Lithuania’s favorite defense is chronological. The Germans came. The occupation began. The machinery of extermination followed. Therefore, whatever happened to the Jews in Lithuania, belongs to Germany. That defense collapses before the record even reaches the main killing phase.

Months before the German occupation had settled into administrative form, Lithuanian political actors had already articulated the anti-Jewish program in their own words. In March 1941, the Lithuanian Activist Front’s “Instructions for the Liberation of Lithuania” declared that “it is very important on this occasion to get rid of the Jews,” called for a “stifling atmosphere” against them, and stated the goal of “eliminating” Jews from Lithuania. (The Lithuanian Government says that the call for “elimination” was an “incident” of antisemitism!) The LAF was not an obscure cell. It was founded by Kazys Škirpa, Lithuania’s former ambassador to Germany, and it operated as the principal political vehicle for anti-Soviet resistance abroad. That was not a battlefield improvisation. It was ideological preparation. It was political intent.

Saulius Sužiedėlis is careful on an important point. He rejects the crude myth that thousands of Jews were murdered across the Lithuanian countryside before Germans even arrived on the scene. But he does not rescue Lithuania with that clarification. He explicitly notes that instances of spontaneous violence were reliably recorded, that Lithuanian police and administrative structures accepted the German lead and at times acted on their own, and that Lithuanian police units supplied the majority of the killers in the destruction of provincial Jewry and at major killing sites such as Paneriai and the Ninth Fort. He also destroys two of the most comforting evasions in Lithuanian public memory: the perpetrators were not “a tiny rabble of misfits and lowlifes,” and those who refused to kill generally were not punished for refusal, while officials who left their posts rather than continue their duties generally were not punished either. Choice remained. Agency remained.

That matters because it strips away the three principal alibis still doing work in Lithuanian memory politics. First, that anti-Jewish violence was merely imported. Second, that participation was confined to a marginal social fringe. Third, that everyone involved was compelled. The scholarship does not support any of those claims. It supports something worse: a real field of Lithuanian decision-making, Lithuanian participation, Lithuanian opportunism, and Lithuanian ideological readiness inside the German assault.

The early record is already enough to end the fairy tale. In Jurbarkas, German orders to compile lists of Communists and Jewish men were followed by arrests carried out with local Lithuanian police participation, theft of valuables, humiliation of Jews, and murder. In........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)