The Holocaust in Lithuania

Holocaust in Lithuania resulted in the near total destruction of Lithuanian Jews living in Lithuania. Over 200,000 out of the 210,000 - 250,000 Jews (about 95% of the Lithuanian Jewry) who were resident on what was Lithuanian territory as of October 1939 perished before the end of the Second World War; most in the the short period of June-December 1941. The Holocaust is considered by some to have begun in Lithuania.

It has been suggested that a factor contributing to this aspect of the Holocaust was that the occupying Nazi German administration cleverly fanned anti-Semitism by falsely connecting the earlier Soviet regime's annexation of Lithuania to the Jewish community. A small part of the Nazis' design drew upon the physical organization, preparation and executions of the murders by local Lithuanian auxiliaries of the Nazi occupation regime.

Background

Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (the Soviet Union had annexed Lithuanian in 1940), some people in Lithuania believed Germany would grant the country independence and in order to appease the Germans expressed significant anti-semitic sentiments. Nazi Germany which has seized the Lithuanian territories in the first day of the offensive used this situation to its advantage and indeed in the first days permitted a Lithuanian government to be established (see Lithuanian 1941 independence and Lithuanian Activist Front). However, when the territory was fully occupied, the Lithuanian Provisional Government was disbanded and banned (around August and September 1941), and some of its supporters ended their days in concentration camps.

The desctruction of Lithuanian Jewry

The German killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, followed the advance of the German army units and immediately begun organizing the murder of Jews. Most Lithuanian Jews perished in the first months of the occupation, before the end of 1941. Before the German invasion, the Jewish population was estimated at 210,000-250,000. About 80,000 Jews were killed by October; about 175,000 by the end of the year. This massive scale of killings meant that the Holocaust and the Final Solution are considered by some scholars to have begun in Lithuania. Majority of Jews in Lithuania did not wait in ghettos^[a] nor were they sent to the Nazi concentration camps which by then were just in the preliminary stages of operation; they were shots in pits near their places of residence with the most infamous mass murders taking place in the Ninth Fort near Kaunas and the Ponary Forest near Vilna. By 1942 about 45,000 Jews survived in Lithuanian ghettos and camps.^[a]

The significant support for the "de-Jewification" of Lithuania coming from the Lithuanian populace has contributed to the quick destruction of Lithuanian Jewry.

Participation of local populace

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1941 Nazi propaganda antisemitic "Jewish Bolshevism" poster in Lithuanian language equating Stalinism and Jews^[b]

One of the crucial factors in the Lithuanian aspect of the Holocaust was that while the Nazi German administration allowed and supported the extermination of the Jews, most of the physical organization, preparation and exectutions of the murders was carried out by local Lithuanian auxiliaries of the Nazi occupation regime. Groups of partisans, civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered the Lithuanian territories. An unit of Lithuanian insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis and encouraged by Germans (from Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst) started anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas (Kovno) on the night of June 25-June 26, 1941 (the Kaunas pogrom); 1500-5000 Jews perished over the next few days in Kaunas and nearby settlements in what became the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

On June 24 1941 the Lithuanian Security Police (Lietuvos saugumo policija), subordinate to Nazi Germany's Security Police and Nazi Germany's Criminal Police, was created. It would be involved in various actions against the Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime. At least some of the civil German commanders thought that the zeal of the Lithuanian police battalions surpassed their own by far. The most notorious Lithuanian unit participating in the Holocaust was the Lithuanian Sonderkommando Squad (Ypatingasis būrys) from the Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) area which killed tens of thousands Jews, Poles and others in Paneriai (the Ponary massacre) and other places. Another Lithuanian organization involved in the Holocaust was the Lithuanian Labor Guard. Many of Lithuanian supporters of the Nazi policies came from the fascist Iron Wolf organization.

Combination of several factors serves as an explanations for the massive scale of Lithuanians involvement. Those factors included: national traditions and values (including anti-antisemitism, common throughout contemporary Europe, and more Lithuanian-specific desire for "pure" Lithuania - the incompatibility of the Jewish population within the perceived model of the Lithuanian nation-state), religion (Orthodox Catholic, in this case), severe economic problems (leading to killing of Jews over personal property) and tragically opposed political orientations (Lithuanian Jews supported the Soviet regime in Lithuania during 1940-1941^[b]). By the time of German invasion, the Jews were blamed for virtually every misfortune that befall Lithuania.

The intense involvement if the local population, in large numbers, became a defining factor of the Holocaust in Lithuania. It should be noted that not all of the Lithuanian populace supported the killings. Out of Lithuanian population of several millions, only a small part - a few tens of thousands - took active part in the killings while at least one thousand risked their lives sheltering the Jews (Israel has recognized 513 Lithuanians as “Righteous Among the Nations” for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust).

Remembrance in modern Lithuania

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Lithuanian Army honor guard laying wreath at memorial for Jewish victims of Ponary massacre

Since Lithuania regained independence in 1990, Lithuanian government has on a number of occasions stated a commitment to commemorating the Holocaust, combating anti-Semitism, and bringing Nazi-era war criminals to justice. NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia have declared that "Lithuania has made slow but significant progress in the prosecution of suspected Lithuanian collaborators in the Nazi genocide". Lithuania was the first of the newly independent post-Soviet states to legislate the protection and marking of Holocaust-related sites. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Lithuania, on September 20, 2001, the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) held a session during which Alfonsas Eidintas, the historian nominated as the Republic's next ambassador to Israel delivered an address dealing with an accounting of the annihilation of Lithuania's Jews.

