1938, Not 1940

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.

The June 1939 file

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 100,000 litai, about 41,000 Reichsmarks, to conduct anti-Jewish pogroms. Read that again. Not a German demand pressed on a reluctant Lithuania, but a Lithuanian faction shopping its own pogrom program abroad and asking to be armed for it.

The paper trail is exact. On 29 June 1939 Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police and SD, forwarded the German Security Police report on the Voldemarist movement to the German Foreign Office. On 19 July 1939 the Foreign Office replied through its official Dörtenbach. Berlin refused the weapons and the request for 100,000 litai. A handwritten endorsement by State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker supported regular quarterly payments of two to three thousand Reichsmarks. The exchange survives in the Nuremberg record, at International Military Tribunal volume 31, pages 385 to 391, and is recounted in Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė’s How Did It Happen?[3]

Strip it to the fact. A Lithuanian political faction asked a foreign government to finance pogroms against the Jews of its own country. It made the request in the summer of 1939. There was no Soviet occupation to blame, because there was no Soviet occupation.

The refusal that gives the game away

The sharpest line in the file is not the request. It is the reason Berlin gave for holding back.

The German Foreign Office did not decline out of any objection to violence against Jews. It declined on grounds of timing. Pogroms, it judged, would disturb the slow but steady process already under way: the pushing of Jews out of the Lithuanian economy. Street violence might interrupt something Berlin considered more useful, including the rising emigration of Jews.

Weigh what that concedes. By 1939 the removal of Jews from Lithuanian economic life was not a German plan and not a Soviet reflex. It was a Lithuanian process already running, and the Germans praised it for working. Through the 1930s a homegrown economic nationalism had made the squeeze systematic, with boycotts and professional exclusion pressed under the same slogan the killers would later inherit. The Voldemarists wanted to speed it up with blood. The Nazi Foreign Office preferred the quieter method precisely because it was succeeding. In this exchange, the premise was shared. The process Berlin proposed not to disrupt was already under way in Lithuania.

This is what breaks the 1940 start date. The exculpatory story needs the Soviet occupation to manufacture the animus. The document shows the animus already embedded in Lithuanian governance, and a radical faction already reaching abroad to arm it, before the occupation existed.

What waited, and what came

Ideology that organizes in 1938 does not dissolve when the calendar turns. It waits, and in Lithuania the wait was short.

Follow the men. Kubiliūnas, who led the 1934 Voldemarist putsch, surfaced in 1941 as First General Counselor, the highest-ranking Lithuanian official in the German civil administration. Vytautas Reivytis, who had worked with German intelligence before the war, took over the Lithuanian Police Department and helped organize the roundups of Jews in 1941. Dieckmann found that in practically every town in the Lithuanian border zone, the district heads, mayors, and local police chiefs installed with the German advance were Voldemarists.[4] One of them, Pranas Lukys-Jakys, returned with the German forces and became a central figure in the Kretinga security apparatus. A West German court’s final retrial judgment convicted him of accessory participation in joint murder in 103 cases, while evidence assembled by Dieckmann places him personally shooting prisoners at Dimitravas.[5]

When the first mass shooting came at Gargždai on 24 June 1941, German personnel shot 201 people, including one woman. The victims were predominantly Jewish men. The local Voldemarist administrators had prepared the ground. None of this makes the pogroms or the mass murder a purely Lithuanian invention. Dieckmann is careful, and so should anyone be, to record that German instigation was the trigger and that the killing spread as the Germans arrived, not before them. But the German prompt did not fall on empty ground. It landed on a radical right that had sought German support since 1938, explicitly requested pogrom funds by June 1939, and then staffed the new administration with men from the same faction. The initiative in 1939 ran from Kaunas to Berlin. The machinery in 1941 was waiting to be switched on.[6]

Anticipated objections

The objections arrive on cue, and each fails on the record. The first says the Germans started the 1941 pogroms, so the guilt is German. The June 1939 file answers it. In 1939 Lithuanian radicals were soliciting the Germans, not the reverse, and Berlin declined the larger proposal on timing rather than principle. The second says the Voldemarists were a fringe that Smetona jailed. He did jail them. But their aim was continuous with an economic nationalism the state itself advanced, and the same faction later filled important posts in the administration that presided over the murders. The third says economic exclusion is not genocide. Correct, and no such equation is made here. The claim is about chronology alone. The organized intent, and the request to fund pogroms, both predate June 1940. That is the whole point, and it is enough.

