The Basketball Game & Murderous Prize (from an eyewitness account).

On July 6, 1941, just over a week after the launcch of the German invasion of Lithuania, a basketball match took place in the city of Kaunas. A local Lithuanian team – composed chiefly of Lithuania’s national team that had earlier won the European nations championship – faced a side drawn from the invading German forces. The local side, of course, won. The Lithuanian organizers of the game came up with a novel idea for rewarding the victorious athletes. The prize they received for beating the Germans was the opportunity to murder Jews.

The day after the game, the team was taken to the Seventh Fort where the Lithuanians had incarcerated around seven thousand local Jews who had been abducted from their homes and off the city streets. They subjected their Jewish prisoners to the most horrendous abuse, murdering hundreds of them daily until there were none left alive, save for thirty survivors, most of whom were veterans of Lithuania’s war of independence. As a reward for their efforts, each member of the victorious basketball team was allowed to shoot dead ten Jews. It should be noted that the abduction of the Jews, their imprisonment at the fort, torture and subsequent murder was ordered by Colonel Jurgis Bobelis, the military governor of Kaunas.

After the war, the small number of survivors of this atrocity began to testify to the horrors they experienced as prisoners at the Seventh Fort. One such witness was Itzhak Nementchik, who provided a graphic account of the ten days of torture at the fort, which culminated in the mass murder by the Lithuanians of the Jews held there. Nementchik himself was released at the last moment along with the small group of “fortunate” veterans. His testimony appeared in the survivors association periodical “Fun Letzn Churban” (Accounts from the Final Destruction), which was published in Munich in 1948.

Most members of the Lithuanian basketball team that murdered Jews fled Lithuania together with the Germans as the Red army advanced. Once in Germany, they eventually found their way to one of the refugee camps in the American occupied zone where they stayed until moving on to the United States and other Western countries. They participated in several more basketball games before leaving Germany.

As is known, two of the members of this infamous team, the Norkus brothers were recently discovered in the United States and proceedings have been initiated to bring them to try to bring them to trial