How Many Jews Did Lithuanians Murder?

Lithuania published the deployment map. Foreign courts named the men. The state never produced the ledger.

How many Jews did Lithuanians murder?

The honest answer is that no complete figure exists. Not because the evidence disappeared. Not because the formations are unknown. Lithuania has researched the battalions, mapped their deployments, published personnel studies and acknowledged their participation in the Holocaust. What it has not done is assemble the names, actions and victims into a national accounting.

The question begins inside Lithuania. Karl Jäger’s report credited Einsatzkommando 3 with the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry, but Jäger also explained that his small German mobile cadre could not have completed the work without Lithuanian partisans, police and civil authorities. They gathered Jews, transported them, guarded the roads and pits, and participated in the shootings.

Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe.

But Lithuanian participation did not stop at Lithuania’s border.

Lithuanian police battalions were deployed across occupied Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia and elsewhere. Lithuania’s own national encyclopedia says that twenty-six battalions were formed, with approximately 20,000 men serving in them. Its deployment summary places most of the specifically located battalions outside Lithuania. The same encyclopedia acknowledges that these formations helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust, participated in killing Jews in Lithuania and Belarus, and guarded Majdanek in occupied Poland.

That should have produced a ledger.

Instead, it produced fragments.

In Belarus, the United States Department of Justice described the 2nd/12th Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion as a mobile killing unit. Its method was to surround a community, remove Jews from homes and workplaces, march them to pits, force them to undress and shoot them. The Justice Department attributed the slaughter of more than 19,000 men, women and children in Minsk and other Belarusian towns during October and November 1941 to the battalion’s operations.

American proceedings identified individual members, tested documentary evidence and imposed the immigration remedies available under United States law. A Scottish court found that Antanas Gecevičius had participated in operations involving the killing of civilians, including Jews, in Belarus. A West German court convicted Franz Lechthaler, the German commander connected to the Slutsk massacre.

Lithuania received some of the men removed from foreign countries. It did not produce a comparable completed accounting of the battalion, its members or its victims.

At Majdanek, Lithuania built an innocence measured in meters.

Antanas Baltušis-Žvejys held a command position in the 252nd Lithuanian Police Battalion, which Lithuania’s own research places in the guard system of Majdanek. The restored Lithuanian state later granted him military recognition. When the matter became public, the director of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre defended the service as “external security.”

The phrase is not exculpatory. A concentration camp cannot operate without armed men preventing prisoners from escaping. Lithuanian guards occupied gates and watchtowers, escorted transports, marched prisoners to forced labor and maintained the enclosure. The perimeter was part of the machinery.

“Outside the fence” was not outside the crime. At Majdanek, it was also where mass graves were prepared and Jews were shot.

The record extends further. Lithuanian-born Vladas Zajančkauskas trained at Trawniki and was deployed during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Liudas Kairys served at the Treblinka labor camp. Their legal records prove different things and must not be inflated into identical accusations. Together with the battalion evidence, however, they establish named Lithuanian participation within a transnational system of persecution, camp security, ghetto liquidation and mass murder.

Lithuania possesses the institutional capacity to finish the count. Its archives contain personnel records. Its historians have studied the battalions. Its encyclopedia has published the deployment structure. Foreign courts and immigration authorities have already assembled files on identified men.

Yet there is still no complete roster of Lithuanian personnel deployed abroad, no site-by-site victim count, no reconciliation of Lithuanian archives with American, British, German, Polish and Belarusian proceedings, and no public account of what happened after removed men returned to Lithuania.

The state has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.

The missing number is therefore not merely a historical gap. It is the product of an institutional decision about which knowledge Lithuania requires itself to complete.

My full investigation, “How many Jews did Lithuanians murder?”, sets out the battalions, foreign deployments, court findings, Majdanek guard record, Trawniki cases, official Lithuanian publications and the evidentiary limits that must be preserved.

The article does not allege collective guilt. It names formations, commanders, institutions and adjudicated records. It also refuses claims the evidence cannot yet prove.

Lithuania should publish the complete battalion rosters, identify every foreign deployment, distinguish guard service from direct killing, connect personnel files to foreign proceedings, produce a defensible victim ledger and review state honors granted to men who served in Nazi persecution formations.

The record is not missing.

Lithuania is standing on it.