A cupboard. A pair of warm boots. A desk. A bookshelf. Two wooden beds with mattresses. A wardrobe. A buffet. A mirror. Two bedside tables.

Rūta Vanagaitė found the list in the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. It recorded Jewish property acquired by Lithuanians during the German occupation. One of the names on it was Jonas Noreika, then head of Šiauliai County, and the address given was Vilnius Street 260.[1]

Nothing on that list is remarkable. That is the difficulty with it. These were not gold bars in a Reich vault or canvases routed to Göring’s collection. They were the contents of somebody’s rooms, and the man whose name sits beside them administered the county from which their owners were being removed.

Noreika took over Šiauliai County from Ignas Urbaitis on August 3, 1941. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has returned to that date repeatedly, because several anti-Jewish measures in the county were signed while Urbaitis still held the post.[2]

The distinction is legitimate. Documents signed by Urbaitis are Urbaitis’s. It does not help much, because the documents that belong to Noreika are not scarce.

On August 22, 1941, he issued Order No. 962 to the district heads and mayors of Šiauliai County. It transmitted an instruction from Gebietskommissar Hans Gewecke: all Jews and half-Jews in the county’s towns and districts were to be in Žagarė by August 29, with the local municipalities responsible for moving them. The order also dealt with what they would leave. Lists of their property were to be sent to the county chief.[3]

People and possessions travelled up the same administrative chain, in the same document, over the same signature.

The Žagarė mayor reported back on August 29 that 949 Jews had arrived from elsewhere in the county. By late September, Bubnys puts the Jewish population of the town at 2,402, against 3,164 non-Jews. On October 2 the Jäger Report recorded the execution there of 2,236 Jews: 633 men, 1,107 women, 496 children.[4]

Silvia Foti, Noreika’s granddaughter, has written at length about the signatures, and there is no point repeating her.[5] The address is a different kind of evidence.

Dieckmann and Vanagaitė devote a chapter of How Did It Happen? to Jewish property. They called it “Robbing the Living.”

The looting acquired an administrative system. Lithuanian municipal administrations, police departments, orphanages, schools and hospitals took delivery of houses, land, livestock, furniture, medical equipment, radios, blankets and dishes out of Jewish homes.

Then Dieckmann mentions Noreika: the head of the Šiauliai district moved into an empty Jewish house with his family and lived there.[6]

Vanagaitė follows with what she found at the Academy library. Noreika at Vilnius Street 260, and beside the address the household goods listed above.[7]

Dieckmann explains how goods like these reached Lithuanian homes. Once the German and Lithuanian administrations had taken what they wanted, the remainder went to public auction in cities, towns and villages.[8]

An auction does not convert the transaction back into commerce. The owners had lost control of their property because they were Jews. They had been ordered out. What they left was inventoried by an administration that had assigned itself the authority to decide what would be stored, allocated, given away or sold. A receipt establishes that money changed hands. It establishes nothing about consent.

Three weeks after the Žagarė order, the machinery got more specific. On September 10 Noreika issued........

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