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 institutional fiction that Lithuanian participation was marginal, confused, or incidental. Mass murder was not some late bureaucratic phase that arrived only after long German consolidation. It was immediate. It was public. It was local. Lithuania did not wait for Berlin’s bureaucratic authorization. The speed itself is evidence. The comprehensiveness and totality of implementation proves the local ideology.

The familiar defense is that German occupiers organized the genocide and Lithuanian structures merely operated under coercion or subordination. But “organized by Germany” is not the same as “carried out only by Germany.” The Holocaust in Lithuania required roundups, confinement, guarding, transport, expropriation, pit security, shooting, and post-murder redistribution of property. Those functions were not performed by abstractions. They were performed by men with names, uniforms, offices, and local knowledge. Men, whose names are often known – some of whom are knowingly and deliberately elevated to Lithuania’s pantheon of national heroes. Jonas Noreika is just one example.

That is why the language of deflection matters so much. Once the state can reduce Lithuania to a stage on which only Germans truly acted, everything else becomes easier. The country can mourn Jews without confronting Lithuanian initiative. It can condemn Nazism while preserving honor for local collaborators. It can praise rescuers while treating perpetrators as ambiguous patriots trapped by history.

It can commemorate without reckoning.

The factual record does not permit that escape.

Lithuanian armed and administrative participation in the destruction of Jews is not a fringe claim. It is part of the documented history of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states plainly that German units were aided by Lithuanian auxiliaries in the mass murder of Jews. That point alone is enough to destroy the sanitized state narrative that presents Lithuanian agency as incidental.

And this is not merely a historical dispute about emphasis. It is a dispute about moral architecture. If Lithuania can persuade outsiders that Germans did the killing while Lithuanians mostly suffered, watched, or occasionally rescued, then the national story survives intact. If, however, Lithuania must confront that local actors participated broadly in confinement, plunder, and killing, then the heroic national mythology collapses.

That is why the rescue narrative is useful. It does not need to deny German guilt. It only needs to rebalance moral attention. It takes a true fragment and uses it to obscure a larger truth. It says, in effect: look here, at the righteous few; do not look there, at the killing fields, the police battalions, the local administrations, the seizures of Jewish property, the men who signed the orders, and the society that adapted itself so quickly to Jewish disappearance.

The state’s preferred substitute is German primacy. The historical fact is shared implementation.

Article 1 addressed the fraud of using 0.04 percent to launder 96.4 percent. Article 2 addresses the companion fraud: using German command to launder Lithuanian participation. These are not separate tactics. They are parts of the same machine.

One shrinks the perpetrators by moving blame upward.

The other enlarges the rescuers by moving virtue outward.

Together they produce a false picture assembled from selective truths.

This is why the case of Jonas Noreika matters so much. He is not only a man at the center of a dispute over one biography. He is proof of the state’s preferred method. Administrative orders tied to Jewish confinement and property seizure exist under his authority. Yet instead of treating that record as disqualifying, Lithuanian institutions have worked to blur, soften, and ultimately invert his role. That inversion only works in a memory culture already committed to minimizing local participation and elevating anti-Soviet credentials above Holocaust conduct. The broader problem is therefore not Noreika alone. It is the national reflex that makes Noreika defensible.

A country that honestly confronted its Holocaust record would say: Germany initiated the genocide, and Lithuanians participated in it extensively; rescuers existed, but they were rare; later anti-Soviet activity does not erase earlier anti-Jewish conduct; signed orders matter more than patriotic legend. Lithuania does not say that with clarity because saying it would force a break with the mythology on which too much of its post-Soviet memory politics still depends.

So the rescue commemoration is not just sentimental cover. It is strategic cover. It helps displace the central issue: Lithuania was not merely where the Holocaust happened. It was the place where it happened fastest, with extraordinary local assistance, and that fact still threatens the country’s preferred image of itself and the falsified narrative it has so carefully manufactured.

The honest formula is not difficult: Germany initiated. Lithuania participated. Rescue was rare. Murder was nearly total.

Everything else is deflection.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)