Before the pit came the police file

On July 5, 1941, a Lithuanian troop commander asked what should be done with nine captured Jews and their families, described as suspected of communist affiliations. Michael MacQueen reproduced the surviving document on page 39. Stasys Čenkus, commander of the Saugumas for all Lithuania, wrote the answer in the margin: “Liquidate them at the first opportunity.” The families were included. The paper required no rifle. It made the rifle inevitable.

Eighty-five years later, Arūnas Bubnys remains acting director of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC. The Seimas appointed him on April 22, 2021, for a five-year term. On June 11, 2026, after that term expired, the Seimas rejected the Centre Council’s proposed successor, Donata Kabelkė, by secret ballot: 28 votes in favor, 43 against, and 18 abstentions (archived copy). The consequence is not speculative. The institution remains under the acting authority of the historian whose published record contains the contradiction at the center of this article.

Bubnys’s 1997 article, “Vokiečių ir lietuvių saugumo policija (1941–1944),” appeared at pages 160–175 of Genocidas ir rezistencija. Near the end of the Lithuanian text, he wrote: “LSP vaidmuo naikinant žydus buvo pagalbinis ir mažareikšmis” — “the LSP’s role in exterminating Jews was auxiliary and minor” (author’s translation from the Lithuanian). That phrase does not appear in the English summary on page 175.

Six years later, Bubnys published “Lietuvių saugumo policija ir holokaustas (1941–1944)” at pages 22–39, with its English summary at pages 39–40. The published English summary says that the Lithuanian Security Police became “an integral part of the repressive mechanism,” closely cooperated with German security agencies, organized mass arrests and transports to prisons and massacre sites, and in some provincial districts supervised the massacres themselves.

Scholars may revise conclusions. A state institution must identify which conclusion it accepts. The LGGRTC continues to publish both accounts while their author remains its acting director.

American federal courts, reading Lithuania’s own archives, did not treat searches, arrests, interrogations, confiscations, prison files, and transfers as minor. They reconstructed the institution that delivered Lithuanian Jews to death. The shooting pit was the final station. The police file arrived first.

The murder was administered.

The office behind the gun

Nazi Germany designed and directed the extermination of Europe’s Jews. German Security Police and SD officers controlled the occupation and supplied the genocidal command. That does not dissolve Lithuanian agency. It identifies the command under which Lithuanian institutions made the murder executable.

The clearest description of the arrangement was written by the Germans, and........

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