Jäger Kept the Ledger. Lithuanians Filled It.

I have filed more than a hundred correction requests with Lithuanian institutions, town by town. Each filing has lengthened the list of false statements I can document. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC) tells the public that perpetrators were exonerated. The National Encyclopedia (VLE) omits the Lithuanian police from the histories of the towns where they shot Jews. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs mourns murdered Jews and names no killer except “Nazi occupation authorities.”

All three use one method. Agency moves from Lithuanians to Germans, and from named men to the passive voice. This article reverses the direction. It asks the question Lithuanian institutions avoid: how did Lithuanians achieve the highest rate of Jewish murder in Europe? The answer comes from the records the killers, their commanders and their witnesses left.

Germans conceived the destruction, issued the orders and killed. The same German records name the Lithuanian formations that carried it out. One fact does not cancel the other.

Where I cite LGGRTC publications, I give them no evidentiary weight. I cite the Centre’s statements against it. The facts rest on German records, eyewitness accounts, court findings and independent scholarship.

The Number

Israel’s Embassy in Lithuania states that more than 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, the highest percentage of any country in Europe, and that the result flowed from collaboration as well as Nazi crimes. In 2018 Israel Hayom reported that the Lithuanian government’s own document put the toll at 95 percent of the Jews in the country. Of every twenty Lithuanian Jews, one lived.

Intent Came First

The Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) wrote its program before a German soldier crossed the border. Its spring 1941 proclamations announced “the fateful and final hour” for settling accounts with the Jews and ordered every Jew to leave Lithuania. A leaflet dated 19 March 1941 offered pardon to Lithuanians who had served the Soviets, on condition that each prove he had killed at least one Jew. It promised Lithuanians the possessions of Jews. Historian Stanislovas Stasiulis, examining the two surviving versions, attributes the version containing that condition to the Berlin LAF leadership and the Voldemarists.

The killing began before German forces reached the localities where it began. Yad Vashem’s Pinkas Hakehillot Lita records that in at least forty Jewish communities, armed Lithuanians began murdering Jews on their own initiative before German troops entered. Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, in the study published by Lithuania’s own International Commission, found that attacks on the Jews of Kaunas began immediately after the invasion, before the German Security Police vanguard under Walter Stahlecker entered the city on 25 June. Lithuanian historian Liudas Truska, reviewing that study for the same Commission, agreed that violence against Jews began with the uprising, before the Germans came.

Stahlecker’s later report to Berlin took credit for setting the Kaunas pogroms in motion. His claim does not erase the killings that preceded his arrival.

The Arithmetic

Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, kept the ledger. He recorded the shootings at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas as executions carried out by Lithuanian partisans on his instructions and orders: 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women on 4 July 1941, and 2,514 Jews on 6 July. His command and their hands appear in the same entry.

For the provinces Jäger formed a mobile unit under SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann: Hamann and eight to ten Germans, operating with Lithuanian partisans. Jäger wrote that the goal of making Lithuania free of Jews could be achieved only through that unit, whose commander secured the cooperation of the Lithuanian partisans and the civil authorities. Jews were marched to the pits in columns of 500. By 1 December 1941 his running total reached 137,346 executed, the overwhelming majority of them Jews.

Ten Germans did not register the Jews of every district, assemble them, dig the pits, march the columns, guard the perimeters and fire the rifles in town after town. Jäger named who did.

The operational reports named Lithuanian formations months before Jäger closed his December ledger. On 30 June 1941, Report 8 attributed the shooting of several thousand Jews over the preceding three days to Lithuanian partisan groups. On 6 July, Report 14 stated that one company guarded the Jewish camp at Fort VII and carried out executions, and that approximately 1,500 Jews were confined there under Lithuanian guards. On 11 July, Report 19 recorded 7,800 Jews killed in Kaunas, partly through pogrom and partly through shootings by Lithuanian commandos. On 19 September, Report 88 recorded 46,692 persons liquidated by Einsatzkommando 3 together with Lithuanian partisans. The reports overlap. The attribution repeats in every one.

Even Arūnas Bubnys, acting head of LGGRTC, concedes that 80 percent of Lithuanian Jews had been murdered by the end of 1941.

The Whole Apparatus

Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis listed the Lithuanian participants: irregular bands such as the Klimaitis group; the TDA battalions, later called police battalions; the Kaunas police and the new local precincts; the Lithuanian Security Police; a large part of the civilian administration; and the Provisional Government, which did not speak against the violence while it controlled the radio and the press. They concluded that most victims were killed with the help of Lithuanians or directly by Lithuanian hands. That is the finding of a study published by Lithuania’s own Commission.

