Lithuania’s commemoration of Lithuanian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust does not stand alone. It performs a function. It directs attention toward the few who saved Jews and away from the much larger fact that Lithuania was one of the earliest and the single most efficient killing ground of the Holocaust.

That is the deflection.

The issue is not whether Germany initiated the Holocaust. Of course it did. The issue is whether Lithuania’s political and memory institutions use German command as a device to shrink Lithuanian agency. They do.

The formula is crude and repetitive:

Germany planned, therefore Lithuania is reduced to backdrop.

Germany occupied, therefore Lithuanian participation is treated as secondary.

Germany led, therefore Lithuanian conduct becomes morally diluted.

That substitution is false. A chain of command does not erase the hands that carried it out.

Lithuania was not a passive landscape across which German policy simply moved. The killing began before the arrival of Nazis and was undertaken with exceptional speed, and comprehensive implementation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen and German Order Police units, aided by Lithuanian auxiliaries, murdered most of Lithuania’s Jewish population between June and November 1941, before the January 1942 Wannsee Conference formalized and coordinated what mass murder in Lithuania had already demonstrated in practice. By the end of 1941, only about 40,000 Jews remained alive in ghettos and labor camps out of a prewar Jewish population of roughly 220,000 to 250,000.

That timeline matters. It destroys the........

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