Foreign Ministry Named Nazis, Not Local Killers
Kazimierz Sakowicz recorded two Lithuanians using switches on crying Jewish children at Ponary on September 24, 1943. Lithuania’s state museum names the killing apparatus at Paneriai, its commanders, and its German chain of command. The Foreign Ministry’s anniversary release does not.
After Vice-Minister Audra Plepytė joined the September 25, 2025 commemoration at Paneriai, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry published a release whose sentence for the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto supplied the perpetrator in three words: “Nazi occupation authorities.” On September 23, 1943, it said, those authorities liquidated the ghetto and “murdered most of the Jews imprisoned in the Ghetto in the Paneriai forest.” The same release put Lithuania’s Holocaust loss at “around 190,000 Jews.” It called the murdered fellow citizens who had helped build the Lithuanian state.
The surviving diary entry for September 24 names personnel.
Kazimierz Sakowicz dated the entry “24 IX – piątek” (“September 24 – Friday”). In the 2014 Polish edition published by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, edited by Maria Wardzyńska, it appears on p. 102. At about 10 a.m., a bus stopped beside the pit near the Rudziński property, which the Yale edition on p. 118 calls “Rudzinski’s pit.” Sakowicz recorded Lithuanians using rifle butts to hurry the victims as they stripped to their underwear. They were driven into the pit and shot from above. A German also fired with a revolver.
A second bus arrived.
Many Jewish children and several men got out. Sakowicz wrote: “Dzieci rozbierały się, a płaczących 2 Litwini uspokajali witkami.” My translation: the children undressed, and two Lithuanians used switches to “calm” those who were crying. The published Yale edition on p. 119 renders the sentence: “The children undressed, and the Lithuanians used sticks to calm those who were crying.” The English translation omits the Polish numeral “2”; it does not omit the nationality or the sticks. The men unloaded a body into the pit, then undressed amid Lithuanian shouts and blows. They were driven to the pit and shot.
What Sakowicz recorded
IPN’s own description of the edition says Sakowicz recorded both what he saw himself and what he heard from others. Rachel Margolis’s foreword to the Yale edition (pp. x–xi) says that from a hiding place in his attic he observed executions at one pit and also made inquiries among neighbors, railway employees, people who acquired victims’ clothing, and the Lithuanian killers themselves. The September 24 entry names no informant and does not state his vantage point.
The page also does not say where the second bus had come from. The final liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto had begun the previous day. That chronology does not prove that these particular children arrived from the ghetto, and this article does not claim it. Sakowicz’s page records something narrower: on September 24, 1943, Jewish children were brought to Ponary, forced to undress, and the Polish text records two Lithuanians using switches on those who cried before the group was killed.
The ministry’s sentence misdescribes the day it commemorates
German direction of the final liquidation is not in dispute. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that SS authorities ordered the final deportation from the Vilna Ghetto and that, during the liquidation, surviving men were sent to labor camps in Estonia and women to camps in Latvia, while children, the elderly, and the sick were sent to Sobibor or shot at Ponary. The USHMM’s 2000 booklet Resistance in the Ghettos, p. 16, gives the September 23–24 breakdown: nearly 4,000 residents deported to Estonia, more than 4,000 children, women, and elderly people deported to Sobibor, and several hundred other children and elderly people taken to Ponary and killed.
If the Foreign Ministry’s sentence describes what happened on September 23, it is wrong: most of the ghetto’s remaining Jews were not murdered at Paneriai that day. Thousands were deported elsewhere; several hundred were killed at Ponary. If the sentence was intended instead as a compressed account of the ghetto’s destruction over time, the omission is worse: the ministry names only the “Nazi occupation authorities” while the state museum at the killing site identifies the local squad that, by the museum’s own count, had shot at least 21,000 Jews at Paneriai before the end of 1941.
The state museum names the killing apparatus
The Paneriai Memorial is administered by the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History. Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture lists it among the state museums subordinate to the ministry. Its Paneriai history page is more exact than the Foreign Ministry’s 2025 release. As of September 14, 2026, the page’s English-language address serves Lithuanian text; the translations below are mine.
