Jews Begged Germans to Save Them from Lithuanian |
Almost five years after the release of my documentary Baltic Truth—a film exposing Holocaust distortion in Latvia and Lithuania, now streaming on Amazon Prime—the evidence continues to confirm the thesis. Lithuania’s self-constructed narrative of reluctant, auxiliary involvement in the Holocaust cannot survive the testimony of the victims themselves.
There is a sentence in Herman Kruk’s chronicle of Vilna that should permanently disqualify Lithuania from any easy rhetoric of “auxiliary” guilt.
On July 25, 1941, Kruk recorded that Jews seized by Lithuanians would sometimes stop Germans and ask the Germans to release them. He added that some Germans did exactly that: they took Jews under their protection, scolded the Lithuanian snatchers, and in some cases even struck them. Kruk also wrote that when Lithuanian snatchers dragged Jews out of houses, those who managed to alert the first German they saw could sometimes secure release from Lithuanian hands.[1]
I have spent years documenting Baltic Holocaust distortion. I have watched Latvian and Lithuanian officials construct elaborate frameworks of denial. But even after everything I have filmed and everything I have read, this detail from Kruk stops me cold. It is one of the ugliest facts in the history of the Lithuanian Holocaust.
It does not redeem the Germans. They remained the architects of destruction, the occupiers who created the system, armed it, legalized it, and turned it into mass murder. But it does something else. It strips away Lithuania’s long-cultivated self-forgiveness. It shows that, at street level, in the first face-to-face encounters of terror, Lithuanian perpetrators could be so immediate, so savage, and so feared that Jews appealed to Germans as the only authority that might restrain them.
That is not the profile of passive auxiliaries. It is the profile of active predators.
Kruk’s entry matters precisely because it was not written decades later in the language of prosecution, memory, or national polemic. It was written inside the event, while the event was happening. And the surrounding entries make clear that this was not an isolated or implausible inversion. In Vilna, Lithuanian snatchers were not........