Nazi Germany brought the command to kill. German police shot 201 people at Gargždai on June 24, 1941; five days later Heydrich issued his first numbered operational order. Within weeks eight to ten Germans were directing mass murder through a far larger local apparatus.

On June 24, 1941, German police murdered 201 people at Gargždai, two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Five days later, Reinhard Heydrich issued Einsatzbefehl Nr. 1, the first of his numbered operational orders to the Einsatzgruppen commanders and the Higher SS and Police Leaders. The interval does not prove that one massacre dictated one order. It establishes that the numbered order followed field experience, and historian Konrad Kwiet supplies the connection the dates alone cannot. He describes the mass shootings in Lithuania as a testing ground in which techniques and practical experience were rapidly converted into a wider extermination policy.

Kwiet goes further. He records that Heydrich’s principal guidelines and operational orders were dispatched only after firsthand experience of murdering Jews in Lithuania. Senior SS and police officials exchanged information about the executions, their progress, their anticipated escalation, and the experience acquired. The killing system was tested in the field and then converted into procedure.

The accusation must remain exact. Nazi Germany did not learn antisemitism from Lithuania. It did not arrive without genocidal purpose, armed formations, directives, or authority to kill. German officials initiated the first border massacres. German units supplied the first firing squads. German commanders determined the targets and controlled the campaign.

Authorship, however, is not capacity. The operations in Lithuania showed how quickly an exterminatory command could become a repeatable system when a small German directing force was joined to prepared political networks, local intelligence, police offices, armed formations, vehicles, prisons, files, and men willing to use them.

Germany brought the command

The German chain is explicit. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent directives from Berlin on June 23 and 24. Hans-Joachim Böhme, head of the State Police office in Tilsit, issued the first killing orders. German Order Police marksmen carried out the Gargždai shooting. Wehrmacht personnel volunteered at Kretinga. Twenty-two Luftwaffe conscripts reinforced the execution squad at Palanga.

No serious account can reverse that responsibility. The murder program was German from conception through command. The first border executions were German-staffed operations, not examples of a handful of Germans directing a large Lithuanian firing force. That model emerged later.

The concession does not absolve the Lithuanian apparatus. It identifies what changed. In the first days, local collaborators searched for Jews and communists, rounded them up, delivered them to German units, and guarded them at collection points until the German killers arrived. Within days, Germans began incorporating Lithuanians into the execution commandos. Identification, detention, guarding, transport, and shooting were being joined into one process.

The local component was not improvised after the invasion. Kwiet records prewar exchanges of intelligence between German security agencies and Lithuanian counterparts, including lists of common enemies. Lithuanians who fled to Germany after the Soviet annexation were recruited as agents and informers before Operation Barbarossa. They returned as guides, translators, and liaison officers connecting German units to local collaborators.

The strongest finding concerns Kazys Škirpa and the National Committee of Lithuania, formed in November 1940. Kwiet records that the committee linked restoration of a Lithuanian state to removal of Lithuania’s Jews. In the same account, Kwiet states that such........

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