The Lithuanian radical right sought German money for pogroms a year before the Soviets came.

Every national defense needs a start date, and Lithuania’s has one. The official account of the wartime catastrophe opens in June 1940, with the Soviet occupation. A tolerant country is invaded. Its citizens are deported by the tens of thousands. Property is confiscated, neighbors vanish into cattle cars, and a poison called Judeo-Bolshevism seeps into the wound. Out of that trauma, the story runs, a murderous antisemitism was born, which the Germans then harnessed when they arrived in June 1941. Take away the Soviet year and the killers never form. The occupation made them.

The archive says otherwise. The organized, German-facing, pogrom-seeking wing of Lithuanian nationalism was already at work in 1938 and 1939. It had a name, a leader, army officers in its ranks, and a written request, preserved in German state files, for foreign money to fund the killing of Jews. All of it predates the Soviet occupation by more than a year. The Soviet period supplied grievance, cover, and opportunity. It did not supply the intent. The intent was filed in Berlin, in the summer of 1939, while Stalin’s tanks were still a year from the border.

The faction that wanted a war on Jews

The radicals were the Voldemarininkai, the Voldemarists, the far-right movement built around Augustinas Voldemaras, the republic’s first prime minister. Their organizational lineage ran through Geležinis Vilkas, the Iron Wolf, a semi-clandestine paramilitary created by the Nationalist regime at the end of 1927 to fight its opposition and led by Voldemaras. In January 1929 it had 252 companies, about 3,500 members, and about 1,500 candidates. After Smetona dismissed Voldemaras in September 1929, the organization fractured; it was closed in May 1930, and part of its former membership continued as the illegal Voldemarist opposition. Between 1929 and 1940 the Voldemarists planned eight military coups. The most dangerous, on 7 June 1934, was led by Chief of the General Staff Petras Kubiliūnas and involved more than 110 officers. Remember Kubiliūnas. He returns.[1]

Their quarrel with Smetona was not that he had established equality for Jews. He had not. His government pursued the Lithuanianization of the economy, and Jews were largely excluded from the state administration. But the regime also resisted pogroms and the radicals’ demand for immediate expulsion. The dispute was not between equality and exclusion. It was between a state program of gradual economic Lithuanianization and a radical demand to accelerate exclusion through coercion and violence. Trade bodies such as Verslas were already demanding that Jews be pushed out within five years, under the banner “Lithuania for Lithuanians.”[2]

Hold the year in view. 1938. When Lithuania swallowed the Polish ultimatum that March, and then lost Klaipėda to Germany in 1939, the radicals blamed Smetona for weakness and turned openly toward Berlin. That is the address of the radicalization, and it is not the Soviet occupation.

From the beginning of 1938 the Voldemarists were receiving occasional German payments of a few hundred Reichsmarks. In June 1939 they came with a larger proposal. They presented themselves to the Germans as the men who had organized and carried out the earlier attacks on Jews in Lithuania, and they asked for weapons and........

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