The Shoah (1939–1945)
Shooting of Gargždai
24 juin 1941·Gargždai
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
On the third day of the invasion, a unit of the security police from Tilsit crosses the border and shoots the Jewish men of the town beside a pit dug near the cemetery; the execution is considered one of the first mass killings of the Shoah by bullets.
Gargždai is located a few kilometers from the East Prussia border, and it is from Tilsit that the unit operating there arrives in the first days of the invasion. The Jewish men of the town are gathered, led to the edge of a pit dug near the cemetery, and shot; the women and children, locked in barns, are killed in the following weeks. The massacre opens the series of border executions carried out by the security police in western Lithuania.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Lituanie
Christoph Dieckmann, *Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen* ; Yitzhak Arad, *The Holocaust in the Soviet Union*.