The official origin date of the Lithuanian Holocaust was chosen to put a German hand on the rifle.

The Government of Lithuania are, in my judgment, the worst Holocaust revisionists in Europe. Not because they deny that the Holocaust happened. They do something more useful to power. They accept the corpses, mourn them in public, place wreaths for cameras, and then arrange the calendar, vocabulary, honors, museums, state history, and prosecutions so that Lithuanian perpetrators disappear from the sentence.

Ask the Lithuanian state when its Holocaust began, and it will hand you a date with a German finger on the trigger.

June 24, 1941. Gargždai, a border town eleven miles from the German frontier and one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Lithuania. About two hundred Jewish men and one woman were marched to a ditch and shot. The firing squad was German, drawn from the Tilsit Gestapo and the Memel police, acting on an order that ran up through Walter Stahlecker to the Reich Security Main Office. The historian who directs Lithuania’s state genocide research center, Arūnas Bubnys, calls Gargždai the first massacre of Jews in Lithuania, perhaps the first in the entire Soviet Union. He adds one detail, and he adds it with care. Lithuanians, he says, took no part in the first Gargždai shooting.

Hold that sentence. It is doing the work of the wreath.

I wrote about the wreath. The argument there was that the state laying flowers for the murdered Jews of the Lietūkis garage is the same state that lifts the men who governed in their name into the national pantheon. Lithuania posthumously honored the acting prime minister of the Provisional Government that sat in Kaunas while Jews were being humiliated, beaten, concentrated, and murdered under the authority that government claimed for the restored Lithuanian state.

This is the sequel. It moves the clock back three days, because the beginning has been staged as carefully as the mourning.

Start before the start. The Lithuanian Activist Front documents published before the German invasion demanded a Lithuania purged of Jews so that none would remain. The Front’s manifesto declared the hospitality once extended to the Jews by Vytautas the Great revoked for all time. I set out that paper in What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”. The leaflets were written before a single German crossed the Nemunas. The killing kept their schedule.

June 22. The invasion opened and the uprising opened with it. Gargždai fell that........

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