The Holocaust in Lithuania

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The Holocaust in Lithuania
Burning synagogue in Lithuania.
DateJune–December 1941
TargetJews
Organised byEinsatzgruppen, Ypatingasis būrys
Deaths190,000–195,000

The Holocaust in Lithuania resulted in the near total eradication of

Nazi-controlled Lithuania. Of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews at the time of the Nazi invasion, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were killed before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered over the three-year German occupation,[1] a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust.[2] Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the non-Jewish local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still debated.[3] The Holocaust resulted in the largest loss of life in so short a period of time in the history of Lithuania.[4]

The events in the western regions of the USSR occupied by Nazi Germany in the first weeks after the German invasion, including Lithuania, marked a sharp intensification of the Holocaust.[5][6][b]

The occupying Nazi German administration fanned antisemitism by blaming the Soviet regime's annexation of Lithuania in June 1940, on the Jewish community. One prevalent antisemitic trope at the time linked Bolsheviks and Jews.[7] There were other tropes, even more unpleasant. To a large extent the Nazis also relied on the physical preparation and execution of their orders by local Lithuanian collaborators.[3]

As of 2020, the topic of the Holocaust in Lithuania and the role played by Lithuanians in the genocide, including several notable Lithuanian nationalists, remained unsettled.[8]

Background

After the

Lithuanian Provisional Government of the Lithuanian Activist Front to be established.[11] For a brief period it appeared that the Germans would grant Lithuania significant autonomy, like that given to the Slovak Republic.[11] However, after about a month, the more independent Lithuanian organizations were disbanded and the Germans seized more control.[11]

Destruction of Jewry

Einsatzgruppe
A" from Stahlecker's report. Marked "Secret Reich Matter", the map shows the number of Jews shot in Reichskommissariat Ostland. According to this map the estimated numbers of Jews killed in Lithuania was 136,421 by the date that his map was created.

Estimated number of victims

Before the German invasion, the Jewish population was estimated at about 210,000.

Some intervened to rescue Jews. From 16 July to 3 August 1940,

, as well as residents of Lithuania.

Holocaust events

The Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda (Memel in German) had historically been a member of the German Hanseatic League, and had belonged to Germany and East Prussia before 1918. The city was semi-autonomous in the period of Lithuanian independence, under League of Nations supervision. Of the approximately 6,000 Jews who had lived in Memel, most had already fled when it was absorbed into the Reich on March 15, 1939. The remainder were expelled. Most fled into Lithuania proper, and most of these were killed after the Axis invasion in June 1941.

Chronologically, the genocide in Lithuania can be divided into three phases: phase 1. summer to the end of 1941; phase 2. December 1941 – March 1943; phase 3. April 1943 – mid-July 1944.[14]

Massacre of Jews by Lithuanians at the Lietūkis garage on 27 June 1941 during the Kaunas pogrom. German soldiers and Lithuanian civilians, including women and children, watch the slaughter from the background

Most Lithuanian Jews perished in the first months of the occupation and before the end of 1941. The Axis invasion of the USSR began on June 22, 1941 and coincided with the June Uprising in Lithuania. During the days before the German occupation of Lithuania the Lithuanian Activist Front attacked Soviet forces,[citation needed] seized power in several cities, spread anti-Semitic propaganda and carried out massacres of Lithuanian Jews and Poles.[citation needed]

A notable massacre began on the night of 25–26 June, when

Einsatzgruppe A, told Berlin that by 28 June 1941 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in the surrounding towns.[15][clarification needed] Klimaitis' men destroyed several synagogues and about sixty Jewish houses. In the 1990s the number of victims claimed by Stahlecker was questioned and thought to have probably been exaggerated.[16]

German Einsatzgruppen followed the advance of the German army units in June 1941 and immediately began organizing the murder of Jews in conquered territories.[6] The first recorded action of the Einsatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppe A) unit took place on June 22, 1941, in the border town of Gargždai (called Gorzdt in Yiddish and Garsden in German), one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the country and only 18 kilometres (11 mi) from Germany's recovered Memel. Approximately 201 Jews were shot that day, in what is known as the Garsden massacre. Some Lithuanian Communists were also among the victims.[17] About 80,000 Jews had been killed by October and about 175,000 by the end of the year.[1]

Most Jews in Lithuania were not required to live in

Ponary Forest near Vilnius.[6][18] By 1942 about 45,000 Jews survived, largely those in ghettos and camps.[c]

In the second phase, the Holocaust slowed, and Germans used Jews as

In the third phase, the destruction of Jews was again given a high priority; that phase liquidated the remaining ghettos and camps.

