Algirdas Jonas Klimaitis (1923 in Kaunas[1] – 1988 in Germany) was a Lithuanian para-military commander.
When the Nazi Germans entered Lithuania, in 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, he formed a military unit of roughly 600 members, which was not subordinate to the Lithuanian Activist Front or the Provisional Government of Lithuania,[2] and engaged in firefights with the Soviet army for the control of Kaunas. On the evening of June 23, most of the city was in the hands of the insurgents.[3]
On the night of 25–26 June, a pogrom led by Klimaitis unit was instigated by Nazi Security Police (Sipo) and SD (Sicherheitsdienst or Security Service, the intelligence arm of the Nazi Party), under SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker.[4] By 28 June, 1941, according to Stahlecker, the commander of the German Einsatzgruppe A, 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in surrounding towns in the region.[3] Klimaitis' men destroyed several synagogues and about sixty Jewish houses. Some sources claim that the number of victims in Stahlecker's report were probably exaggerated.[2].
After the war, Algirdas Klimaitis, moved to Hamburg, Germany, where he died in 1988.[5]
See also
References
- ^ Iš naujausios Lietuvos istorijos By D. Kuodytė, Lietuvos Politinių kalinių ir tremtinių sąjunga
- ^ a b (Lithuanian) Arūnas Bubnys. Lithuanian Security Police and the Holocaust (1941–1944)
- ^ a b Zvi Gitelman (ed.) Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ISBN 0253333598. Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 97.
- ^ "Extracts from a Report by Einsatzgruppe a in the Baltic Countries". jewishvirtuallibrary.org. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Einsatz_Baltic.html. Retrieved 2008-08-06.
- ^ (Lithuanian) Vestuvių generolai ir Lietuvos saugumas
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