While the Holocaust in Lithuania is a topic that has been covered extensively in the historical literature, one related event that occurred as this tragedy unfolded, i.e., the attempted coup against the Lithuanian Provisional Government (PG) in late July 1941, has received comparatively little attention. For those scholars who have examined the coup, the explanation for it has been that the Nazis sought to remove the PG because of its persistent appeals for Lithuanian independence. However, while this conflict with the Nazis was certainly a factor, there were ulterior motives for the Nazi support of the coup, which are clarified through an examination of the primary sources. In particular, while European Jews had been subjected to increasing brutality for the first 21 months of the war, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews would be subjected to pre-planned mass murder, beginning with communists and Jewish males of fighting age and eventually culminating in a decision to commit Europe-wide genocide. With this policy rapidly evolving, the Nazis attempted to overthrow the PG in late July 1941, not only to eliminate resistance to the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Greater German Reich but also to expedite the Final Solution in Lithuania. In doing so, the Nazis exploited the increasingly anti-Semitic society of Lithuania under Soviet rule, characterized in part by the far right led by followers of Augustinas Voldemaras. Upon occupying Lithuania, the Nazis found the most enthusiastic participants in anti-Semitic violence could be found among these followers, so they were the party that the Nazis backed in the coup. Investigating events before, during, and after the attempted coup clarifies the relationship of the Holocaust with the coup.
Historiographic Challenges
There are essentially three trajectories in the historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania that characterize the writing about the topic over the past seventy years: the slow but eventual transition from intentionalism to functionalism; the increasing availability of archival documents; and the issue of Lithuanian guilt. Our understanding of the Holocaust is one that has been more shaped by functionalism than intentionalism at least since the 1990s when, not coincidentally, archival materials from the former Soviet Union first became broadly available. As a result, while Soviet control of postwar Lithuania discouraged an honest discussion of the Holocaust there, the last 25 years have been characterized by vociferous debate.
The intentionalist point of view, expressing the idea that the Nazis came to power with the intention of exterminating the Jews of Europe, was predominant in the historiography of the Holocaust until 1961. The functionalist viewpoint, which states that extermination was a decision reached gradually (in the summer of 1941 at the earliest), began to emerge in the literature when Raul Hilberg published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961.Hilberg theorized that the far-flung bureaucracy of Nazi Germany and competition among various ministries, the party, and the Schutzstaffel (SS) resulted in a gradual movement toward genocide. Martin Broszat’s Der Staat Hitlers, published in 1969, while not limited to the Holocaust, nevertheless argued that Nazi Germany, rather than being an autocratic state, was a polycracy that pushed forward and concretized vague agendas, thus obviating the need for a pre-existing plan or decisive order.
The debate between historians who remained committed to intentionalism and those supporting functionalism raged mostly during the 1970s and 1980s, with the assumptions of moderate functionalists beginning to receive confirmation with increased access to Soviet archives. Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, published in 1996, was likely the final gasp of a radical intentionalism based on the notion of inherent German evil. Goldhagen’s thesis of an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” lying at the heart of the National Socialist project, was greeted mostly by derision.The prevailing functionalist viewpoint on the origins of the Holocaust is most succinctly stated in Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution, published in 2006. Browning sees key roles for independent initiative and “cumulative radicalization” in the evolution of Nazi genocide.
As noted, the increasing availability of sources was essential to the shift from intentionalism to functionalism. Some of these documents became available before 1991 and the disintegration of the USSR, including the Jäger Report, which describes in painstaking detail the course of the Holocaust in Lithuania through December 1, 1941. The report was provided to West German prosecutors by Soviet authorities in 1963 – four years after Karl Jäger’s suicide while awaiting trial. Given the extent to which the document corroborates the notion of cumulative radicalization, it is not surprising that Browning’s theory could only be truly supported by documents with access to Soviet archives.
In addition, Gerald Fleming’s Hitler and the Final Solution, published in 1984, was among the first works by a western historian to incorporate Russian archival material. Although Fleming tended to take an intentionalist view of the Holocaust, his work nevertheless presaged the watershed of Soviet documents that entered the research a decade later. Fleming’s own work was not focused specifically on Lithuania but rather on Latvia. However, given the related policies implemented in these bordering countries, Fleming’s research boded well for the future historiography of the Holocaust in the Baltic States.
There are numerous reasons for the desire of the Soviets to limit access to archival documents relevant to the Holocaust in Lithuania. First, there was a desire to suppress the specifically Jewish nature of the majority of the victims of the Nazis in the Baltic States to perpetuate a mythos of fascist aggression against all Soviet peoples. Second and more important to this analysis, there was an impulse to suppress nationalism across the Soviet Union. This impulse was especially great in the Baltic States, whose incorporation into the USSR was highly contested by both the countries themselves and the outside world.
