The Doctrine Lithuania Never Revoked |
Part 1 of 4: The day Lithuanians could no longer murder Jews with impunity
For decades, Lithuanian diplomats have repeated a carefully constructed phrase when addressing audiences about the Holocaust: Jews murdered by Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators. I have listened to this formula for years. I have spent thirty years documenting Lithuanian Holocaust history. I consider myself highly educated on this subject. And even I was confused by what they meant when they said “Soviets” murdered Jews. The phrase made no sense to me — until I found the yiskor books and the Koniuchowsky testimony collection, and understood that the formula is not an error. It is an engineered deception, calibrated with exquisite precision for audiences who do not know any better.
Every word in that formula performs a specific concealment. “Nazis” hides Lithuanians. During the war, Lithuanians murdered Jews — often without German supervision, often before German authority was consolidated, and with a ferocity that the Nazis themselves protested. By attributing the murders to “Nazis,” Lithuania erases its own agency from the wartime record.
“Soviets” hides Lithuanians. After the Nazis retreated, Lithuanian violence against Jews continued. Jews who survived the war and returned home were assaulted, robbed, and murdered by their Lithuanian neighbors. Lithuania attributes this postwar violence to the “Soviet period,” as though Soviet reconquest caused it. It did not. Lithuanians murdered returning Jews because surviving Jews were unacceptable. The Soviet period is the timestamp. The Lithuanian population was the murderer.
“Collaborators” hides the word “Lithuanian.” This is the most deliberate element. The collaborators were Lithuanian. The self-described partisans who seized control of towns in June 1941 were Lithuanian. The police battalions that carried out mass shootings across the country and into Belarus were Lithuanian. The neighbors who looted Jewish homes, raped Jewish women, and burned Jewish girls with lit cigarettes were Lithuanian. Lithuania’s formula is........