Language:
English
Year of publication:
1991
Titel der Quelle:
Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte
Angaben zur Quelle:
20 (1991) 363-392
Keywords:
Jews
;
Nazi concentration camps
Abstract:
Attempts to reconstruct the history of the killing site near Kovno, especially the massacre of thousands of Jews from Germany in November 1941. Examines testimonies of Kovno Jews and Lithuanian guards, Einsatzgruppen reports, and accounts by Jewish prisoners who were employed in digging ditches, each holding 3,000 bodies, and, in October-December 1943, in exhuming and burning these in order to obliterate the traces. Between June-October 1941, about 20,000 Jews from the Kovno ghetto were shot at the fort. In November 1941, transports totalling ca. 5,000 German deportees were driven directly from the railway station to the fort. Asserts that, contrary to legend, they were deceived until the end and did not put up a struggle. also examines the case of 5,000 Jews from Vienna for whom the civil administration ordered the ghetto to prepare in January 1942 but who never arrived. Hypothesizes that the SD routed them to another killing site and that the incident reflects the rivalry between civil authorities and the SS and the improvisation on the local level in carrying out top-level orders to rid the Reich of Jews in whatever way was quickest.
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