The Soviet offensive against Lithuanian nationalism was largely accomplished through the painting of all Lithuanian nationalists as collaborators with the Nazis. For instance, while it presents a collection of extremely important documents for understanding the Holocaust in Lithuania, the volume Documents Accuse, published in 1970 under the auspices of the government of the Lithuanian SSR, offers virtually no nuance in distinguishing blameless elements of the Lithuanian nationalist movement from those who committed war crimesConversely, the roughly contemporaneous book by the Lithuanian-American historian Algirdas Budreckis, The Lithuanian National Revolt of 1941, published in 1968, specifically treats the period during which spontaneous violence by Lithuanians committed against Jews was most common. However, Budreckis glosses over this violence in fewer than ten pages and essentially ascribes it to a few bad apples.
This tension in the historiography was reflective of that between Lithuania and the USSR itself. It is little wonder, therefore, that Lithuania was among the first republics to declare its separation from the Soviet Union in 1991. While the dissolution of the USSR resulted in an abundance of newly available documents, this watershed of evidence has not abated the intensity of the debate over Lithuanian collaboration. While many Lithuanian historians have undertaken honest attempts to investigate the issue, others have espoused a theory of “double genocide,” which alleges that the Soviet occupations of 1940-41 and 1944-1991 were as bloody and genocidal as that of the Nazis.
Related to this dispute is the issue of Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation in 1940-41, which remains contentious due to its connection to anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps the most controversial development regarding this aspect of the debate was the suggestion that the Lithuanian-born Israeli Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad be prosecuted by the Lithuanian government for war crimes on the basis of his membership in a Soviet partisan group during the war. Also central among the disputes today is the extent to which violence committed by Lithuanians against Jews, particularly the street violence and pogroms of the first few weeks of the Nazi occupation, was spontaneous or was directed behind the scenes by the German occupation authorities. This dispute is similarly unresolved.
Thus, the complexity of the historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania has not decreased with time. However, the key factor complicating a fuller understanding of this difficult topic is the issue of Lithuanian collaboration, which has erupted in the last quarter century after being assumed during the Soviet period as universal by heavily biased court historians. There is still much to learn about this subject, but the ferocity of the current debate has at least generated an impressive amount of source material, much of it from the Lithuanian national archives, aiding significantly our attempts to attain a better understanding of this history.
Antecedents to the Final Solution in Lithuania
Jews had lived in the territory of Lithuania for centuries and had established Vilnius as a worldwide center of Jewish religious learning. Lithuanian Jews had enjoyed long periods of comparative tolerance, punctuated by outbursts of anti-Semitic repression. Such repression became more common upon annexation in 1795 to the Russian Empire, with its tradition of pogroms. These developments contributed both to the emigration of large numbers of Lithuanian Jews to the United States and elsewhere in the late 19th century and to the emergence of Lithuania as a major European center of political Zionism.
Lithuanian independence came with the end of World War I, followed by several years of military conflicts with the Soviet Union and neighboring Poland, the latter of which occupied and annexed Vilnius in 1919. When the smoke cleared, the Lithuanian republic that was established represented a solid Lithuanian majority of more than 80% but with significant numbers of ethnic minorities and strong divisions based on these demographics. Jews constituted the largest minority, numbering between 5% and 7% of the total population. The political scientist Robert van Voren has characterized the relationship between the Lithuanian and Jewish populations as separate with “a sort of ‘buffer'” between them, consisting before the war of the “Tsarist bureaucracy” or “Polonized aristocracy” and subsequently the war-time German occupation authorities. Van Voren writes, “Both communities had their grudges against these three dominant ‘external’ powers, but now with them gone they had to deal with each other directly.”Still, he maintains, given the large percentage of rural Jews living in shtetls with overwhelmingly Jewish populations, anti-Semitism was only active in the cities, where Lithuanians sought to enter a Jewish-dominated bourgeoisie.
Following the adoption of a Lithuanian national constitution in 1922, elections were held for the national legislature, the Seimas. Jews received full political rights and were represented in the Seimas in a minorities bloc with Poles. This bloc held five seats out of a total of 78. This political power grew in subsequent elections in 1923 and 1926, in which an enlarged bloc that included Russian and German ethnic minorities won approximately 15% of votes. The election of 1926 was particularly controversial because, for the first time, the former ruling party, the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party, was excluded from the government. The fears among right-wing Lithuanians of a “leftist” government were confirmed in their minds when the government signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in September 1926.
In response to the election, a coup was staged in December 1926, led by the Lithuanian Nationalist Union, which had won only three Seimas seats in the election, in concert with the Christian Democrats. The coup installed Antanas Smetona, one of the signers of Lithuania’s independence declaration, as president and Augustinas Voldemaras, a former prime minister and foreign minister, as prime minister. Ultimate power rested with Smetona, who instituted an authoritarian regime by dissolving the Seimas and ruling by decree.