The limits of the claim

Precision is what lets an accusation survive, so mark the boundary. This record does not prove the Holocaust in Lithuania was inevitable. It does not prove a nation was fated to murder, and it convicts no people. Most Lithuanians were not Voldemarists. Destiny is not a category of evidence, and none is claimed. The target is not the ordinary population, itself terrorized in these years. It is a named faction, its named leaders, and the policy of economic exclusion that faction wanted to hurry along with violence.

What the record does establish is narrow and unmovable. Named Lithuanian organizations and named men held organized antisemitic intent. They treated the elimination of Jews from national life as nation-building. They asked a foreign power to fund pogroms. They did it in 1938 and 1939, before June 1940. The Soviet occupation intensified grievances and gave the Judeo-Bolshevik libel wider reach. The German invasion then supplied the license, command structure, and machinery of mass murder. Neither created the organized antisemitic intent already documented in 1939.

Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has had decades to make these papers central to the national record. Its handling of Jonas Noreika shows the opposite method: in 2019 Lithuania’s own International Commission publicly objected that the Centre was minimizing the nature and extent of his collaboration in the persecution of Jews. In 2026 I applied to become the Centre’s Director General and proposed a documents-first method: facts before reputation. Lithuania declined. I am therefore publishing the chronology the Centre should already have made unavoidable. When a state research institution minimizes the documentary record to protect a patriotic verdict, it produces propaganda rather than history.[7]

The chronology holds

Lithuania destroyed a larger share of its Jews than any nation in Europe. Roughly nineteen of every twenty were murdered. A number that total invites an origin story that keeps the nation innocent, and the June 1940 start date is that story. It moves the source of the violence outside the country and lets everything before it pass as a golden age.

The papers refuse the favor. The Voldemarists asked for their pogrom money in 1939. Heydrich forwarded the file in June 1939. The Foreign Office replied and approved regular payments in July 1939. The Red Army had not arrived. The deportations had not happened. The alibi requires a blank page before the Soviets, and the blank page does not exist.

1938, not 1940. The defense is a date, and the date is false.

[1] “Geležinis Vilkas,” Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija (VLE), recording its creation by the Nationalist regime in late 1927, 252 companies, about 3,500 members and 1,500 candidates in January 1929, and closure on May 24, 1930; “voldemarininkai,” VLE, recording eight planned coups and more than 110 officers in the June 7, 1934 attempt.

[2] Liudas Truska and Vygantas Vareikis, The Preconditions for the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism in Lithuania (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2004); Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen? Understanding the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), p. 36.

[3]Reinhard Heydrich to Joachim von Ribbentrop, June 29, 1939, PS-2953; German Foreign Office memorandum, July 19, 1939, PS-2952, bearing a handwritten endorsement signed “W”; the IMT prosecution identified “W” as the Secretary of State, then Ernst von Weizsäcker, and quoted the endorsement supporting regular quarterly payments; International Military Tribunal, vol. XXXI, pp. 385-391; Dieckmann and Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen?, p. 37.

[4] “Petras Kubiliūnas,” VLE; Arūnas Bubnys, “Lietuvių viešoji policija ir policijos batalionai (1941-1944),” Genocidas ir rezistencija; Dieckmann and Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen?, pp. 78-79.

[5]Landgericht Ulm, judgment of August 29, 1958, Ks 2/57, Lfd. Nr. 465a (initial conviction in 315 cases); Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of February 23, 1960, 1 StR 648/59 (vacating the conviction as to Lukys and remanding the case); Landgericht Ulm, judgment of November 3, 1960, Ks 2/57, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. XVI, Lfd. Nr. 499, pp. 779-780 (final retrial conviction in 103 cases); Dieckmann and Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen?, pp. 79, 224.

[6] Report of the Tilsit State Police, July 1, 1941, recording 201 persons shot at Garsden/Gargždai on June 24, including one woman; reproduced by JewishGen’s Gargždai KehilaLinks project.

[7] International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, “A Response to the Statement of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania of 27 March 2019,” April 11, 2019; Grant Arthur Gochin, “Re: Application – Director General, LGGRTC,” Substack, 2026.