Kaunas Fortress

On 7 July 1879 Tsar Alexander II issued the edict ordering a fortress at the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris. Generals Nikolay Obruchev, Konstantin Zverev and Ivan Volberg planned seven forts and nine batteries in concentric loops; construction began in 1882 with about 4,000 workers. The forts were brick, usually five-sided, banked with earth ramparts worked into the relief, with batteries on the hills between them. The first phase was completed in 1887, the fortress was designated first class that year and Otto Klem became its first commandant.

The Ninth Fort cost 850,000 roubles on its own: a trapezoid with two armoured watchtowers and cannon casemates lined with cork to deaden the noise of firing. A scheme of 1912 for twelve further forts by 1917 stopped when fighting began on the Eastern Front; by 1915 only the Ninth met the new standard and the Tenth was part-built. The complex then covered 65 square kilometres.

General Karl Litzmann aimed the German attack at the sector between the Nemunas and the Jiesia, where the three oldest forts stood. The 40th Reserve Corps brought some 40,000 trained men and heavy mortars, 420 mm "Bertas" and Gamma howitzers, against a garrison of about 60,000, largely untrained conscripts and older reservists. Fighting opened on 7 August 1915. Bursting 420 mm shells choked the defenders with concrete and brick dust, food and weapons ran short, and some units lost up to three-quarters of their strength. On 16 August the Germans took the third stationary battery, then Fort II, then Forts I and III; the Eighth and Ninth forts held longer. On 18 August, after eleven days, the fortified zone was broken. The Germans took the city, some 20,000 Russian soldiers and about 1,350 guns; the commandant, General Vladimir Grigoryev, left hastily.

Lithuania regained independence on 16 February 1918, and material the Germans had not taken went to resupply the Lithuanian army and to build the armoured train Gediminas. Rebuilding the works for modern warfare was judged too vast an expense: the armament was dismantled and the trenches filled with scrap iron. The forts were parcelled out to civil bodies — the Sixth and Ninth as prisons, the Central Archive in the Seventh, and a gas chamber installed in the gunpowder depot of the First Fort to execute condemned prisoners.

The USSR occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and the fortress was used for interrogations and to hold political prisoners. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and German forces entered Kaunas on 24 June. The Sixth Fort became a prisoner-of-war camp for Red Army soldiers. Kaunas had a Jewish population of between 35,000 and 40,000; few survived the Holocaust in Lithuania.

On 6 July 1941, acting under SS orders, Lithuanian auxiliary police units shot nearly 3,000 Jews at the Seventh Fort. On 18 August, in the "intellectuals action", over 1,800 Jews were shot at the Fourth Fort. On 28 October the residents of the Kaunas Ghetto were summoned for the "Great Action", and over 9,000 men, women and children were taken to the Ninth Fort and executed. More than 5,000 Jewish deportees from central Europe were executed at that fort. About 60 prisoners escaped from it in December 1943; they had been assigned to excavate and burn the bodies of earlier victims as part of Aktion 1005, and thirteen of them were able to document that attempt to hide the evidence of the mass murders. The Red Army captured Kaunas on 1 August 1944. Counts of the dead differ: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes about 18,500 Holocaust victims in detail, while other sources give 30,000 Jewish dead and a total of about 50,000.

The Ninth Fort was dedicated as a museum in 1958, its first exhibition opening in 1959; a 32-metre memorial to the victims was raised in 1984. Soviet forces held most of the complex until their withdrawal was completed in 1993, after which Lithuanian military bases were established at several forts. The museum there, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, has drawn about 100,000 visitors a year since the early 2000s; the Seventh Fort was sold in 2007 and reopened by its new owners as a fortification and military museum. In the 2000s parts of the complex were held by the ministries of Culture and Defence, the State Property Fund and the city. Unexploded ordnance remains on the site despite a 1995 clearance of about 1.9 tonnes of explosives. The complex is the most complete of the surviving Russian Empire fortresses.