Lithuania answers evidence of institutional participation with a defense of collective innocence because collective innocence is easier to prove than institutional innocence.

Source note: This article relies on the published historical studies and archival references identified in the footnotes. Where Lithuanian records are presented in English, the wording follows the cited published translations.

Lithuania has an answer ready whenever the machinery of the Holocaust is traced through Lithuanian offices, police departments, battalions, prisons and files.

Not every Lithuanian was a killer.

Nazi Germany directed the extermination campaign.

Neither proposition answers the charge.

The documentary accusation is not that an entire people became murderers. It is that an organized Lithuanian fascist faction, already seeking German support for anti-Jewish violence before the Soviet occupation, captured enough of the local coercive apparatus in July 1941 to become indispensable to the German killing program.

The nation did not have to become an apparatus. A prepared faction could capture one.

Lithuania’s alibi changes the defendant. It turns evidence against named factions, offices and commands into an accusation against every Lithuanian, defeats the invented accusation, and declares the institutions absolved.

The charge Lithuania invents

In 1938, Not 1940, I documented the prehistory. By 1939, Lithuanian Voldemarists were seeking German money and weapons for pogroms against the Jews of their own country. Their antisemitism did not begin with the Soviet occupation of June 1940. Their organization did not begin with Germany’s invasion in June 1941. The political program, the German connections and the appetite for violent ethnic purification were already present.

Two years later, they no longer needed to ask Berlin for weapons. They needed offices.

On the night of July 23-24, 1941, figures associated with the Lithuanian Nationalist Party and the old Voldemarist movement attempted to force Lithuania’s Provisional Government from office. They failed. The government refused to resign and remained nominally in place until the German civil administration dissolved it in August.

A failed overthrow sounds like a failed coup.

The radicals did not capture the cabinet. They captured crucial parts of the machinery beneath it: military command, police leadership, battalion command, security structures, prison administration and the appointment channels through which armed men could be selected and deployed.

The government survived. Its command structure changed underneath it.

The Voldemarists did not need a plebiscite. They did not need every Lithuanian to approve. They did not need every policeman to be an ideological fascist or every soldier to join for the same reason. They needed authority over uniforms, weapons, police records, detention cells and armed formations.

They acquired enough of it.

The coup beneath the government

The Lithuanian Provisional Government had proclaimed the restoration of independence before German forces entered Kaunas. Germany never recognized it as a sovereign government. The occupiers wanted Lithuanian administrative and police assistance without permitting an independent Lithuanian center of power.

During the first weeks of occupation, officials associated with the former authoritarian regime of President Antanas Smetona occupied important positions in the reconstituted Lithuanian structures. Colonel Jurgis Bobelis became military commandant of Kaunas. Andrius Butkūnas commanded the Tautinio darbo apsaugos battalion, known as the TDA. Colonel Jonas Šlepetys served as minister of the interior.

These men were not defenders of Jewish equality. Before the Voldemarist action, Jews were already being beaten, detained and murdered. TDA personnel had........

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