June Deportations Triggered Shoah in the Baltics

Few outside the affected nations are aware that Stalin practiced his own “soft genocide” (via deportations) … which was actually much harder on its victims than genocide by bullets or genocide by gas (both dispense far more merciful death than dying from hunger, cold, diseases or being worked to death in the Gulag).

After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the German invasion in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the eastern parts of Poland. From 1939–1941, 1.45 million people who inhabited the region were deported (to highly inhospitable places) by Stalin’s regime. About 350,000 died – 100,000 more than died in Sobibor.

In June 1940 the three independent Baltic countries were occupied by the Soviet Red army and new pro-Soviet puppet governments were installed. Mass deportation campaigns began almost immediately – although most of them took place from 22 May to 20 June 1941, just before the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. They are now called “June deportations” in Baltic states. Over 70,000 were deported – about one-third died in captivity.

The Soviets never trusted Latvians, Lithuanians or Estonians – and for a good reason. But they trusted Jews – also for a good reason. Hence, after the Red Army occupied Baltic countries in June of 1940, local Jews got preferential treatment from the new masters of the land and were placed by the latter in positions of some power (real or imaginary).

The concept of “Judeo-Bolshevist Soviet Union” and anti-Semitism in general were quite popular in Baltic countries at the time – so it is no surprise at all that local political (especially paramilitary) activists decided to avenge genuinely horrific “June deportations” … by wholesale mass murder of Jews as soon as Wehrmacht drove the Soviets out of those lands – and Germans very much encouraged (and supported) those decisions.

In reality, these Jews had nothing to do with June deportations whatsoever… but no one cared about the truth as revenge is usually blind. However, the first mass murder of the “Holocaust by Bullets” (and of Shoah in general) was committed by Germans: on the night of 23 to 24 June 1941, in the Grobina cemetery (eleven kilometers east of Liepaja in Latvia) an SD detachment shot six local Jews for no reason other than them being Jews.

On June 29 the Nazis started forming the first Latvian Auxiliary Police in Jelgava… which promptly murdered about 2,000 Latvian Jews. From 1941 to 1944, around 70,000 Jews were murdered, approximately three-quarters of the pre-war total of 93,000. In addition, thousands of German and Austrian Jews were deported to the Riga Ghetto where they were subsequently unceremoniously shot.

The first mass murder of Jews in Lithuania happened one day after Grobina massacre in neighboring Latvia: in the border town of Gargzdai (one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Lithuania).  Approximately 201 Jews were shot by Einsatzgruppe A that day.

The horrific Kaunas pogrom began two days later and lasted through June 27th. Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe A, told his superiors that by 28 June 1941 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in the surrounding towns.

The most infamous incident occurred at the garage of NKVD Kaunas section – an event known as the Lietukis Garage Massacre. There several dozen Jewish men, allegedly associates of NKVD, were publicly tortured and executed on 27 June in front of a crowd of Lithuanian men, women and children. The incident was documented by a German soldier who photographed the event as a man, nicknamed the “Death Dealer”, beat each man to death with a metal bar.

The Holocaust in Lithuania resulted in the near total eradication of its Jewish population. Of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews at the time of the Nazi invasion, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were killed before the end of the war, most of them between June and December 1941.

Thus, more than 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population was murdered over the three-year German occupation, a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust (except Estonia). Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still hotly debated.

By the end of 1941, virtually all of the 950 to 1,000 Estonian Jews unable to escape Estonia before its occupation by Nazi Germany (25% of the total prewar Jewish population) were killed in the Holocaust by German units such as Einsatzgruppe A and/or local collaborators. It was specifically mentioned at the Wannsee Conference that by January of 1942, Estonia became completely Judenrein.