Two factors contributed to the speed of the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. The first was significant support for the "de-Jewification" of Lithuania from the Lithuanian population.[12][19] The second was the German plan for early colonization of Lithuania – which shared a border with German East Prussia – in accordance with the Generalplan Ost; thus the high priority given to the extermination of the relatively small Lithuanian Jewish community.[19]

Participation of local collaborators

A member of the Lithuanian Security Police marching Jewish men through Vilnius, 1941
German soldiers and Lithuanians watch the burning of a synagogue, 9 July 1941

Dina Porat, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, writes that "The Lithuanians showed [the Einsatzgruppen] how to murder women and children, and perhaps made them accustomed to it...Indeed, at the onset of the invasion the German units killed mostly men, while the Lithuanians killed unselectively."[12]

The

SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker arrived in Kaunas on 25 June 1941 and gave agitation speeches in the city to instigate the murder of Jews. Initially this was in the former State Security Department building, but officials there refused to take any action. Later, he gave speeches in the city. In an October 15 report, Stahlecker wrote that they had succeeded in covering up their vanguard unit (Vorkommando) actions, and made them look like initiatives of the local population.[20] Groups of partisans, civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered the Lithuanian territories.[1]
A rogue unit of insurgents headed by
pogroms in Kaunas (Kovno) on the night of 25–26 June 1941. Over a thousand Jews perished over the next few days in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.[6][20][21] Different sources give different figures, from 1,500[6] to 3,800, with additional victims in other towns of the region.[21]

On 24 June 1941, the

fascist Iron Wolf organization.[3] Overall, the nationalistic Lithuanian administration was interested in the liquidation of the Jews as perceived enemies and potential rivals of ethnic Lithuanians, and thus not only did not oppose Nazi Holocaust policy but in effect adopted it as their own.[19]

Holocaust mass graves near city of Jonava.

A combination of factors explains the participation of some Lithuanians in genocide against Jews.[12] Those include national traditions and values, including antisemitism, common throughout contemporary Central Europe, and a more Lithuanian-specific desire for a "pure" Lithuanian nation-state with which the Jewish population was believed to be incompatible.[3] There were a number of additional factors, such as severe economic problems which led to the killing of Jews over personal property.[12] Finally the Jews were seen as having supported the Soviet regime in Lithuania during 1940–1941.[d][3][12][19] During the period leading up to the German invasion, Jews were blamed by some for virtually every misfortune that had befallen Lithuania.[3][19]

The involvement of the local population and institutions, in relatively high numbers, in the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry became a defining factor of the Holocaust in Lithuania.[1][3][19]

Not all of the Lithuanian populace supported the killings,

Polish minority in Lithuania also helped to shelter Jews.[23] Lithuanians and Poles who risked their lives saving Jews were persecuted and often executed by the Nazis.[27]

Comprehension and remembrance

Following the Holocaust, Lithuania became part of the USSR, whose government tried to minimize the unique suffering of the Jews.[28] In Lithuania and throughout the Soviet Union, memorials did not mention Jews in particular; but instead were built to commemorate the suffering of "local inhabitants".[28] However, people guilty of Nazi collaboration and crimes against Jews were often deported or executed.[29]

Since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the debate over Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust has been fraught with difficulty. Modern Lithuanian nationalists stress anti-Soviet resistance, but some Lithuanian partisans, seen in Lithuania as heroes in the struggle against Soviet occupation, were also Nazi collaborators who cooperated in the murder of Lithuanian Jewry.[30]

The genocide in Lithuania was one of the earliest large-scale implementations of the Final Solution, leading some to conclude that the Holocaust began in Lithuania in the summer of 1941.[6][7]^ Other scholars say the Holocaust started in September 1939 with the onset of the Second World War,[31] or even earlier, on Kristallnacht in 1938,[32] or with Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

