For decades, Lithuania has pointed to my grandfather Jonas Noreika’s imprisonment at the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof as proof that he was an anti-Nazi hero. The story is emotionally powerful: the Nazis arrested him, deported him and imprisoned him. But the historical record tells a more complicated story. Noreika’s imprisonment in 1943 cannot answer for what he did two years earlier, when, as governor of Šiauliai County, he participated in the persecution of Jews and the administration of their stolen property.

The question is not whether Jonas Noreika suffered under the Nazis. He did. The question is whether that later suffering can be used to erase, excuse or overshadow the evidence of his actions in 1941.

Stutthof tells us what Nazi Germany did to Jonas Noreika in 1943. It does not tell us what Jonas Noreika did to the Jews in 1941.

The Story I Inherited

I grew up with Stutthof as one of the cleanest parts of my grandfather’s story. Jonas Noreika had been arrested by the Nazis. He had been sent to a concentration camp. In the Lithuanian story I inherited, that settled the question of who he was: a patriot, an anti-Nazi, a victim of Germany. When I was a girl in Chicago, adults admired that part of our family history. I admired it too.[1]

How Stutthof Became an Alibi

Years later, after my mother asked me to write about her father and I began pulling his life apart document by document, Stutthof became much more complicated. I learned that the fact of his imprisonment had been made to do far more historical work than it could possibly carry. It was not simply evidence that the Nazis persecuted him in 1943. It had become a way to obscure what he did in 1941.[2]

There is no evidence he was an anti-Nazi resistor, according to wartime American diplomatic reports and a later study produced under Lithuania’s International Commission.[3]

Together they show something Lithuania should have said clearly a long time ago: the March 1943 Stutthof group was not a roster of forty-six proven anti-Nazi resistance leaders.

The Failed Mobilization—and the German Reprisals

In February and March 1943, the Germans tried to raise a Lithuanian SS formation. The effort collapsed. American diplomats in Stockholm followed the crisis through German-controlled Lithuanian newspapers, radio reports, material coming from Lithuanian sources, and reports that reached them through diplomatic channels. The record they assembled does not read like a case file against forty-six individually identified underground fighters. It reads like an occupation regime furious that a country had refused to give it the men it demanded.[4]

One American Legation dispatch, dated May 5, 1943, was devoted to conditions in Lithuania during March. It described the mobilization crisis and the German retaliation that followed. German propaganda blamed what it called educated or intellectual circles for influencing the population against the mobilization. Universities were closed. The occupation authorities threatened punishments connected to labor, property, education and public life.[5][6]

A second dispatch, dated May 11, 1943, is even more revealing. Its subject was the attempted German military mobilization in Lithuania and its consequences. The report said the mobilization had failed so badly that those obtained amounted to only about 0.2 percent of those eligible. Students and young men disappeared from the cities. Men hid in the countryside. Even some who initially appeared escaped before they could be sent away.[7][8][9]

Then came the reprisals.

The contemporary report describes arrests taking place while Lithuanian universities and other institutions were being closed. Representatives of Lithuanian public life were summoned and pressured to support a German-approved appeal. They complained about arrests........

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