What Lithuania Means When It Says Jews “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished” and Lost Herrings examined Lithuania’s vocabulary: Jews “vanished,” “perished,” or were “lost,” as if no one registered them, robbed them, beat them, marched them, shot them, or buried them. In Before Lithuania Prosecuted Fridman, It Warned Me, I described the written warning Lithuania placed before it later prosecuted Artur Fridman. This article supplies the name that vocabulary hides and that warning protects: Pranas Lukys-Jakys.

Lithuania has laws against “distortion,” prosecutors willing to pursue speech, and state institutions that lecture the world about occupation, resistance, and historical dignity. It now seeks to punish Artur Fridman for a Facebook post about Lithuanian nationalist memory. Fridman is presumed innocent. The prosecution itself is the state act at issue.

But there is a problem.

Germany tried Pranas Lukys, alias Jakys. Lithuania did not.

That single fact damages the architecture Lithuania has built around its own collaborators. The full documentary record on Lukys-Jakys is now assembled in a public forensic register.

This is not an exoneration of Germany. Germany initiated, directed, and administered the genocidal project. The narrower point is more damning for Lithuania: even postwar Germany convicted this Lithuanian perpetrator. Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews.

Pranas Lukys-Jakys was the Lithuanian Security Police chief in Kretinga, a Voldemarist nationalist actor, and a hands-on murderer inside the Einsatzkommando Tilsit killing zone. A West German court identified him, tried him, convicted him, and sentenced him. Twice. A senior German Holocaust historian has separately documented him personally shooting prisoners as they ran across a camp yard.

Germany convicted a Lithuanian perpetrator for participation in murder. Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews. Lithuania now seeks to punish a Jew for speech about the same universe of Lithuanian nationalist memory. This is not historical protection. It is state memory laundering.

The Lithuanian Security Police Chief

Lukys-Jakys was born in 1900 in the Raseiniai region. He served in the Lithuanian armed forces after the First World War, entered the criminal police of the Republic of Lithuania in 1923, and became tied to the Voldemarist political current – the radical nationalist milieu that looked to Nazi Germany and supplied personnel to the Lithuanian Activist Front.

After the Soviet occupation in 1940, he fled to Germany. The contemporaneous Stapo Tilsit report of 1 July 1941, signed by Hans-Joachim Böhme, identifies him as an agent of the Tilsit section of the German security forces. When the Wehrmacht entered Lithuania on 22 June 1941, he returned with the German advance and resumed a Saugumas role in the Kretinga district.

He stood where Lithuanian local knowledge, lists, nationalist violence, German police structures, and Jewish vulnerability converged. He supplied lists. He helped identify alleged communists and Jews. He worked through the local apparatus in which German security police, Lithuanian police, and white-armbanded Lithuanian auxiliaries made the killings executable.

On 24 June 1941, men aged fourteen to sixty were ordered to the Kretinga marketplace. Werner Hersmann of the Tilsit SD and Lukys separated alleged communists and Jews from the crowd. Jews were beaten and confined. The next........

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