The post-Soviet Lithuanian government has on a number of occasions commemorated the Holocaust, made attempts to combat antisemitism, and brought some Nazi-era war criminals to justice.

post-Soviet states to enact legislation to protect and mark off Holocaust-related sites.[26] In 1995, president of Lithuania Algirdas Brazauskas, speaking before the Israeli Knesset, offered a public apology to the Jewish people for Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust.[23] On 20 September 2001, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Lithuania, the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) held a session in which Alfonsas Eidintas, the historian nominated as the Republic's next ambassador to Israel, delivered an address about the annihilation of Lithuania's Jews.[33]

Controversy and criticism

Historically Lithuanians have denied national participation in the Holocaust or said that Lithuanian participants in the genocide were fringe or extreme elements.

Lithuanian Provisional Government and the participation of Lithuanian civilians and volunteers in the Holocaust.[33]

Since the 1990s there has been criticism of the Lithuanian government's efforts to accurately depict the history of the Holocaust, the continued praise for Lithuanian nationalists who allegedly collaborated with the Nazis in murdering hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews and the government's aversion to accepting culpability for the Holocaust in Lithuania.[vague] In the 2010s Lithuanian society was characterized by Holocaust dismissal and a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment.[36]

In 2001 the

Soviet bloc countries.[26] In 2008, the Center which had initially ranked Lithuania high during ongoing trials to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice, noted in its annual report no progress and the lack of any real punishment from Lithuanian justice agencies for Holocaust perpetrators.[38]

In 2010 a Klaipėda court ruled that swastikas could be displayed publicly and were symbols of "Lithuania's historical heritage."[39]

In January 2020 Lithuanian Prime Minister

Polish Holocaust bill which makes it a crime to claim Poles or Polish authorities played any role in the Holocaust.[41]
In May 2020, on the 75th anniversary of end of World War II in Europe, the Lithuanian government sent its vice minister of foreign affairs, Povilas Poderskis, to accompany the German, Israeli and American ambassadors in attending a ceremony at the Lithuanian Jewish Cemetery in Vilnius.

Vilnius Street renaming and memorial controversy

In 2019 the issue gained national political attention when Vilnius' liberal

Virgin Mary as a "žydelka" ("jew-girl") which was condemned by Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Jewish Community of Lithuania.[42] Landsbergis said the poem was an attempt to show the ignorance of Lithuanian antisemites and requested support from "at least one smart and brave Jew ... who does not agree with Simasius."[42] Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda subsequently proposed a law that would require municipalities to follow rules from the national government "when installing, removing or changing commemorative plaques" but later tabled the proposed law.[43]

See also

Notes

a

Polish Jews who sought refuge in Lithuania escaping the invasion of Poland in 1939 and 2) Jews from various Western countries shipped to extermination sites in Lithuania.[44]

b ^ Some scholars have noted that the German Final Solution and the Holocaust actually began in Lithuania.
Dina Porat: "The Final Solution – the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other – began in Lithuania.[6]
Konrad Kwiet: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [...] The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signalling the beginning of the "Final Solution."[7] See also, Konrad Kwiet, "The Onset of the Holocaust: The Massacres of Jews in Lithuania in June 1941." Annual lecture delivered as J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 4 December 1995. Published under the same title but expanded in Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A Moses, ed. Andrew Bonnell et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 107–21

c

Shavli Ghetto (5,000); there were also a number of smaller ghettos and labor camps.[1]