In some sense, the figures of Smetona and Voldemaras represent two important positions within the Lithuanian right wing for the country’s Jewish population. Smetona enjoyed the support of the Jewish population, who viewed him as a champion of Zionism and as their protector against the growing anti-Semitic violence seen in neighboring countries such as Poland. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Michael MacQueen, Smetona’s decision to nationalize the Lithuanian economy and create and empower a Lithuanian middle class resulted in increased anti-Semitism,egged on by Lithuanian Businessman’s Association. Smetona also oversaw the elimination of the Ministry for Jewish Affairs, which had existed since independence.
In contrast to Smetona’s relatively benign authoritarianism and passive anti-Semitism, Voldemaras represented an explicitly fascist and potentially violent position. Although he began his political career as a mainstream figure, Voldemaras became increasingly radicalized over the course of the 1920s. In 1927, an organization he helped found, Gelezinis Vilkas (the Iron Wolf), emerged as a force in Lithuanian civil society. The organization was ultranationalist and explicitly anti-Semitic and answered largely to the personal whims of Voldemaras himself. The organization’s platform called for economic and political measures against Lithuania’s Jews, noting however that overt violence would be counterproductive at that time.This position ultimately changed.
Lithuania in Crisis
Conflicts between President Smetona and Prime Minister Voldemaras culminated in the firing and internal exile of Voldemaras in 1929. The Iron Wolf was banned the following year. After a failed coup attempt in 1934, Voldemaras was imprisoned and subsequently exiled to France, although he would continue to exert tremendous influence. For most of the 1930s, Lithuania resembled most of the other dictatorships of Europe in being authoritarian but not particularly oppressive to minorities, with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany. Lithuania increasingly saw itself as a small, weak country situated between hostile, heavily armed neighbors. To the east, the Soviet Union sought some reconstitution of the Russian Empire under Soviet rule. To the west, the emergence of Nazi Germany was met in Lithuania with worry that the Nazis would attempt to reclaim Memel (called Klaipeda in Lithuanian), a formerly German city with a German ethnic majority that had been awarded to Lithuania as its sole port following World War I.
This tense situation worsened with a rapid series of geopolitical events beginning in 1938. In March of that year, Poland, which still possessed Vilnius, issued an ultimatum to Lithuania to establish diplomatic relations, which in essence forced Lithuania to acknowledge Polish rule over the disputed city. Lithuania relented to avoid war with a stronger neighbor. A year later, Germany issued an ultimatum over Memel, to which Lithuania again acceded. Unsurprisingly, a large number of Jews living in that region fled to the provisional capital, Kaunas, along with large numbers of ethnic Lithuanians. According to political scientist Roger D. Petersen, the annexation was a galvanizing moment in the history of Lithuanian nationalism, resulting in calls for national unity in the face of territorial loss.
The outbreak of war in September 1939 and the consequent division of territory in Eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany brought the crisis to a head. Smetona wanted to keep Lithuania neutral. However, the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin had ultimately apportioned Lithuania to the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviets first sought to force Soviet troops onto Lithuanian soil by posing yet another ultimatum to the country to accept 20,000 Red Army troops on its territory. As an enticement, the Soviets offered assistance in helping Lithuania to occupy Vilnius and the territory around it, with Lithuanian troops marching into the former capital on October 28. The event is particularly notable because it marks the first outbreak during the war of anti-Semitic violence on Lithuanian soil, although in this case, it seems to have been mainly violence committed by Poles against Jews and was largely contained by the Lithuanian military and police.
In June 1940, the Soviets forced Lithuania to accept an additional unspecified number of troops, the election of a “People’s Seimas” from a list of candidates approved by the Soviets, and finally the addition of Lithuania to the USSR as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. On July 21, 1940, independent Lithuania ceased to exist. Virtually every historian writing about Lithuania during this period agrees that the year of Soviet occupation was decisive in bringing largely dormant anti-Semitic feelings to the surface.Although a full examination of the topic is beyond the scope of this study, the core cause of this emergence was the perceived Jewish collaboration with the Soviets via the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP), emblematized by the greeting by Lithuanian Jews in the streets of Red Army troops occupying Lithuania.
It suffices here to say that Jewish membership in the LCP was factually based but exaggerated and that most Jews, while not communists, nevertheless recognized that Soviet rule was preferable to rule by the Nazis. On the former point, Alfred Erich Senn wrote that the involvement of Lithuanian Jews in the LCP was largely a matter of the Soviets aiming to undermine Lithuanian nationalists by recruiting ethnic minorities; to this end, the LCP had had such a large Jewish population that Lithuanian security sources during the period of independence considered the LCP to be a “Jewish party.”On the latter point, Saulius Suziedelis writes, “Since most Lithuanians had underestimated, and many even approved, the growing anti-Semitic atmosphere of the 1930s, they tended to downplay the Jews’ very real fears.” Conversely, Suziedelis notes elsewhere that, because Jews could see Soviet rule as preferable, “the politics and geopolitics of the war and occupation precluded an alliance with anti-Soviet ethnic Lithuanians, who increasingly perceived the struggle for independence as their exclusive affair.”
