Lithuania Published 84 Names. Its Foreign Ministry Still Says “Collaborators.”

Sakowicz recorded 80 “Shaulists” shooting and 100 guarding the fence at Ponary on 2 September 1941. Lithuania’s own institutions can identify the Special Squad. One of them still retreats to a generic word.

On 5 August 2025, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on the previous day’s visit to Paneriai by Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys and Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Budrys was quoted saying that tens of thousands of innocent lives “were ended” in the most brutal way at Paneriai. No actor appears in that sentence. The release then said that “the Nazis and their collaborators killed 6 million Jews.”

Herzog’s statement that day was more exact. The Baltic Times account quotes him saying the Nazis would not have carried out their plan without the cooperation of the local population, who committed terrible crimes against their neighbors. The guest named the local role. The host ministry’s account of Paneriai did not.

The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania had already published Arūnas Bubnys’s 2019 book Vokiečių saugumo policijos ir SD Vilniaus ypatingasis būrys 1941–1944 m. The Centre’s own announcement says the Special Squad’s principal purpose was the mass murder of Jews and gives short biographies of 84 squad members. The Centre issued the study in English in 2020 as German Security Police and the SD Vilnius Special Squad 1941–1944. On 2 September 1941, Kazimierz Sakowicz recorded 80 “Shaulists” shooting and another 100 guarding the fence at Ponary. Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 report counted 3,700 Jews murdered in Vilna that day.

A witness with limits

Sakowicz was a Polish journalist living beside the execution site. The Yale English edition, edited by Yitzhak Arad, preserves a diary written while the killings were occurring. Rachel Margolis’s foreword says Sakowicz observed from his cottage and attic, questioned neighbors and railway employees, spoke with people who bought victims’ clothing, and talked with the Lithuanian killers whom she calls the “Ponary riflemen.”

Arad also supplies the warning label. Sakowicz was hostile toward Lithuanians, could be scornful of Jewish victims, and was hostile toward the Soviet Union. Proximity did not make him neutral. His diary is a contemporaneous witness source with prejudices and limits, not an official personnel ledger.

The editorial note to the 2 September entry explains a convention: when Sakowicz’s information is second-hand, he puts the source’s name in parentheses. The estimate of 4,000 people is expressly “so says Jankowski”; Sakowicz then says others claimed 4,875. Later in the same entry he records 2,000 brought to Ponary, including men, women and children. His head counts vary within the entry. They are reported estimates, so this article takes the victim total from the German ledger rather than from Sakowicz.

The sentence giving 80 shooters and 100 guards carries no parenthetical source. Neither does the sentence immediately after it: “They shot while they were drunk.” The next allegation says that before the shooting men and women were tortured and is marked “Jankowski.” The platoon commander seen drunk on the road in a woman’s fur is marked “Kalinowski.” Later Jankowski is named again for the account of a small child found beside the pit and shot; Krywkowa is named for an infant torn from its mother’s breast and shot. An absent parenthetical does not convert 80 and 100 into a payroll or prove that Sakowicz personally counted every man. Under the editor’s stated convention, those two figures are not identified as second-hand.

3,700 in the German ledger

Jäger prepared his “complete list of executions” on 1 December 1941. The English reproduction states at the opening that two early executions were conducted on his instructions and orders by Lithuanian partisans, and that the Hamann raiding squad’s subsequent actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans. Those opening sentences do not identify the personnel used for every later entry. The Vilna detachment entries are appended at the end of the same list. For 2 September, Jäger records 864 Jewish men, 2,019 Jewish women and 817 Jewish children: 3,700 people.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum chronology carries the same figure and attributes the murder at Ponary to German authorities and their Lithuanian auxiliaries. It is not a second independent count; it is modern institutional confirmation of the Jäger-scale figure and the German-Lithuanian character of the action.

Jäger calls the 2 September massacre punishment for German soldiers supposedly having been fired upon by Jews. Historian Samuel Kassow, writing for the Fortunoff Video Archive’s Vilna series, describes the accusation as false and says the shooting was staged by Lithuanian auxiliaries. Sakowicz called the alleged shooting bogus and recorded that Gebietskommissar Hans Hingst announced that Jews would be punished. Kassow adds that the Great Provocation was used as the pretext to murder ten members of the Vilna Jewish council on 2 September.

Arad’s note 23 belongs to the preceding editorial discussion of Jäger’s 12 September Vilna figure: 993 men, 1,670 women and 771 children total 3,434, although the report prints 3,334. The 2 September categories add correctly to 3,700.

