Photo: Füsun Kavrakoğlu, 2026.
On 24 June 1941, Vilnius was occupied by German troops and from the early days of the Nazi occupation, the remaining Jews in the city were persecuted and murdered: by September 1941 several thousand Jews had already been murdered.
The Vilnius Ghetto was established on 6 September 1941 on the initiative of Vilnius City Commissioner Hans Hingst. Up to the end of October 1941, there were two ghettos in Vilnius – Large (about 30,000 prisoners) and Small (9,000-11,000 prisoners). Most of the Jews imprisoned in the Large Ghetto were qualified specialists and skilled workers, while the Small Ghetto was the ghetto of the incapacitated (the elderly, frail and sick). By the end of 1941, German and Lithuanian police units and SD special squad (Sonderkommando) (special unit refers primarily to the Jewish forced-labor units in Nazi extermination camps during World War II who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria) had killed about 30,000 Vilnius Jews in Paneriai Forest, located outside the city. During the mass killing actions, all the residents of the Small Ghetto were killed and this ghetto ceased to exist.
During the period of December 1941-March 1943 there were no mass killings of ghetto prisoners as the demand for labor force in the German war economy increased. During this period the ghetto became a kind of “state within a state”, with its own government, police, various workshops, forms of spiritual and cultural life and institutions. The Jewish Council (Judenrat) was the highest authority of ghetto self-government. Various departments were subordinate to the Jewish Council: Labor, Health, Social Aid, Food and Housing, etc. The Labor Department was the most important in the ghetto. The administration of the ghetto related the hope of survival of the ghetto prisoners to their economic usefulness to the Germans. About 14,000 (two-thirds) of the prisoners of the ghetto were working in various factories, workshops and labor camps. In July 1942, pursuant to a decision of the Nazi government, the Jewish Council was dismissed and Jakob Gens was appointed the ruling authority in the ghetto, the “Ghetto Representative”.
On 23-24 September 1943, the occupational authorities liquidated the ghetto. About 14,000 Vilnius Ghetto prisoners were deported to labor and concentration camps in Estonia, Latvia and other countries. Around 2,000-3,000 Jews still worked at various institutions in Vilnius, which were important to Germans. In early July 1944, with the Red Army approaching Vilnius, however, the last remaining Jews in Vilnius were killed. Only about 2,000-3,000 Vilnius Jews of 58,000 survived the Nazi occupation.
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