d ^ The propaganda line of Jewish Bolshevism was used intensively by Nazis in instigating antisemitic feelings among Lithuanians. It built upon the pre-invasion antisemitic propaganda of the anti-Soviet Lithuanian Activist Front which had seized upon the fact that more Jews than Lithuanians supported the Soviet regime. This had helped to create an entire mythos of Jewish culpability for the sufferings of Lithuania under the Soviet regime (and beyond). A LAF pamphlet read: "For the ideological maturation of the Lithuanian nation it is essential that anticommunist and anti-Jewish action be strengthened [...] It is very important that this opportunity be used to get rid of the Jews as well. We must create an atmosphere that is so stifling for the Jews that not a single Jew will think that he will have even the most minimal rights or possibility of life in the new Lithuania. Our goal is to drive out the Jews along with the Red Russians. [...] The hospitality extended to the Jews by Vytautas the Great is hereby revoked for all time because of their repeated betrayals of the Lithuanian nation to its oppressors." An extreme faction of the supporters of Augustinas Voldemaras, a group which also worked within the LAF, actually envisioned a racially exclusive "Aryan" Lithuanian state. With the start of German occupation, one of Kaunas' newspapers – Į Laisvę (Towards Freedom), commenced a spirited antisemitic crusade, reinforcing the identity of the Jew with communism in popular consciousness: "Jewry and Bolshevism are one, parts of an indivisible entity."[3][33]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Porat, Dina (2002). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects". In David Cesarani (ed.). The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Routledge. pp. 161–162. .
  2. ^ Reich, Aaron (23 September 2021). "On This Day: Nazis liquidate Vilnius Ghetto, slaughter Lithuanian Jews". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Retrieved 2023-08-19.
  3. ^
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  5. ^ Matthäus, Jürgen (2007). "Operation Barbarossa and the onset of the Holocaust". In Christopher R. Browning (ed.). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. .
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Porat, Dina (2002). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects". In David Cesarani (ed.). The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Routledge. p. 159. .
  7. ^ a b c Kwiet, Konrad (1998). "Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 1 (12): 3–26.
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  8. ^ Stanislovas Stasiulis (2020). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: The Key Characteristics of Its History, and the Key Issues in Historiography and Cultural Memory". East European Politics and Societies. 34 (1): 261–279. . Retrieved January 4, 2024.
  9. ^ Miniotaite, Grazina (1999). "The Security Policy of Lithuania and the 'Integration Dilemma'" (PDF). NATO Academic Forum. p. 21.
  10. ^ Thomas Remeikis (1975). "The decision of the Lithuanian government to accept the Soviet ultimatum of 14 June 1940". Lituanus. 21 (4 – Winter 1975). Archived from the original on 17 December 2010 – via Internet Archive.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
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  13. ^ "Japan's Abe seeks Baltic support against North Korea". AFP. 14 January 2018. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 14 January 2018.
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  17. ^ "The first mass execution of the Jews of Gargždai". Holocaust Atlas of Lithuania. Retrieved 2023-12-11.
  18. ^ a b "Śledztwo w sprawie masowych zabójstw Polaków w latach 1941–1944 w Ponarach koło Wilna dokonanych przez funkcjonariuszy policji niemieckiej i kolaboracyjnej policji litewskiej" (in Polish). Institute of National Remembrance. Archived from the original on 2007-10-17. Retrieved 10 February 2007.
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  24. ^ "Names of Righteous by Country". 2017.
  25. ^ "Righteous Among the Nations - per Country & Ethnic Origin". Yad Vashem. January 1, 2008. Archived from the original on October 15, 2009. Retrieved 2009-03-15.
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  30. ^ Walkowitz, Daniel J.; Lisa Maya Knauer (2004). Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Duke University Press. p. 188. .
  31. ^ Mineau, André (1999). The Making of the Holocaust: Ideology and Ethics in the Systems. Rodopi. p. 117. .
  32. ^ Freeman, Joseph (1996). Job: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor. Greenwood Publishing Group. .
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  35. ^ a b Senn, Alfred E. (Winter 2001). "Reflections on the Holocaust in Lithuania: A new Book by Alfonsas Eidintas". Lituanus. 4 (47).
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  38. ^ "Wiesenthal Center Denounces Lithuanian Decision not to Implement Jail Sentence for Convicted Nazi Criminal Based on Flawed Medical Examination". Simon Wiesenthal Center. November 16, 2008. Archived from the original on 2012-02-29. Retrieved 2009-03-15.
  39. ^ Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects, p. 205, 2014, by Shivaun Woolfson, Bloomsbury Publishing
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  41. ^ "Holocaust still haunts Lithuania – DW – 08/14/2019". dw.com. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
  42. ^ a b "Landsbergis about Jewish community leader: she has no clue what she's doing". Delfi EN (in Lithuanian). Retrieved 2023-08-02.
  43. ^ "Lithuanian president retreats from idea of proposing stricter regulation on plaques". www.baltictimes.com. Retrieved 2023-08-02.
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Further reading

External links