The Beginnings of Collaboration
Formal collaboration between Lithuanian nationalists and Nazi Germany began, as noted below, before the war, but it crystallized with the founding on November 17, 1940, in Berlin of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF). Led by Kazys Skirpa, the Lithuanian ambassador to Germany who found himself stranded in Berlin with the Soviet occupation, the LAF was, in the words of Tomasz Szarota, “formed of representatives of a number of political parties or factions, but the truly powerful ones were the followers of former President Smetona, on the one hand, and the adherents of his rival, Augustinas Voldemaras, author of the failed fascist putsch of 7th June 1934, on the other.”
As noted, the Smetona wing of the party could be considered one of authoritarian nationalists. The fascist Voldemarist wing, in contrast, had radicalized significantly since its founder’s ouster. For one thing, it had abandoned its earlier avoidance of anti-Semitic violence, at least in theory, for a more proactive position. In this vein, and due to shared ideological leanings, the Voldemarists had reached out the Nazis before the war had even begun. On July 19, 1939, for instance, Ulrich Dörtenbach, a legation councilor in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) of the SS, reporting on the financial relationship of the government with the Voldemarists in Lithuania dating back a year and a half. Mentioning the plans of the Voldemarists, Dörtenbach wrote, “With regard to the pogrom-plans of the ‘Woldemaras Supporters’ [sic] it has to be said that for some time past the Lithuanian government has been working successfully towards the elimination of Jewry from Lithuanian economy. This has resulted in an ever-growing increasing emigration of Jews during the last years.”Although the German government elected not to supply weapons at that time and expressed concern about how anti-Semitic violence might interfere with the German policy at the time of forced emigration, the letter nevertheless substantiates the awareness of the government, and more importantly of the RSHA, with the Voldemarists.
Further, on July 29, Heydrich forwarded Dörtenbach’s report to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, with an addendum that read, in part:
In the middle of May it was decided to form a secret Lithuanian national socialist party. Its leaders are the most trustworthy members of the “Woldemaras Supporters”. The direction of the work within the Officer’s Corps is said to be in the hands of old members of the “Woldemaras Supporters”. Besides that, they are said to have one assistant who is on the personal staff of President Smetana [sic]. In order to make full use of antisemitic feeling in Lithuania it is intended to stage pogroms against the Jews.
Heydrich’s note continues to make the same point as Dörtenbach’s, i.e., that weapons should not be supplied to the Iron Wolf because the flight of Jewish capital could be bad for the economy.
These contacts are supported by Lithuanian documents as well. For example, a bulletin from the Lithuanian State Security Department (Saugumas) dated April 15, 1939, stated, “There exist certain links between the Activists [i.e., those operating in Kaunas] and the German circles,” speaking specifically of LAF members collaborating with pro-Nazi ethnic Germans from the Memel region. This information corroborates other Lithuanian documents cited by Budreckis, who states that cross-border infiltration between Lithuania and Nazi Germany in both directions on behalf of the LAF occurred throughout 1940. Although Budreckis’s work should be approached with extreme caution due to his obvious goal of exculpating the LAF from charges of anti-Semitic violence, there is little reason why he would allege cross-border collaboration if it had not occurred.
Barbarossa and the Start of the Holocaust in Lithuania
Skirpa had wanted to accompany German troops into Lithuania on June 22, 1941, but was detained by the Nazis in Berlin and in fact remained there until 1944. At that time, he was sent into the concentration camp system, where he remained until liberation. Although Skirpa remained behind, the LAF in Kaunas was given advanced notice of the invasion and set immediately into action. They proclaimed a national uprising against the Soviets and violence erupted throughout the country, aimed at Red Army troops and real or perceived communists. However, the geography of the country and the plans of the invasion dictated that German troops would take two days to arrive in Kaunas, which still acted as the country’s capital. The city, and thus the country at large, was engulfed in an enormous vacuum of power.
In Kaunas, violence against Jews exploded onto the streets in an orgy of murder, rape, and looting. Numerous bystanders and survivors have commented over the decades on the widespread violence. Remarking on the outrages seven years later, survivor Yosef Gar wrote, “To curry favor with the Germans, the Lithuanian pro-Hitler element then began their anti-Jewish atrocities, hopeful through such deeds to convince the Nazis that, with regard to the killing of Jews, they could rely on the Lithuanians and they could fully trust them.”Among the historical controversies that persist regarding this period of two days is the extent to which this violence was directed by any forces at all. Szarota writes that these “partisans,” as they called themselves, were unorganized and did not recognize the LAF’s authority. Although it has been suggested that the Iron Wolf organized the street violence on these days, either with or without covert German support, absent compelling evidence to substantiate this theory, Szarota’s assessment seems the most likely.
