Jacob Gens
Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics.
When Germany invaded Lithuania, Gens headed the Jewish hospital in Vilnius before the formation of the ghetto in September 1941.
Gens and his policemen helped Germans in rounding up the Jews for deportation and execution in Ponary in October–December 1941 and in liquidating several smaller ghettos from late 1942 to early 1943.
His policies, including the attempt to save some Jews by surrendering others for deportation or execution, continue to be a subject of debate and controversy.
[2] Gens was transferred into the army reserves in 1924 and moved to Ukmergė to teach physical education and the Lithuanian language at a Jewish school.
[6] He appears to have wanted to transfer from the infantry into the Lithuanian Air Force, but at the time it was accepting only unmarried men.
[8] Gens was a Zionist, and was a follower of the Revisionist Zionism school,[9] which called for most European Jews to immediately emigrate to create the State of Israel in what were then the League of Nations mandates of Palestine and Trans-Jordan.
[14] The German Army entered Vilnius on 24 June 1941,[15] as part of their invasion of Russia in World War II.
In early September 1941, the Germans murdered most of the Judenrat, which left the Jewish community leaderless before and during the relocation of the Jews into two ghettos in Vilnius.
[16][d] Officially, the duties of Gens and his policemen were to carry out German and Judenrat orders and provide law enforcement for the inhabitants of the ghetto.
Included in their first duty, and considered by the occupiers as the single most important task, was the uncovering of any anti-German activity in the ghetto.
[20] The police force comprised around 200 men at the start,[21] and Gens appointed Salk Dessler as his deputy commandant.
[23] The police force included many other former Betar members, and this may have been because Gens favored people coming from his own political leanings.
[21] From late October to December 1941, the ghetto was subject to Aktions, selections of people for deportation and execution in Ponary.
Friend had not been involved in Vilnius' Jewish organizations prior to the German invasion, and did not have much support from the ghetto's inhabitants.
[37] In June 1942,[38] Gens took the responsibility for carrying out the death sentence imposed on five men from the ghetto who had been convicted of murder.
Weisskopf tried to increase his own power base by negotiating directly with the German Army and not going through the ghetto's Labor Department.
The ghetto police then searched Weisskopf's house, found contraband, arrested him, and jailed him for four days, after which he lost his position running the workshop.
Gens' policy was that when no Germans were present at the gates, the policemen would do minimal searches and would allow the smuggling of food and other necessary items.
[42] On 10 July 1942, the Judenrat of the Vilnius Ghetto was dissolved by Franz Murer, the German deputy for Jewish Affairs, for incompetence and ineffectiveness.
[54] As part of his efforts to secure support, he held a "political club" of sorts in his home, bringing together some of the community leaders for colloquia to discuss Jewish history, recent events, and the fate of the Jews.
He reduced the entire command to 100 older residents, and on 26 July handed over 84 elderly, mostly terminally ill or disabled, who were then executed by the Nazis.
[57] The Jewish administration employed over 1500 people in September 1942,[43] including some intellectuals who were appointed to jobs to ensure their survival.
[59] During one of these consolidations, on 25 October, Gens gave up 400 old people in return for saving the remaining 600 Jewish residents of Oszmiana.
The FPO tried to prevent the formation of other resistance groups in the ghetto, mainly because they feared that it would increase the chances of German discovery as well as competition for scarce resources.
[67] In July 1943, Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel demanded that Gens hand over Yitzhak Wittenberg, a leader of the FPO.
[81] Gens justified these cultural activities by claiming that the Jewish administration "wanted to give man the chance to be free of the ghetto for a few hours, and we succeeded in this.
[84][85] Elvyra Gens was opposed to her husband taking a leading role in the government of the ghetto and urged him to "pass" as a Lithuanian.
Both Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, early historians of the Holocaust, argued that without the help of the Judenrats, the Germans would have been hampered in their extermination efforts.
Holocaust historiography treated people such as ... Jacob Gens ... as instruments of destruction in the hands of the Nazi killing machine. ...