Their analysis of the file of Vytautas Reivytis, director of the Lithuanian Police Department, went further. Germans conceived the Holocaust; the executing power was Reivytis and his police officers. Regional officials, rural wardens and local police selected the victims, separated them from their neighbors, isolated them, plundered them and killed them.

The German reports describe that machinery in operation. Report 17, dated 9 July 1941, records Lithuanian police sections in Vilnius, subordinate to the Einsatzkommando, compiling lists of Jewish intellectuals, political activists and wealthy Jews. Searches and arrests followed, with 54 Jews liquidated on 4 July, 93 on 5 July, and seizure of Jewish property. Report 21, dated 13 July, records 150 Lithuanian officials assigned to arrest Jews and transport them to camps, where they underwent “special treatment” that same day. The killing at the pit depended on the policeman who wrote the list, the official who concentrated the victims and the guard who closed the perimeter.

The Provisional Government did not limit itself to silence. On 1 August 1941 it approved a statute “On the Status of Jews.”

At Ponary, outside Vilnius, the Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz recorded eighty Lithuanian shooters and a hundred guards on 2 September 1941. At Nowe Święciany in October 1941, the Lithuanian Special Squad was assisted by 120 local Lithuanian policemen and former partisans; Dieckmann counts at least 5,000 victims there.

Sužiedėlis has stated that the participants included intellectuals, teachers, students and military officers, that they were far more numerous than Lithuania admits, and that refusing to murder Jews almost never brought punishment. Duress does not explain them.

The Audience

On 27 June 1941, at the Lietūkis garage in Kaunas, Lithuanians beat Jewish men to death with crowbars and forced water hoses into them until they died. Wehrmacht Colonel Lothar von Bischoffshausen saw women standing on chairs and crates to lift their children for a better view. The cheering, clapping and laughter led him to assume he had come upon a “victory celebration or some type of sporting event.” When the killing ended, according to a German photographer present, the killer climbed onto the pile of corpses with an accordion and played the Lithuanian national anthem, and the crowd sang with him. A private German letter written two days later recorded the same scene.

The plunder followed the shooting. In Utena, a Lithuanian auxiliary policeman returned from the murder of Jews in the Rašė Forest and auctioned their belongings in the central market. At Ponary on 25 October 1941, Sakowicz recorded Lithuanian soldiers dividing the possessions of murdered Jews, and a woman confronting the soldier who had taken her money and promised to release her and her child. He recorded the shooting continuing on All Saints’ Day.

Property also entered the written machinery of persecution. A published order dated 19 September 1941, signed by Vilnius district head Br. Draugelis, directed the forced removal of Jews to Vėliučionys and the locking and sealing of the property they left behind. Guards were to be reliable persons, preferably Lithuanians. The township head could pay them remuneration. A Lithuanian district official ordered the removal and the sealing of the property, and authorized payment of the guards.

The Export

Lithuanian killers crossed borders. The Kaunas 2nd Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Service Battalion, later numbered the 12th, under Major Antanas Impulevičius, left for the Minsk region on 6 October 1941 with German Reserve Police Battalion 11, as a U.S. federal court found. An article in LGGRTC’s own journal records 485 men in the battalion and states that about 450, all three companies, took part in the killings. On 10 October the prisoners of the Rudensk ghetto were murdered while Juozas Krikštaponis commanded the battalion’s Second Company. At Slutsk on 27 October, a lieutenant of German Police Battalion 11, stationed in Kaunas, announced orders to murder all the Jews of the town within two days. District commissioner Heinrich Carl reported “indescribable brutality on the part of both the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans,” and asked to be spared that battalion in future.

Bubnys himself records that almost every Vilnius-region battalion formed in 1941 took part in the Holocaust that autumn: driving Jews into the ghetto, guarding it, convoying Jews to Ponary and guarding the shootings. His survey then places Vilnius battalions in Belarus and Ukraine, and the Vilnius 2nd at Majdanek.