Meanwhile, a group of LAF members in Kaunas met on July 23 and proclaimed a provisional government. Skirpa was recognized as prime minister, but in his absence, the education minister, Juozas Ambrazevicius, was elevated to the top position. Stasys Rastikis, a general and former commander of the Lithuanian Army, was named defense minister, although he was also in Berlin and would not arrive in Kaunas until July 27. Although they were all members of the LAF, none of the ministers in the PG were associated with the Voldemaras wing. Two days later, Heydrich commented on the Voldemarists in Operational Situation Report (OSR) 14, which he compiled in Berlin on July 6, 1941, on the basis of Einsatzgruppen reports sent from occupied territory. He wrote, “They reject Rastikis in principle because he is close to Christian-democratic circles.”
When German troops entered Kaunas on June 24 and took control of one of the partisan bands roaming the city, the man who was put in charge was Algirdas Klimaitis, who was a Voldemarist. Although Szarota notes that he suspects contacts between Klimaitis and the RSHA occurred before the war, no evidence has yet emerged to substantiate this suspicion. Klimaitis is particularly important because, in contrast to the street violence in Kaunas before the arrival of the Germans, he directed the first violent episodes in Kaunas with a clear leadership. On the night of June 25 and 26, Algirdas led a band of armed “partisans” to Vilijampole, a suburb of Kaunas with a large Jewish population, and conducted a mass pogrom. The significance of this pogrom, as noted by Suziedelis, writing with Christoph Dieckmann, is that, unlike the street violence of the previous days, in which it is likely that Jews were being attacked for putatively being communists, the attack on Vilijampole was an attack on Jews for being Jews.
Notably, the same day, Franz Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, one of the four mobile commando units that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union, Poland, and Baltic States in June 1941 and were deployed against political enemies and eventually Jews, arrived in Kaunas. Thus, whether as organized a pogrom against the Jews in Kaunas could have been organized without the SS remains an open question. For instance, in a Lithuanian article, Alfonasas Eidintas alleged that Stahlecker organized the pogrom directly, citing the testimony of Jonas Dainauskas, then leading the Saugumas, who claimed that the native security forces refused to participate. However, Dieckmann and Suziedelis write, “It is not unlikely that such talks did indeed take place. Yet, it remains unclear, what was exactly discussed, and what was the outcome of those talks.” At the very least, we know that the Einsatzgruppe leader was aware of Klimaitis, because he reported it to his superiors. In OSR 12, Heydrich wrote that one of two partisan groups that existed in Kaunas was led by Klimaitis and numbered 600 men “in the main office of civilian workers.”
Writing about the pogrom years later, Avraham Tory, who ultimately served as a member of the Jewish Council (Jüdenrat) once a ghetto was established in Kaunas, asserted that the Voldemarists led the pogrom:
Toward evening, suspicious Lithuanian characters appeared in the midst of the nervous crowds filling the streets, serving blows to Jewish passers-by. These Lithuanian thugs voice threats against the Jews: ‘Hitler will be here before long and will finish you off.’ That these attacks on the Jews were not accidental is attested by the fact that they took place simultaneously in different parts of town. In fact, it later became clear that the attackers were members of Lithuanian ‘partisan’ gangs, acting on the instructions of the fifth column of the indigenous local Nazis.
Although it might be tempting to dismiss Tory’s ability to taxonomize elements of Lithuania’s far right, he was personally acquainted with members of the PG and was aware of the range of opinions on solutions to the “Jewish question” among these groups.
On June 27, perhaps the most notorious instance of the first week of the occupation occurred — an open massacre of 60 Jewish men by Lithuanian civilians in broad daylight on the property of the Lietukis Garage. Gar wrote, “As eyewitnesses from adjoining houses reported, dozens of Jews were killed by the murderers were car wrenches, spades and picks.”Other witnesses reported water torture and beatings with iron bars. In any case, they all agree that the killing was public and that, while German troops looked on, they did not participate. Like the violence of the first two days, it remains unclear who directed the events at the Lietukis garage, although the likeliest explanation is unorganized violence committed by men recently released from a nearby prison run by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
Reactions to the violence at the Lietukis Garage from the PG ran the gamut from denunciation and discomfort to statements of ideological support. Dieckmann and Suziedelis, citing Lithuanian documents, refer to government disgust at the events but also to Jews being held responsible for communist crimes.They note further than the garage was only 200 meters from where the German 16th Army was then headquartered, so clearly the military could have chosen to stop the violence.Dieckmann and Suziedelis took note of claims by individual soldiers who were present that Lithuanian mothers raised their children over their heads so the children could more easily watch the killing. Evaluating these accounts, they write, “This statement is likely to be the attempts of the German soldiers to mark the entire Lithuanian nation as brutal anti-Semitists, and, thereby, to make a more advantageous depiction that the killings executed by the Germans were far more ordered.”