There have however been criticism that Lithuania is too slow to deal with that issue; in 2001 Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Wiesenthal Center, criticized the Lithuanian government on its unwillingness to persecute Lithuanians involved in the Holocaust. In 2002 the Simon Wiesenthal Centerdeclared its dissatisfaction with the Lithuanian government’s efforts and launched a controversial "Operation Last Chance" offering monetary rewards for evidence that leads to the prosecution of war criminals; this campaign has encountered much resistance in Lithuania and the other Baltic countries.

There has also been a debate about the place of the Holocaust in the Lithuanian national memory; Lithuanians have historically denied their willing national participation in the Holocaust or labelled the Lithuanian participants in genocide as fringe extreme elements. The memories of that time and the discussion of those events in Jewish and Lithuanian historiographies are quite different, although Lithuanian historiography in the past two decades have improved, with the works of scholars such as Alfonsas Eidintas, Valentinas Brandišauskas and Arūnas Bubnys, among others, being positively reviewed by the Western and Jewish historians. The contentious issues involve the role of the Lithuanian Activist Front, the Lithuanian Provisional Government and participation of Lithuanian civilians and volunteers in the Holocaust. The issue remains controversial to this day; in February 2008 Chairman of Yad Vashem has alarmingly stated that "destructive historical revisionism seems to be taking place in Lithuania".

Notes

a ^{^} Three major ghettos in Lithuania were estabilished: Vilna ghetto (with the population of about 20,000), Kaunas Ghetto (with 17,500) and the Shavli Ghetto (with 5,000); there was also a number of smaller ghettos and labor camps.

b ^{^} The propaganda line of Jewish Bolshevism was used intensively by Nazis in instigating antisemitic feelings among Lithuanians. It built upon the pre-invasion antisemitic propaganda of anti-Soviet Lithuanian Activist Front (which seized upon the fact that more Jews than Lithuanians supported the Soviet regime) and helped to create an entire mythos of Jewish culpability for the sufferings of Lithuania under the Soviet regime (and beyond). A LAF pamphlet read: "For the ideological maturation of the Lithuanian nation it is essential that anticommunist and anti-Jewish action be strengthened [...] It is very important that this opportunity be used to get rid of the Jews as well. We must create an atmosphere that is so stifling for the Jews that not a single Jew will think that he will have even the most minimal rights or possibility of life in the new Lithuania. Our goal is to drive out the Jews along with the Red Russians. [...] The hospitality extended to the Jews by Vytautas the Great is hereby revoked for all time because of their repeated betrayals of the Lithuanian nation to its oppressors." An extreme faction of the supporters of Augustinas Voldemaras, a group which also worked within the LAF, actually envisioned a racially exclusive "Aryan" Lithuanian state. With the start of German occupation, one of Kaunas newspaper - 7 Laisve (Towards Freedom) commenced a spirited antisemitic crusade, reinforcing the identity of the Jew with communism into popular consciousness: "Jewry and Bolshevism are one, parts of an indivisible entity."

See also

• Chiune Sugihara
• Collaboration during World War II
• Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force (1944)

External links

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lithuania and the Jews: The Holocaust Chapter, Symposium Presentations, 2005, Washington DC, includes:

• Foreward by Paul A. Shapiro and Carl J. Rheins
• Lithuanian Collaboration in the “Final Solution”: Motivations and Case Studies by Michael MacQueen
• Key Aspects of German Anti-Jewish Policy by Jürgen Matthäus
• Jewish Cultural Life in the Vilna Ghetto by David G. Roskies

• Katy Miller-Korpi, The Holocaust in the Baltics
• Alfred E. Senn, REFLECTIONS ON THE HOLOCAUST IN LITHUANIA: A NEW BOOK BY ALFONSAS EIDINTAS, Lituanus, Volume 47, No. 4 - Winter 2001
• Memorial to Murdered Jews of Lithuania (w/ photos of the memorial)

Further reading

• Arūnas Bubnys, The Holocaust in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944, Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2005, ISSN 9986-757-66-5 abstract
• Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust, Versus Aureus, 2003, ISBN 995596
• Alfonsas Eidintas, A “Jew-Communist” Stereotype in Lithuania, 1940-1941, Lithuanian Political Science Yearbook (01/2000), pp. 1-36, [3]
• Harry Gordon, The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania, University Press of Kentucky, 2000, ISBN 0813190088
• Rose Lerer-Cohen, Saul Issroff, The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941-1945: A Book of Remembrance, Gefen Booksm, 2002, ISBN 965229280X
• Dov Levin, Lithuanian Attitudes toward the Jewish Minority in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: The Lithuanian Press, 1991–1992, # Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, pp. 247-262, 1993, [4]
• Dov Levin, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania, Berghahn Books, 2000, ISBN 9653080849
• Josifas Levinsonas, Joseph Levinson, The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania, The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2006, ISBN 5415019022
• Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, Darius Staliūnas, The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, Rodopi, 2004, ISBN 9042008504
• Alfred Erich Senn, Lithuania 1940: Revolution from Above, Rodopi, 2007, ISBN 9042022256