The hundred around the fence

Sakowicz separated the functions. Eighty shot. One hundred guarded the fence. The guards should remain guards; calling all 180 men shooters would falsify the sentence.

The names used by the sources are untidy, but the local killing formation is not mysterious. Sakowicz writes “Shaulists.” Margolis uses “Ponary riflemen.” Arad transliterates the Lithuanian Special Squad as Ypatingi Buriai; Kassow writes Ypatingi Burai; the Lithuanian state centre uses Vilniaus ypatingasis būrys. These labels cannot turn Sakowicz’s 80 and 100 into a one-for-one roster. They place his daily observation inside a documented Lithuanian killing apparatus operating under German command.

Arad describes the Ponary force as divided into functions: one subunit transported victims, another guarded the site outside and inside, and a third shot at the pits. The inside guards kept victims from escaping; the outside guards kept others away. Guarding the enclosure was part of the killing operation. Kassow is equally direct: under overall German supervision, Lithuanian volunteers did most of the actual killing, the Special Squad played the key role, and Lithuanians suggested Ponary to the Germans as a convenient mass-murder site.

The current Paneriai Memorial is even more specific. Its English page says the unit was initially a Lithuanian auxiliary police squad of about 100 members, names Petras Jakubka and Mečys Butkus as its first organizers, identifies Juozas Šidlauskas and Balys Norvaiša as commanders, and names SS technical sergeant Martin Weiss as the actual German commander. German command and Lithuanian composition appear together.

The two Lithuanian state sources do not give the same early strength. The Centre says about 150 Vilnius employees were selected in the first half of July 1941; the Memorial says the auxiliary police squad initially had about 100 members and later fell to 40. Neither figure verifies Sakowicz’s 80 shooters and 100 guards. Nor does either disprove them. Arad’s description includes multiple functional groups at Ponary, and Sakowicz’s figures remain a witness count for one day, not a unit roster.

Lithuania already published the personnel history

The Centre’s own description of Bubnys’s book says that in the first half of July 1941 the Nazis selected about 150 Vilnius employees, most of them Lithuanians. Their assigned work was to arrest Jews, drive them to the holding site and shoot them. After the first mass shootings at Paneriai, many left. Bubnys’s formulation, quoted by the Centre, is blunt: “those remained for whom such activity did not seem terrible and criminal.”

The same page says that many future squad members joined because they lacked work and a source of income. It notes that after joining they lived at prestigious addresses in central Vilnius. The page does not establish how each apartment was obtained, so that fact should not be enlarged into a claim about a particular victim’s home. The Centre does establish recruitment, assigned work, continued service and individual biographies. It publishes 84 short biographies of Special Squad members alongside 17 Nazi officials responsible for the Paneriai mass killings.

By 2025 Lithuania’s own institutions had therefore published, in English as well as Lithuanian, the unit’s name, Lithuanian composition, German subordination, founding officers, commanders, recruitment pool and dozens of individual biographies. The local apparatus was not unavailable to an international audience.

The clothes came back from the forest

Sakowicz’s 2 September entry also records women stripped to their underwear and victims carrying furs and valuables because they believed they were being sent to the ghetto. Within two days he recorded a “brisk business in women’s clothes.” The market that formed beside the pits is documented in The Shoes Were Still Warm.

The Foreign Ministry chose the generic noun

No source permits us to turn Sakowicz’s figures into a verified 180-name order of battle. No source permits us to turn the hundred guards into shooters. The hundred guards remain guards.

That precision also cuts against institutional vagueness. The Paneriai Memorial names the Lithuanian auxiliary squad, its Lithuanian officers and German commander. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has published the formation’s purpose and scores of individual biographies, and it issued the study in English. Yet the Foreign Ministry’s 5 August 2025 account of its minister’s visit said that lives at Paneriai “were ended,” by no one, and then retreated to “the Nazis and their collaborators.” Herzog, on the same day, named cooperation by the local population.

“Collaborators” is not false. At Paneriai it is less exact than Lithuania’s own published history permits. Jäger supplied the dead. Sakowicz supplied the manpower he recorded at the fence and pits. Lithuania has the unit history, the commanders and many of the names. The verbs had subjects.

Primary source locators: Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (Yale University Press, 2005): Rachel Margolis, Foreword, esp. pp. x–xi; Yitzhak Arad, Preface, esp. pp. xiv–xv; editorial introduction, esp. p. 9 and pp. 22–27, including note 23; 2 September 1941 entry and note 25, pp. 27–29. Jäger Report: Bundesarchiv, R 70 Sowjetunion/15, Bl. 77–89; English reproduction hyperlinked above.