The museum says the mass shootings of Jews at Paneriai were carried out by members of the Special Squad of the German Security Police and SD, the Ypatingasis būrys. It records about 100 members when the unit first appears in documents on July 15, 1941; junior lieutenants Jakubka and Butkus as its first organizers; officer Juozas Šidlauskas as commander from July 23; and, after the November reorganization, Lieutenant Balys Norvaiša as commander with Balys Lukošius as deputy. The unit then numbered roughly 40 to 50 men. Most were Lithuanians; several were Russians and Poles.
The same page states that the squad was subordinate only to the German Security Police and carried out its officers’ instructions, and that SS noncommissioned officer Martin Weiss oversaw it for the longest period. Then the museum gives the unit’s killing record: about 5,000 people shot in July 1941, about 2,000 in August, and at least 21,000 Jews shot at Paneriai by the end of 1941 according to the Jäger report. After the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated in September 1943, the page records several hundred elderly and sick Jews shot there as well.
German authority and identifiable local personnel are preserved together on the state museum’s own page. The Foreign Ministry’s 2025 release retained the first and removed the second.
The ministry already had the words
The omission cannot be explained as an institutional inability to name Lithuanian participation. In a May 2013 interview republished on the Foreign Ministry’s own site, then-Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius said he was “ashamed to say, but it is true” that there were Lithuanian collaborators who took part in the murder of Jews. He called that participation a fact that should be studied and included in Lithuanian education.
A 2014 National Memorial Day release said simply, “The Vilna Ghetto was liquidated on 23 September 1943.” In a 2016 National Memorial Day release, the ministry stated in Lithuanian that Nazis in Lithuania, “dažnai padedami lietuvių kolaborantų” (“often aided by Lithuanian collaborators”), murdered 90 percent of approximately 208,000 Lithuanian Jews. A 2017 National Memorial Day release exists in both Lithuanian and English. The Lithuanian version says the Vilna Ghetto was destroyed and its last Jewish residents killed or deported; the English version, written for foreign readers, says only that “the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated.” At Paneriai on April 8, 2021, for Yom HaShoah, the ministry again named “Nazis and their local collaborators in Europe” and put the Lithuanian Jewish death toll at “some 200,000.”
For the 80th anniversary of the Vilna Ghetto liquidation in 2023, the ministry used the phrase “nacių okupacinė valdžia” — “Nazi occupation authorities.” It said those authorities liquidated the ghetto and murdered most of its imprisoned Jews at Paneriai, and put the murdered at approximately 190,000. The 2025 English release repeated the same perpetrator formula and the same total.
Of the five National Memorial Day releases retrievable on the ministry’s current site as of September 14, 2026 (2014, 2016, 2017, 2023, 2025), four omit Lithuanian perpetrators: 2014 and 2017 through the passive voice, 2023 and 2025 through “Nazi occupation authorities.” Only 2016 names “Lithuanian collaborators.” Releases for 2015, 2018–2020, 2022, and 2024 were not retrievable in my search. A separate April 2021 Yom HaShoah release named “local collaborators.” In 2023 and again in 2025 the ministry chose the anonymizing formula after it had already written “Lithuanian collaborators” in 2016. I have examined elsewhere the diplomatic formula “Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators.” For the national memorial day in 2023 and 2025, even “collaborators” disappeared.
The ministry’s count has moved as well: 90 percent of “approximately 208,000” in 2016, “some 200,000” in April 2021, approximately 190,000 in 2023, “around 190,000 Jews” in 2025. The Embassy of Israel in Lithuania states: “Over 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, the highest percentage of any country in Europe.” The 2025 release claims the murdered as builders of the state. Its perpetrator sentence leaves their local killers outside it.
September 24
Sakowicz’s September 24 entry is dated and specific. It records a German firing a revolver. It records Lithuanian personnel hurrying victims with rifle butts. A second bus brought Jewish children. The Polish text specifies two Lithuanians using switches on those who cried.
The state museum at Paneriai names the squad and its commanders. The Foreign Ministry’s own archive proves that the ministry knows how to say “Lithuanian collaborators.”
Its vice-minister stood at Paneriai on September 25, 2025. The Foreign Ministry’s release said “Nazi occupation authorities” and stopped. An omission made by design, with the purpose of misleading the reader about what happened, is not mere imprecision. It is a lie. When that lie is applied to the Holocaust to remove identifiable perpetrators from the account of who murdered the Jews, it has a name: Holocaust denial.
