Lithuania published the deployment map. Foreign courts named the men. The state never produced the ledger.

How many Jews did Lithuanians murder?

The honest answer is that no complete figure exists. Not because the evidence disappeared. Not because the formations are unknown. Lithuania has researched the battalions, mapped their deployments, published personnel studies and acknowledged their participation in the Holocaust. What it has not done is assemble the names, actions and victims into a national accounting.

The question begins inside Lithuania. Karl Jäger’s report credited Einsatzkommando 3 with the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, but Jäger also explained that his small German mobile cadre could not have completed the work without Lithuanian partisans, police and civil authorities. They gathered Jews, transported them, guarded the roads and pits, and participated in the shootings.

Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe.

But Lithuanian participation did not stop at Lithuania’s border.

Lithuanian police battalions were deployed across occupied Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia and elsewhere. Lithuania’s own national encyclopedia says that twenty-six battalions were formed, with approximately 20,000 men serving in them. Its deployment summary places most of the specifically located battalions outside Lithuania. The same encyclopedia acknowledges that........

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