Kowno (Fort IX)

The Ninth Fort is part of the ring of fortifications built around Kaunas (German: Kowno) by the Russian Empire; work on it began in 1903. After Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania at the end of June 1941, the fort became one of the largest Holocaust sites in the country. According to the Ninth Fort Museum, about 50,000 people were murdered there between 1941 and 1944. About 30,000 of them were Jews; the others included Lithuanians, Poles and Russians.

On 28 October 1941 the Germans held a selection in the Kovno ghetto, the so-called “Great Action”. The next day 9,200 people were taken to the Ninth Fort and shot in a nearby field by German and Lithuanian police units. The report of Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, lists 4,273 children among them. Jews deported from Germany, Austria, France and Czechoslovakia were also shot and buried there, most of them in November and December 1941; the last large group of French citizens was killed in May 1944.

In the second half of 1943 the Germans set prisoners to exhume and burn the remains of the victims to destroy the evidence. On 25 December 1943, 64 members of this forced work unit escaped, which meant the crimes could not be fully hidden. The Kovno ghetto itself was liquidated in July 1944.

From Berlin

Berlin's sixth deportation transport (train Da 26) left Bahnhof Grunewald on 17 November 1941. Its passengers had first been held in the assembly camp in the Levetzowstraße synagogue. It was one of five transports from the Reich, the others from Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna and Breslau, that were planned for Riga but sent to Kowno instead. Figures for its size range from 812 to 1,006 people. Their average age was 46, and 25 were children aged ten or younger. The deportees were not told where they were going, and after four days in overcrowded carriages they arrived in Kaunas on 21 November 1941. Their luggage was taken to the Gestapo in Kaunas.

On 25 November 1941 all the deportees from Berlin were shot at Fort IX, together with the Jews deported from Munich and Frankfurt am Main. Karl Jäger's report records 2,934 people murdered that day: 1,159 men, 1,600 women and 175 children, “resettlers” from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. On 29 November a further 2,000 deportees from Vienna and Breslau were murdered at the same place. No survivors from the Berlin transport are known.

1 transport from Berlin brought 1,006 people here; at least 0 of them are known to have survived.