There is a note of truth in this last statement — if it is true that the killings of the first two days and those at the Lietukis Garage were mostly unorganized, then the pogrom in Vilijampole was certainly more ordered. In OSR 8, Heydrich wrote, “Lithuanian partisan groups had already in the last three days [before June 28, the date of the report from Einsatzkommando 1b in Kaunas] shot several thousand Jews,” providing a rough estimate of the number of Jews killed in Vilijampole and Kaunas proper in the first six days of Barbarossa — the vast majority of these victims must have been from the pogrom. If nothing else, Klimaitis’s leadership during the pogrom had indicated that at least one Iron Wolf member was a reliable collaborator in anti-Jewish violence.
The massacre at the Lietukis Garage was essentially the last instance of public violence against Jews in Kaunas during the German occupation. In his book, Budreckis claims that it was the LAF that actually stopped the violence in the streets of Kaunas. Referring specifically to pogrom in Vilijampole, he writes, “A Communist band attacking in Vilijampole on the night of June 26-27, murdered twenty children … before it was liquidated by the LAF.”Both because of Budreckis’s political agenda and because he does not indicate whether these children were Jewish, it is unclear whether he has confused the alleged communists with Klimaitis’s men or whether he has deliberately misled his readers. It is clear, however, that communist bands killing children in Vilijampole on the same night as the pogrom is highly unlikely.
Greater Organization and Speed
Regardless of why the public violence stopped, the next series of events indicates why the majority of Lithuanian Jews were still alive in the summer of 1941, but most had been murdered at the end of the year. On July 2, Einsatzkommando (EK) 3 arrived in Kaunas, led by Karl Jäger, who would go on to write the famous report of December 1, 1941, in which he claimed the Final Solution had been fully implemented in Lithuania. The important event on July 2 was the announcement by the PG of the format of military battalions called the National Labor Guard (Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos; TDA). Over the course of the previous week, calls had gone out for volunteers to join this force, and thousands responded. At the head of the TDA battalions was Jurgis Bobelis, a lieutenant colonel from the Lithuanian Army, who had been directly appointed by the PG. Szarota writes that Bobelis had been instrumental in disarming the “partisans” conducting street violence in Kaunas, some of whom undoubtedly enlisted in the TDA.According to Dieckmann and Suziedelis, approximately 40% of the TDA men were enlisted men who deserted from the Red Army.These men populated the lower ranks in the TDA. The officer corps was heavily populated by Voldemarists.
Once formed, the TDA battalions rounded up thousands of Jews from the streets of Kaunas, driving them to the old Russian Seventh Fort on the outskirts of the city, where the PG was considering establishing a concentration camp. Jäger’s arrival portended something much more sinister. In two “actions” on July 4 and 6, these Jews were shot by two of the TDA battalions, with no German security police actually participating. While battalions authorized by the non-Voldemarist PG might seem contradictory, Suziedelis writes that Bobelis had only nominal control over the Seventh Fort and that Jäger organized the shootings.The two battalions were led by Bronius Norkus and Kazys Simkus, both Voldemarists. Moreover, the chief of police in Kaunas, Vytautas Reivytis, was a Voldemarist as well. Norkus and Reivytis would ultimately be subordinated by Jäger to Joachim Hamann, a member of EK3 who led a mobile commando unit (RollkommandoHamann) that played the key role in the extermination of Jews in the countryside.
While the death toll from these two days at the Seventh Fort is uncertain, Tory wrote that 1,800 were shot on July 6 alone. In OSR 19, dated July 11, Heydrich wrote that 7,800 Jews had been killed in Kaunas through that date, “partly through pogroms and partly through shooting by Lithuanian commandos.” He added, “Further mass shootings are no longer possible” and referred to plans to erect a ghetto in Vilijampole. This ghettoization plan was announced on July 7. Regarding Heydrich’s assertion that mass shootings could no longer be performed, Dieckmann and Suziedelis report that the shootings had caused the Wehrmacht and Jäger’s EK, which seems likely. Until the “Great Action” at the Ninth Fort in November, mass shootings of Jews in Kaunas were over, but the EK in Lithuania had learned on whom it could most rely.
The Voldemarist Coup
As ghettoization moved forward and the military occupation authorities ultimately moved on, a civilian administered was established by the Nazis. Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO), to have its capital in Riga, Latvia, encompassed all of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and much of Soviet Belarus. Hinrich Lohse was named as Reichskommissar. These facts were announced to the PG, which had repeatedly asserted its desire for independence, in mid-July. The PG did not hide its disappointment. In an extended commentary on the political situation in the Baltic States appended to OSR 40, Heydrich commented on the failed collaboration with the PG and wrote, “Meanwhile, all the old political organizations, for example, the Christian Democrats and the Popular Socialists, and the Voldemaras supporters are trying to gather their old members. Unconditional agreement with every political form arranged by Germany is to be expected only from Voldemarist circles and from the apolitical rural and small-town populations.”
