Part 1 of 4: The day Lithuanians could no longer murder Jews with impunity

For decades, Lithuanian diplomats have repeated a carefully constructed phrase when addressing audiences about the Holocaust: Jews murdered by Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators. I have listened to this formula for years. I have spent thirty years documenting Lithuanian Holocaust history. I consider myself highly educated on this subject. And even I was confused by what they meant when they said “Soviets” murdered Jews. The phrase made no sense to me — until I found the yiskor books and the Koniuchowsky testimony collection, and understood that the formula is not an error. It is an engineered deception, calibrated with exquisite precision for audiences who do not know any better.

Every word in that formula performs a specific concealment. “Nazis” hides Lithuanians. During the war, Lithuanians murdered Jews — often without German supervision, often before German authority was consolidated, and with a ferocity that the Nazis themselves protested. By attributing the murders to “Nazis,” Lithuania erases its own agency from the wartime record.

“Soviets” hides Lithuanians. After the Nazis retreated, Lithuanian violence against Jews continued. Jews who survived the war and returned home were assaulted, robbed, and murdered by their Lithuanian neighbors. Lithuania attributes this postwar violence to the “Soviet period,” as though Soviet reconquest caused it. It did not. Lithuanians murdered returning Jews because surviving Jews were unacceptable. The Soviet period is the timestamp. The Lithuanian population was the murderer.

“Collaborators” hides the word “Lithuanian.” This is the most deliberate element. The collaborators were Lithuanian. The self-described partisans who seized control of towns in June 1941 were Lithuanian. The police battalions that carried out mass shootings across the country and into Belarus were Lithuanian. The neighbors who looted Jewish homes, raped Jewish women, and burned Jewish girls with lit cigarettes were Lithuanian. Lithuania’s formula is engineered so that the word “Lithuanian” never appears in a sentence about the murder of Jews.

This formula is not delivered carelessly. It is delivered at Holocaust commemorations, at diplomatic receptions, at Jewish institutional events, and before audiences of Jews who receive it in good faith. Lithuanian diplomats have rehearsed this phrase before the Simon Wiesenthal Center, before the American Jewish Committee, before Knesset delegations. Every delivery is a performance. Every performance depends on the audience not knowing that the Nazis protested Lithuanian savagery, that Lithuanians murdered Jews after the Nazis left, and that “collaborators” means Lithuanians.

The Author of Elimination

The doctrine behind the murders was not improvised. It was authored by Kazys Škirpa, Lithuania’s Ambassador to Germany and putative Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, before a single German soldier set foot on Lithuanian soil. Škirpa’s Lithuanian Activist Front published its manifesto: “The Lithuanian Activist Front, by restoring the new Lithuania, is determined to carry out an immediate and fundamental purging of the Lithuanian nation and its land of Jews.” The March 1941 pamphlet elaborated: “The more Jews abandon Lithuania under these circumstances, the easier it will be later to achieve complete liberation from the Jews.” The hospitality extended to Jews by Vytautas the Great was “revoked for all times.”

As early as December 1940, Škirpa’s program called for driving “all Jews of Lithuania” out, “to there would be none of them at all in Lithuania.” Jews who did not leave voluntarily would find conditions made impossible for their survival. That is not an immigration policy. That is a death sentence issued by a head of state in waiting. Škirpa submitted his proposals to Nazi strategist Peter Kleist in July 1940 and to the German Military High Command in January 1941 — proposing the elimination of Jews before Germany adopted it as policy. Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has noted that Hitler decided to murder the Jews of occupied Europe only after 65,000 Lithuanian Jews had already been murdered by mid-September 1941. The possibility that Lithuanian enthusiasm influenced the German decision has never been investigated by Lithuania.

Škirpa remains one of Lithuania’s most honored figures. Pro-Škirpa demonstrations took place in Vilnius in 2024. His revocation of hospitality to Jews has never been revoked. The hero’s doctrine still stands.

Lithuania’s own Genocide and Resistance Research Centre characterized this program as containing “manifestations of anti-Semitism” — reducing a doctrine of ethnic cleansing to an incident. Its General Director, Birutė Teresė Burauskaite, insisted that the LAF “proposed to solve ‘the Jewish problem’ not by genocide, but by the method of expulsion.” Historian Saulius Sužiedėlis rejected this: “Such ethnic cleansing, which is considered a crime against humanity, was one of the main points of the LAF’s programme, not a manifestation of it.”

What Even the Nazis Could Not Stomach

In Slutsk, Belarus, in October 1941, Lithuanian police battalions were given the opportunity to murder the city’s Jewish population. Commissioner General Wilhelm Kube wrote a formal protest to Himmler: the town was “a picture of horror.” He described “indescribable brutality” by the Lithuanian murderers. Wounded people buried alive worked their way out of their graves. A Nazi commissioner described this as “such a base and filthy act that this incident should be reported to the Fuehrer.” Nazi memos used the words “ghastly” and “sadistic” to describe Lithuanian conduct. When the architects of industrial murder describe your conduct as sadistic, the historical verdict requires no further interpretation. These are the people Lithuania calls “collaborators” — the word chosen specifically so that “Lithuanian” never appears in the sentence.

The State That Prosecutes Questions

It is reprehensible to deny or minimize Soviet crimes, Nazi crimes, or Lithuanian crimes — I reject all three. Lithuania denies, distorts, inverts, minimizes, and institutionally suppresses the record of Lithuanian crimes. It operates an entire government department — the LGGRTC — dedicated to the fraudulent management of Lithuania’s own history. Its own Seimas-created expert council described the LGGRTC as “de jure a research center, de facto a bureaucratic institution.” Lithuania’s audacity is without precedent: it criminally prosecutes a Jewish citizen, Artur Fridman, for allegedly distorting Soviet crimes — while the Lithuanian state maintains an institutional apparatus dedicated to the distortion of Lithuanian crimes on an industrial scale. How dare Lithuania accuse a Jew of distorting history when Lithuania built a government department to do precisely that with its own. Poland passed a comparable law criminalizing speech about Polish responsibility for the Holocaust and reversed the criminal provisions within six months under international pressure. Lithuania has not reversed. It has escalated — from abstract legislation to the criminal prosecution of a named Jewish citizen.

Fridman posted on Facebook on May 9, 2024, while visiting a cemetery honoring his grandfather — a Jew who fought Nazis. Lithuania responded with two criminal charges, a travel restriction, and a 220-page indictment. The formula holds: when Lithuanians murder Jews, the word “Lithuanian” is replaced with “collaborator.” When a Jew asks why, the full weight of the Lithuanian criminal justice system descends on him. The phrasing is precise. The targeting is precise. The deception is precise. And it has worked on Jewish audiences for thirty years.

In Part 2, I will present what the yiskor books and the Koniuchowsky testimony collection document: the specific murders — before, during, and after the Nazi occupation — that Lithuania’s formula was designed to conceal. The screams heard across towns. The storms that delayed executions only because the murderers did not want to get wet. The Jewish mother and baby murdered on their own doorstep after liberation. These were not Nazi crimes. These were not Soviet crimes. These were Lithuanian crimes.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)