Bubnys offers two defenses of the 252nd Battalion, formed in autumn 1942. First, it could have had no direct role in the destruction because most Lithuanian Jews were already dead or confined to ghettos. That argument counts only Lithuanian Jews, and the battalion served at Majdanek, in occupied Poland. Second, at Majdanek it guarded the approaches to the camp and convoyed prisoners to work, and so did not take part in massacres. Guarding a camp is not an alibi for what happens inside it. A Vytautas Magnus University study found that it guarded the prisoners and the camp during the mass killing there. I set out that contradiction in “Lithuania vs Lithuania.” A guard who holds the perimeter of a massacre is part of it.

Lithuanian-born Vladas Zajančkauskas, trained at Trawniki, was deployed to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld.

What the German Record Concedes

Germany conceived the destruction. Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis place the decision in Berlin. I do not contest any of that. The German record also documents disputes inside the occupation apparatus. Lithuania’s defenders cite them. They prove less than claimed.

• After the Wehrmacht disarmed the Lithuanian partisans in late June 1941, Stahlecker reported that the “self-cleansing” actions ceased.
• The Security Police formed the Hamann unit, by its stated rationale, to avoid disputes with the Wehrmacht over disorganized mass shootings and to bring the killings under control.
• Jäger wanted to murder the remaining Jewish laborers and their families. The German civil administration and the Wehrmacht prohibited it because Germany needed their labor. In the same report Jäger demanded measures to stop Jewish reproduction and threatened death for pregnancy. The restraint was economic, not humane.

These disputes do not exonerate the occupation authorities. They show where these particular interventions came from. The Provisional Government did not publicly condemn the killing of Jews. Sužiedėlis has acknowledged that German power might have been able to halt it immediately.

More than 900 Lithuanians are recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. They hid Jews from the Germans and from their own neighbors. Their choices prove that participation was a choice. A rescuer’s courage cannot be transferred to the official who made the lists, the formation that guarded the killing site or the policeman who drove the victims to it.

The Rescue Alibi

When Lithuanian officials invoke Lithuanian names, it is most often to present Lithuania as a rescuer nation. On 18 September 2026 the President honored 36 rescuers. The presidential text named only “Nazi genocide” as the danger they faced. The museum’s own booklet for the same ceremony acknowledges that “some local helpers” (“dalis vietinių talkininkų”) took part in the systematic mass killing. The President’s text left even those men out, and the booklet reduced the killers to “helpers.” I asked “Rescued From Whom?” The answer is in the records above.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust distortion includes “intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.” Promoting the rescuer narrative while diminishing the perpetrator record is that distortion. Officials who stage these presentations practice it. Audiences who accept them without testing them against the record lend it their names. The murdered are then victimized a second time.

The government’s 157-measure plan promotes the rescue story and assigns the telling of the “truth” to LGGRTC, the institution that tells the public perpetrators were exonerated. I set out the record in “157 Measures, No Credibility.” A plan that entrusts the truth to that institution is not a truth plan.

The Other Side of the Mirror

Lithuania’s institutions present Germans as the actors and Lithuanians as bystanders. The documents restore Lithuanian agency alongside German direction. Germans conceived the destruction, issued the orders and kept the count. The LAF announced it in writing before the invasion. Armed Lithuanians began it before German forces arrived. Lithuanian police, officials, partisans and battalions staffed every stage of its execution. They sold the property of the murdered. A Lithuanian crowd cheered at the garage. Lithuanian battalions carried the killing into Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. The German disputes do not erase the Lithuanian roles recorded in the same reporting system.

The institutions that deny this record have received my correction requests. They cannot say they were not told.

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Archival and Print Sources

• Operational reports: U.S. National Archives, RG 242, microfilm T175, roll 233, Ereignismeldungen UdSSR Nos. 8 (30 June 1941), 14 (6 July), 17 (9 July), 19 (11 July), 21 (13 July) and 88 (19 September 1941).
• Draugelis order: Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje 1941–1944, vol. I (Vilnius, 1965), document 164, pp. 209–210; Lietuvos SSR CVA, f. 684, ap. 1, b. 4, l. 21 (copy).
• Bischoffshausen: Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen and Volker Rieß, eds., The Good Old Days (1991), p. 28.
• Sakowicz: Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary 1941–1943, ed. Yitzhak Arad (Yale University Press, 2005), entries for 2 September and 25 October 1941.
• Reivytis file: LCVA, f. R-683, ap. 2, b. 2, as analyzed by Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis.
• Battalions: Arūnas Bubnys, Genocidas ir rezistencija 2(8) (2000), pp. 42–55, and 2(24) (2008), pp. 35–61.