Commenting on Lohse’s assessment of the political landscape in Lithuania, Heydrich wrote in OSR 54, “To give the political situation a certain balance and to weaken the Activist forces, which are mainly recruited from former Christian Democrat circles, the Reichskommissar has thought of drawing the Voldemaras supporters more strongly into cooperation.”Remarking on these developments, Szarota writes, “as time went on, the position of Voldemaras’s followers was growing in the Germans’ perception, particularly in military and police circles. Among the underlying factors was the group’s radically anti-Semitic ideology, close to the National-Socialist one.”
Ultimately, the decision was made to form the Voldemarists into an independent party. It is unclear precisely when this occurred. As noted above, Heydrich wrote to von Ribbentrop that such a party had been formed in May 1939; however, it is unsure whether that same party still existed more than two years later. Budreckis writes that the Nazis enlisted the help of Pranas Germantas-Meskauskas, a former government minister and confidante of Skirpa whom the Nazis had brought to Lithuania from exile in Germany in June, to organize the Lithuanian Nationalist Party (LNP). In contrast, Karlis Kangeris writes that the LNP actually approached the Reichskommissar for his support, citing a Lithuanian document from Adrian von Renteln, the Generalkommissar of the Lithuanian district, that reads, “With the aim of uniting all of the National Socialist forces in Lithuania into an organized and disciplined party, the LNP is striving to transform Lithuania toward an Axis ideology or to remodel it on the basis of National Socialism and fascism.”
In either case, it is clear that the Gestapo and the LNP were cooperating by the time the LNP attempted its coup on the night of July 23. Budreckis and Dieckmann offer the most complete accounts of the coup in the non-Lithuanian literature. Budreckis, who relies on postwar Lithuanian sources, including General Rastikis, writes that the Voldemarist leadership occupied the Kaunas police headquarters and deposed Bobelis, replacing him with Simkus. The LNP arrested two PG ministers, and the PG, learning of the incidents, prepared for armed conflict. At the behest of the Gestapo, the LNP did not attack the government’s position. Instead, it moved against a command post where a battalion led by Rastikis was stationed, depending Rastikis’s resignation as well. He refused and asked the German general Robert von Pohl to intervene. Budreckis’s account ends with the LNP standing down after some mediation, although they continued to hold the command post.
Dieckmann’s version, based in part on documents only available since 1991, seems more accurate. In his account, the standoff is mediated by Martin Kurmis, a German SS captain and Sicherheitsdienstagent of Lithuanian descent who played a key role in planning the invasion, and the LNP is appeased by the PG yielding the “top positions” in the administration to the LNP. Moreover, he writes, “The outcome of the coup meant increased willingness of the Lithuanian military and Lithuanian police to cooperate with the German side. The takeover of Lithuanian armed units by right-wing extremist forces certainly facilitated the mass murders that began soon afterward, especially of the Jewish population.”
The Aftermath
Lohse visited Kaunas on July 25, the day after the coup, as noted by Heydrich in OSR 35. With the RKO firmly established by the end of the month, there was little point for the PG to continue. It met on August 5, drafted a resolution expressing its continued desire for full independence, and dissolved itself. Ghettoization of Kaunas’s Jews continued apace, and the ghetto was finally sealed on August 15. Around the same time, the Rollkommando Hamann, manned by Voldemarists, began its onslaught against Jews in the Lithuanian countryside, transforming the country into what Eric Haberer has called the “flashpoint of genocide.” The LAF was almost immediately banned by the Nazi occupation forces and it rapidly transitioned its purposes toward resistance. The LNP itself was outlawed only a few months later, indicating that its primary purpose, beyond providing a possible alternative to the PG, was to be deployed against the Jews of Lithuania. Writing seven months later, Jonas Fledzinksas, the Lithuanian Agriculture Minister in the PG, summarized the Voldemarists thus: “The Lithuanian Nationalist Party, which was in fact merely the name of a small group of young and naïve political amateurs, realized that unconditional collaboration with Germany in certain circumstances would be a betrayal.”
