How Holocaust collaborators remade themselves as anti-Communist refugees, used the Lithuanian émigré community as cover, and walked into the American establishment.

Stasys Žakevičius died peacefully in Los Angeles in 1973. Seven years earlier a federal court in the same city had made him a citizen under the name Zymantas-Zakevicius, and when he was buried beside his wife and father-in-law nothing in that quiet American ending recorded what his name had meant to the Jews of Vilnius in 1941.

Bronys Raila died in Los Angeles too, in 1997. Before the war he ran the propaganda arm of the Lithuanian Activist Front and helped write the political language that readied Lithuania for the destruction of its Jews. In America he became an influential émigré journalist and a Radio Free Europe broadcaster. In 1996, independent Lithuania awarded him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Gediminas.1

The propagandist and the administrator reached the same city. What their two lives share is a postwar arrangement that Lithuania has still not honestly faced.

I write this from Los Angeles, and that is not incidental to why I am writing it. The men in this account helped persecute and destroy Lithuanian Jews of exactly the kind I come from. I came to this particular history late, while studying for my doctorate, and found in it a shape I had only ever seen in fragments. It is harder to study once you understand that men who helped prepare and administer the destruction of Lithuanian Jewish communities like my family’s lived out their last years, comfortably, in your own city.

This account rests principally on Mallory Needleman’s 2019 University of Haifa thesis, American Intelligence, Lithuanian Collaboration, and Holocaust Atrocities in Lithuania: The Case of John F. Mazionis and Stasys Žakevičius, together with the published materials it identifies. Where archival detail appears below, it is reported as Needleman documented it from the CIA name file, the State Department personnel records, and the immigration and naturalization records she examined.2

When the Germans took Vilnius in June 1941, Žakevičius became chairman of the Vilnius City Committee. On 28 June he broadcast a radio address calling the Jews “the backbone of the bloody Bolshevik terror” and announcing that they would be eliminated from the political, economic, and cultural life of Lithuania. The speech ran the next day in Naujoji Lietuva.3

The same paper carried an order announcing that 60 Jews and 20 Poles had been seized as hostages and held at Lukiškės prison, with a threat of further arrests if the population did not comply. Six of the 60 Jewish hostages were released on 22 July. The remaining Jewish hostages were murdered at Paneriai. The order was co-signed by the German military commander of Vilnius, and the Germans’ own internal report named Žakevičius as the leader of the Lithuanian city committee.4

On 4 July he issued a further announcement that ordered Jews to wear identifying badges, barred them from the sidewalks, and imposed a night curfew, warning that disobedience would bring the severest punishment. Another order required every resident to register as Aryan or Jew and to name everyone living in the home.5

None of this was private........

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