IX fortas

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IX fortas ( Fort IX or Ninth Fort , Devintas fortas ) in Kaunas is a fortification of the Kovno Fortress , which was completed immediately before the First World War and which today serves as a memorial for the victims of Stalinist persecution and National Socialist mass murder .

construction

The IX. Fort was built from 1902. This happened as part of the expansion of the fortifications, with which the city of Kaunas (then Kovno ), which then belonged to Tsarist Russia , was to be expanded into a military fortress. In 1924, a branch of the Kaunas prison was established in the fort.

Occupation time

In 1940 and 1941 the fort served the Soviet NKVD as a prison. During the German occupation in World War II , the IX. At least 18,500 Jewish people from Lithuania and across Europe were murdered. After the German invasion, between the end of June and July 1941, thousands of Jews were deported to the fort, mistreated and shot by Lithuanian guards. On October 28, 1941, the so-called “great action” was carried out in the course of which 9,000 Jews, half of them children, were killed in the fort.

Between November 25 and 29, 1941, Jews from Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, Vienna and Munich were shot in the fort. The murder of these 4,934 deportees is documented in the Jäger report . It is largely assessed as an unauthorized action taken by Friedrich Jeckeln or Karl Jäger without Himmler's orders or consent .

In August 1943, as part of Aktion 1005 , the order was given to open the mass graves there and to remove the bodies. The first graves on the west side of the fort were dug by hand, and a grab excavator was added later. By July 1944, up to 70,000 corpses are believed to have been earthed and burned at the stake. The remaining prisoner detachment was - as is usual in such actions - shot as a keeper of secrets. However, 63 prisoners broke out in December 1943, 14 of whom reached the ghetto and reported there.

After the end of the war

After the end of the Second World War, the fort was used as a prison again for a few years. From 1948 onwards, businesses settled there and made structural changes in the fort. In 1958 a museum was established in the fort. The exhibitions in the fort not only deal with the events in Kaunas, but also deal with the entire Holocaust in Lithuania .

literature

Christoph Dieckmann: German occupation policy in Lithuania 1941-1944. Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0929-6 , Volume 2.

Web links

Commons : IX Fort  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Museum in the 9th Fort Kaunas Museum , accessed on March 10, 2013.
  2. ↑ 1939–1944 Timeline – Kovno, United States Holocaust Museum ( Memento of the original dated December 8, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed March 10, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ushmm.org
  3. ↑ a b Israel Gutman et al. (Ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust . Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Vol. 2, p. 804.
  4. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945: a commented chronology. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 98-109.
  5. ^ Christoph Dieckmann: German occupation policy in Lithuania 1941-1944. Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0929-6 , Vol. 2, p. 962.
  6. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 2, pp. 695-717.

Coordinates: 54 ° 56 ′ 42 ″  N , 23 ° 52 ′ 12 ″  E