The damage, however, was done. In his famous aforementioned report, Jäger wrote, “I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, other than the Work Jews, including their families.”These “Work Jews” numbered 34,500 in three cities out of an original population of the nearly 200,000 who had lived in Lithuania less than two years earlier. The destructiveness of the Holocaust in Lithuania as a percentage of the original population killed was higher in that country than in any other country in Europe. Haberer writes, “While encouraged and utilized by the Germans, [violence against Jews] was, as such, not a creation of Nazi propaganda and ingenious organization. The eruption of mass violence as witnessed in Lithuania could not have been invented by fiat […] These were elemental destructive social forces that had been in the making for decades.” Haberer might be overstating the culpability of the native populations of Eastern Europe, but there is little question that the LNP and the collaborators that it donated to the Nazi effort were instrumental in the costliness of the Final Solution in Lithuania.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the evidence strongly indicates that the Nazis chose to back the supporters of Augustinas Voldemaras in the coup against the Lithuanian PG on July 23, 1941, in part to expedite the Final Solution in Lithuania. The desire of the Voldemarists to commit pogroms against Lithuanian Jews had been expressed years before the German occupation. Once the occupation began, through figures such as Klimaitis and Norkus, the Voldemarists had established themselves as the most reliable among native Lithuanians to commit acts of violence against Lithuanian Jews. Therefore, the Voldemarists would have been seen by the Nazis as the most fitting party to receive Gestapo support. This strategy of the Nazis clearly paid off: in terms of the percentage of Jewish lives lost; Lithuania had the highest death toll of any country during the Holocaust. Controversy might persist over the exact role of Lithuanian collaborators in this cataclysmic series of events, the thorough destruction of Lithuania’s Jews is indisputable.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Bulletin No. 92 from the Lithuanian State Security Department. Bulletin, April 15, 1939. In Documents Accuse. Edited by B. Baranauskas, K. Ruksenas, and E. Rozauskas. 62-63. Vilnius: Gintaras, 1970.
Dörtenbach, Ulrich. Memorandum to Reinhard Heydrich, memorandum, July 19, 1939, Nuremberg Document 2592-PS. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume V. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 655-56.
Fledzinskis, J. “Report of the Director General of the Lithuanian Economics Ministry, J. Fledzinkis [sic], regarding the occupation of Lithuania and statistical data regarding Jews in Lithuania, Germany and Vienna, 1941-1942.” February 2, 1942. Record Group O.82, File Number 4. Baltic Countries Collection. Yad Vashem Digital Archive, Jerusalem.
Gar, Yosef. Umkum fun der Yidisher Kovne. Munich: Farband fun Litvishe Yidn in der Amerikaner Zone in Daytschland, 1948.
Heydrich, Reinhard. Ereignismeldungen UdSSR. Record Group 14, 101M.0082. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.
———. Letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop, June 29, 1939. Nuremberg Document 2953-PS. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume V. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 657-58.
Jäger, Karl. “Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK.3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen.” December 1, 1941. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://phdn.org/archives/
holocaust-history.org/works/jaeger-report/htm/img001.htm.en.html.
Tory, Avraham, Martin Gilbert, and Dina Porat. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Secondary Sources
Budreckis, Algirdas Martin. The Lithuanian National Revolt of 1941. South Boston, MA: Lithuanian Encyclopedia Press, 1968.
Dieckmann, Christoph. Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen, 1941-1944, 2 vols. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2016.
Dieckmann, Christoph, and Saulius Suziedelis. Okupacija Ir Aneksija: Pirmoji Sovietine Okupacija, 1940-1941 = Occupation and Annexation : the First Soviet Occupation. Totalitariniu rezimu nusikaltimai Lietuvoje. Vilnius: Margi Rastai, 2006.
Eidintas, Alfonasas. “A ‘Jew-Communist’ Stereotype in Lithuania, 1940-1941.” Lithuanian Political Science Yearbook, January 2000, 1-36.
Haberer, Eric. “Intention and Feasibility: Reflections on Collaboration and the Final Solution.” East European Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2 (2001): 64-81.
Kangeris, Karlis. “Kollaboration vor der Kollaboration? Die baltischen Emigranten und ihre ‘Befreiungskomitees’ in Deutschland 1940/41.” In Okkupation Und Kollaboration (1938-1945): Beiträge Zu Konzepten Und Praxis der Kollaboration in der Deutschen Okkupationspolitik, edited by Werner Röhr, 165-90. Berlin: Hüthig Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1994.
MacQueen, Michael. “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 27-48.
Petersen, Roger Dale. Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Senn, Alfred Erich. Lithuania 1940: Revolution from Above. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Suziedelis, Saulius. “Foreign Saviors, Native Disciples: Perspectives on Collaboration in Lithuania, 1940-1945” in Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, edited by David Gaunt, Paul A. Levine, and Laura Palosuo, 313-59. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004.
———. “The Historical Sources for Antisemitism in Lithuania and Jewish-Lithuanian Relations During the 1930.” In The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, edited by Alvydas Nikzentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliunas, 119-54. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
———. “Lithuanian Collaboration during the Second World War: Past Realities, Present Perceptions” in “Kollaboration” in Nordosteuropa: Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Joachim Tauber, 140-63. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2006.
Szarota, Tomasz. On the Threshold of the Holocaust: Anti-Jewish Riots and Pogroms in Occupied Europe: Warsaw, Paris, the Hague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Kaunas. Translated by Tristan Korecki. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.
Voren, Robert van. Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011.
Inevitable Historicity 