Lithuania’s own state history identifies the police who drove Vilnius’s Jews into the ghetto. Its current Holocaust chronology makes them anonymous.

The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania tells readers that on September 6, 1941, Vilnius Jews “were moved to the ghetto by the police.” Eighty-five years later, the police still have no name on that page. The same entry names Hans Hingst, German city commissioner; Franz Murer, his aide for Jewish affairs; and Karolis Dabulevičius, the Lithuanian mayor. Its exact wording says Murer, together with Dabulevičius, selected the ghetto site in the Old Town. When the mass removal begins, the institution switches from names to a generic noun: “the police.”[1]

Lithuania’s Supreme Court has held that international crimes may be denied or minimized through omission as well as direct statement; I set out that ruling in Omission Can Be Denial. Lithuania Said So. Here the omission is of the perpetrators, and it can be tested against the Centre’s own scholarship rather than inference.

Arūnas Bubnys’s chapter on the Vilnius Ghetto supplies the identity the public chronology withholds. The Centre first published the chapter in Lithuanian in 2011 and reissued it in English in 2020. It says, “The transfer went according to plan,” then identifies the Lithuanian public police and self-defense unit soldiers as the forces that carried it out. Bubnys’s own introduction acknowledges that Nazi mass murder in Lithuania could not have proceeded at such speed and scale “without the active assistance of the Lithuanian administration and the local population.”[2]

The chronology itself is credited to Arūnas Bubnys. He took office as the Centre’s Director General in April 2021. The same historian wrote both texts: the chapter that names the Lithuanian public police and the chronology that erases them.[3]

The police chief wrote it down

Antanas Iškauskas was chief of the Vilnius City and District Police. His September 9, 1941 report describes the operation from inside the command structure. The English reproduction, headed “Chief of Police / City & Region of Vilnius,” appears at p. 44 of Lithuania: Crime & Punishment, no. 5. It begins: “The ghetto campaign in Vilnius was begun at 6 a.m. September 6th.”[4]

Vilnius was divided by police-station districts, then into quarters and sub-quarters. Guards were placed on roads out of the city to prevent Jews from escaping. All seven police stations began simultaneously. Police evicted Jews from their homes; self-defense soldiers drove the columns toward designated places. Property left behind was locked and sealed.[5]

Iškauskas recorded the completion times: 9 p.m. for the first precinct, 11 p.m. for the second, 5 a.m. on September 7 for the third, 8 p.m. for the fourth and fifth, 10 p.m. for the sixth, and 7 p.m. for the seventh. The latest listed completion came twenty-three hours after the reported 6 a.m. start.[6]

Police planned sectors, blocked escape routes, entered apartments, expelled families, directed columns, sealed homes and collected keys. The Centre’s footnote and the Melamed reproduction point to the same file in the Lithuanian Central State Archives, f. R-689, ap. 1, b. 10. Bubnys cites leaf 37; the reproduced report carries leaves 28–30. The state holds the folder.[7]

Where forty-six thousand comes from

Arad’s 2005 editorial introduction to Ponary Diary, 1941–1943 gives the figure directly: about 40,000 Jews forced into the two ghettos and about 6,000 sent to Lukiškės in the space of twenty-four hours, with the transfer attributed to Lithuanian municipal police and a Lithuanian police battalion under Iškauskas. Arad describes the unit as a police battalion; the report’s own heading identifies its author as chief of police for the city and district of Vilnius. His later monograph, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, gives a more granular breakdown: approximately 29,000–30,000 to Ghetto No. 1, 9,000–11,000 to Ghetto No. 2, and about 6,000 to Lukiškės.[8]

Bubnys’s 2020 chapter gives approximately 29,000 people in the Large Ghetto and approximately 9,000 in the Small Ghetto. The Centre’s own note adds that estimates vary but usually do not exceed 40,000 ghetto residents. The Centre’s figures........

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