Before Jonas Noreika signed the orders during the Nazi occupation, he had already published an antisemitic political program in 1933

My grandfather’s 1933 pamphlet is public, scanned, and readable in the original. Lithuania has not revoked the state decoration it conferred on him in 1997. The replacement plaque installed on the Wroblewski Library in 2019 has been taken down for renovations, not repudiated, and is to go back up when the work is finished. The honor has been interrupted by construction. It has not been withdrawn.

The Document He Published in Independent Lithuania

Fifty cents. Printed in Kaunas. The author’s name across the cover in capitals: JONAS NOREIKA.

He was 23, and there was no occupier in the country. Eight years later he was chief of Šiauliai district and signed orders establishing a Jewish ghetto and expropriating Jewish property. I am his granddaughter.

I was raised on the hero, and I have written before about how that ended. This is the document the defense of him cannot absorb.

Internal evidence dates the pamphlet to after Germany announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations on 14 October 1933. Antanas Smetona’s Lithuania was authoritarian, but it was independent and at peace. The Soviets were seven years away.

No German official dictated the text. No foreign occupier compelled my grandfather to write it. He published it under his own name and priced it for sale.

An Antisemitic Program in His Own Words

The pamphlet opens with a parable of a ship drifting through violence and storm. Then it arrives in Lithuania, and then at Jews.

My grandfather argues that Jews hold too much of the country’s commerce and capital. He asks what becomes of Lithuanians if the money and the land end in Jewish hands, and answers that Lithuanians will be forced to scatter.

From there it becomes instruction.

He demands an oath against buying from non-Lithuanians. He forbids the sale of land to a Jew at any price and calls the seller a traitor. He writes, “Once and for all, we will not buy from Jews.”

Trade is condemned not merely as unfair dealing but because a transaction sustains a Jewish household in Lithuania. Jewish continuation itself becomes the injury.

The rest is delivery.

Newspapers are to refuse advertising from non-Lithuanian firms and print lists of Lithuanian traders instead. Journalists are to carry the theme every day, placing Vilnius under Polish rule and Jewish commerce inside the same grievance. Writers are to stop describing autumn and begin rousing young men. Officers are to use the army’s teaching hours on their conscripts and enter trade after discharge.

The Lithuanian who declines is marked as having handed the country to Jews.

Near the end, my grandfather tells the reader that the property is already his by right. Then he invokes what he calls the law that has governed the........

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