EUROPE’S ONLY SURVIVING JEWISH PARTISAN FORT
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VILNIUS—There have been two new developments in the saga of Germany’s Forty-Fifth Armoured Brigade, to be established in the forests adjacent to the remains of Europe’s last Jewish partisan fort, where around one hundred escapes from the Vilna Ghetto lived and fought the Nazis and their local collaborators during the Holocaust. See report.
The 20 June updates:
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There has been no public response from the Brigade or the German Foreign Ministry to date, but a hastily organized major PR event was organized with the state-financed official Lithuanian Jewish Community to do a meaningful and emotional remembrance service at an old Jewish cemetery in a shtetl, which Brigade members kindly cleaned up in a most welcome gesture. It also served well for PR, photo-ops and laudatory press coverage (e.g. here and here). But this old cemetery has nothing to do with the Holocaust (other than it is not maintained because the buried folks there have no living descendants because of the Holocaust), and such nice gestures, ceremonies, services, soap-and-water cleanups of prewar Jewish remnants do not obviate the moral and historical imperative that now falls upon the new Brigade and the German Foreign Ministry: to organize recognition, restoration and preservation of Eastern Europe’s last anti-Nazi Jewish fort, which A Higher Hand has put right in the same forest, smack next to the Brigade. And what a grand opportunity to fulfil Fania’s last wish. Verily: whatever the physical fate of the last Jewish anti-Nazi fort right in the same forest as the new German Brigade in Lithuania, there is one thing you can be sure of: Photo-ops and nice gestures at prewar sites will not make the history and spirit of Fania’s fort go away. For until dealt with, openly and honorably, it will forever haunt the Brigade and its masters…
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The congruence of the Jewish Partisan Fort with the new Brigade’s training ground has indeed been noted in an online essay (19 June 2025) by German scholar Clemens Heni.