Seventeen Lithuanian Antisemites to Be Put on Trial in Kovno on Charge of Organising Slobodka Excess

The serious anti-Jewish excesses which occurred at Slobodka near Kovno, in August 1929, the same month in which the Palestine outbreak took place, will come up shortly before the District Court of Kovno, it is announced here. Seventeen members of the antisemitic Fascist Organisation, the Iron Welf, will be put on trial on the charge of having organised the excesses. If found guilty they will each be liable to six years’ imprisonment.

The anti-Jewish excesses in Slobodka, a suburb of Kovno and the seat of the famous Slobodka Yeshiba, lasted from the evening of August 1st. till the night of August 3rd. At about eleven o’clock on Thursday night, August 1st., a big body of armed Fascists took up their position in the centre of Slobodka, and demanded that all people passing by should produce their papers. Where the person happened to be a Jew, he was set upon and beaten. A number of the victims appealed to the police for help, but they were driven off with abuse, and some of the police, too, joined in beating them. The Fascists, meanwhile, went on with their work, the police looking on passively.

65 Jews, including many prominent Slobodka residents, among them the son of the Principal of the Slobodka Yeshiba, were badly man-handled. Under the martial law obtaining in Lithuania, people were not allowed to be out in the streets after 1 a.m., and it was therefore impossible to remove the injured to hospital. In practically every house in Slobodka, people were heard all through the night groaning and meaning, waiting for the morning, to be taken to hospital. When the morning came; many of the injured were detained in the hospitals, and the less seriously injured, after being treated, were allowed to go home. The streets were presently filled with people with battered heads and bandaged faces and limbs.

M. Stashkevitch, the head of the Civil Protection Department of the Lithuanian Police Force, was subsequently dismissed from his position, on the charge that he had been responsible by his negligence for the outbreak. It was argued, however, in certain quarters, that he had merely been made a scapegoat for the misdeeds of much higher personages, and M. Voldemaras, the Prime Minister at the time, was himself accused of having been implicated, although he assured the Jewish representatives, including the Executive of the Council for the Protection of Jewish Rights, that he would spare no efforts to track down the guilty and see that they were punished.

When the Voldemaras regime was overthrown the following month, and the present Premier, M. Tubilis, took office, the new Minister of the Interior, M. Musteikis, dissolved the Iron Wolf organisation, arresting large numbers of its members, following the discovery of a plan to march on Kovno and restore M. Voldemaras to power.