhere in Europe were later deported to Estonia and killed in the camps the Germans built there, particularly Klooga and Lagedi.
The post-war record
The three Baltic states became Soviet republics again in 1944 and the Soviet authorities investigated and tried a number of local collaborators. Many were sentenced to long terms in the Gulag or executed. Many others escaped to the West, where they were generally not pursued during the Cold War, particularly in the United States and Canada, both of which received large Baltic emigre communities. The post-1991 independent Baltic states have engaged with their wartime record at different speeds. Lithuania has been the slowest. Latvia has been faster. Estonia, with the smallest pre-war Jewish community and the smallest local auxiliary participation, has had less to confront and has done so more readily.
The Baltic Jewish communities today number a few thousand each, mostly the descendants of post-war Soviet Jewish migrants from elsewhere in the USSR rather than the descendants of the pre-war communities. The pre-war communities, for practical purposes, were destroyed.
See also
Sources
- Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941-1944, Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996
- Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- USHMM: The Baltic States