Victims' belongings exhumed from mass graves at Fort IX
Introduction
Invasion
Mass Murder
Ghettoization
Inside the Ghetto
Secret Archives
Final Days
Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Though some Jews initially saw the ghetto as a refuge from arbitrary arrests and killings, they quickly learned otherwise. Soon after sealing the ghetto, the Germans launched waves of new terror, forcing people at gunpoint to hand over their valuables. Members of SS-Colonel Karl Jäger's Einsatzkommando 3 systematically killed segments of the population in so-called actions. Local auxiliaries helped carry out the murders, which took place in Forts IV, VII, and IX. Part of a circle of fortifications built by the Russians during the tsarist period, these forts became the primary killing sites for Kovno's Jews. The Jewish council was ordered to assemble the entire population on October 28 under penalty of death. The ghetto's inhabitants gathered in Demokratu Square at 6:00 a.m. and stood all day in the sleet without food or water. Each family had to walk before SS-Sergeant Helmut Rauca, who waved them either to the left or to the right. By day's end, he had "selected" 9,200 people, including more than 4,000 children. They were held in a fenced-off area of the ghetto until the next morning, when they were all marched off to Fort IX. There, German Einsatzgruppen and local Lithuanian auxiliaries forced them to undress and lie down in previously dug ditches. They were shot at close range.
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Fort IX, August 1944.
"At the fort they were forced to undress, and in groups of 300 they were pushed into the ditches that had been dug. There they were killed--shot with automatic rifles and machine-guns. Those who were doomed were kept naked in the cold for several hours. The children were thrown first into the ditches, often into water. Then the women were shot at the edge of the ditch, so that they would fall in. Then the men... Many were buried alive. All those who did the killing were drunk." Elena Kutorgiene, Lithuanian rescuer, diary entry, October 30, 1941.
The road to Fort IX
Ghettoization
Esther Lurie, Demokratu Square, watercolor and ink, undated
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