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 background figures. They were a daily terror. Kruk describes them seizing Jews in the streets, dragging bleeding elderly men along, beating those who could not keep pace, entering courtyards and homes, searching attics and closets, and carrying men off in trucks and taxis. He asks, in one entry, “who catches and who snatches?” because even when Germans demanded Jewish labor gangs, Lithuanian Ypatinga men intercepted them and took them where they wished.[2]
Kruk is explicit about who these men were. The snatchers in Vilna were recruited from the Ypatinga, the Lithuanian paramilitary formation whose members also carried out executions at Ponar and in other Lithuanian towns. In other words, the same Lithuanian formation that hunted Jews in the streets was tied to the killing pits. The line from seizure to extermination did not have to be inferred. The victims knew it already.[3]
That is why the July 25 scene matters so much. Jews were not appealing to Germans because Germans were humane. They were appealing to Germans because Lithuanian hands were already on them.
When I made Baltic Truth, one of the hardest truths to convey was this exact dynamic: that in Latvia and Lithuania alike, Jews met annihilation first through the hands of their own neighbors. The German framework was supreme, but the local hand was immediate. Kruk’s chronicle provides the evidence in real time.
The same structure appears in Kaunas. On July 7, 1941, Avraham Tory recorded that attorney Leib Garfunkel and attorney Yakov Goldberg, after meeting the Gestapo commander and then the Lithuanian military city commander, were stopped at a roadblock by Lithuanian partisans who were abducting Jews and looting their homes. When Garfunkel and Goldberg explained who they were, and even when Goldberg invoked his service as an officer in the Lithuanian Army and his role as chairman of the Association of Jewish Combatants in Lithuania’s War of Independence, the Lithuanian answer was brutally simple: “It doesn’t make any difference, you are Jews.” They were taken away and secured release only because higher authority confirmed they had in fact been expected at the military command headquarters.[4]
That exchange deserves to stand beside Kruk’s. It captures the moral hierarchy in early summer 1941. German occupation had opened the gates of destruction, but local Lithuanian actors often provided the first and most intimate experience of it. You were not first confronted by abstractions such as “the occupation regime” or “the Einsatzgruppen process.” You were stopped by a Lithuanian partisan in the street, dragged from your apartment by a Lithuanian snatcher, taken to a Lithuanian-controlled roadblock, or pushed into a Lithuanian-run detention site. The German framework was supreme, but the Lithuanian hand was immediate.
The wider documentary record supports exactly this reading. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that Lithuanians carried out violent riots against Jews shortly before and immediately after the arrival of German forces, and that in June and July 1941 German Einsatzgruppen together with Lithuanian auxiliaries began murdering the Jews of Lithuania.[5] In Kaunas specifically, USHMM notes that local Lithuanian perpetrators humiliated, beat, robbed, and murdered Jews in the days between the Soviet retreat and German consolidation, and that many Jews, including entire families, were arbitrarily seized from their homes.[6] Yad Vashem likewise records that even before the Germans entered Kaunas, antisemitic Lithuanians went on wild killing sprees against Jews, and that Jews taken to the Seventh Fort were brutally abused and then shot by Lithuanians and Germans.[7]
Once that context is restored, Kruk’s line is no longer bizarre. It is inevitable. If the Lithuanian snatcher is the one seizing you, beating you, dragging you from the house, and taking you away, then the first German you can reach becomes, in that specific second, the only possible check on Lithuanian violence. That does not make the German innocent. It makes the Lithuanian unbearable.
There is even a second, narrower line of corroboration. In a 2025 interview, the Lithuanian historian Arūnas Bubnys stated that some prisoners survived the Seventh Fort by bribing guards, and that attorney Yakov Goldberg secured the release of around thirty Jews who had participated in Lithuania’s 1918–1920 independence struggle; he added that Jewish women were also liberated from the fort on July 7, 1941.[8] Bubnys is not a neutral witness, and his statement should be used cautiously. But even with that caution, it reinforces the larger point: at least in some cases, Jews or their representatives sought release from a killing environment in which Lithuanians were already central actors.
And that, finally, is what Lithuania’s culture of self-exculpation cannot absorb.
I know the defense. I have heard it from officials in Riga and Vilnius alike. They will say the courts have not ruled, that the historical record is complex, that context must be considered. I have watched Latvia exonerate Herberts Cukurs. I have watched Lithuania prosecute Artur Fridman for a Facebook post. I know what these states do when identity management is at stake, because I have documented it on film. The pattern is not confusion. It is policy.
For decades, Lithuania has tried to narrate its role in the Holocaust as secondary, reluctant, conditioned, provoked, or swallowed up by German command. But a nation cannot hide behind the language of “auxiliary participation” once the victims themselves record that they sometimes begged Germans to save them from Lithuanians. That is not merely collaboration. It is local predation so extreme that the victim, in the instant of danger, experiences the collaborator as the more immediate terror.
Kruk’s scene destroys the comforting picture of Lithuanian involvement as derivative. It shows Lithuanian perpetrators not at the margins of German crime but at its front edge: in the street, in the stairwell, in the courtyard, in the house, laying hands on Jews before deportation, before ghettoization, before the paperwork of annihilation had fully settled into place. Jews did not have to wait for the distant machinery of Berlin to feel the Holocaust in Lithuania. They met it in Lithuanian.
That fact should end a great deal of Lithuanian self-forgiveness.
Because when the victims themselves testify that they appealed to Germans to be released from Lithuanian hands, the old alibi collapses. Lithuania was not merely a place where the Holocaust happened. In too many streets and too many houses, it was the hands by which it happened.