Kovno Ghetto

Kovno Ghetto
Monument of the Kaunas Ghetto
LocationKaunas, German-occupied Lithuania
DateSummer 1941 to autumn 1943
Incident typeImprisonment, mass shootings, forced labor, starvation, mass deportations to Auschwitz and conversion into a labour camp
Perpetrators Germany
ParticipantsWaffen-SS
OrganizationsSchutzstaffel, RSHA
CampAuschwitz
Victims29,000
Survivors3,000
Ghettos Reichskommissariat Ostland (marked with red-gold stars)

The Kovno Ghetto was a ghetto established by Nazi Germany to hold the Lithuanian Jews of Kaunas (Kovno) during the Holocaust. At its peak, the ghetto held 29,000 people, most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps, or were shot at the Ninth Fort. About 500 Jews escaped from work details and directly from the ghetto, and joined Jewish and Soviet partisan forces in the distant forests of southeast Lithuania and Belarus.