The Kovno Garage Massacre - Lithuanian nationalists clubbing Jewish Lithuanians to death, 1941

 The Kovno Garage Massacre - Lithuanian nationalists clubbing Jewish Lithuanians to death, 1941

Lithuanian nationalists clubbing Jewish Lithuanians to death. Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, June 27, 1941.

In June and July 1941, detachments of German Einsatzgruppen, together with Lithuanian auxiliaries, began murdering the Jews of Lithuania. Groups of partisans, civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered the Lithuanian territories.

Over a thousand Jews perished over the next few days in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania

A rogue unit of insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis and encouraged by Germans from the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, started anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas (Polish: Kovno) on the night of 25–27 June 1941.
Over a thousand Jews perished over the next few days in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred in what was later known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre.
During the Lietūkis Garage Massacre, carried out before the invading Germans had actually set up their administration, 40-60 people were killed and publicly humiliated in the process. Jews were forced to gather on the afternoon in the courtyard of a garage at 43 Vitautas Avenue, in the center of the city.
Some of them were killed with shovels, iron bars, or by other barbaric methods. Lithuanian children were lifted onto the shoulder of their parents to catch a glimpse of the “Death Dealer of Kovno”, a sight that one German regular army officer later described as the most frightful event he’d witnessed in the course of two world wars.