Lithuania’s Alibi Is a Diversion

Lithuania answers evidence of institutional participation with a defense of collective innocence because collective innocence is easier to prove than institutional innocence.

Source note: This article relies on the published historical studies and archival references identified in the footnotes. Where Lithuanian records are presented in English, the wording follows the cited published translations.

Lithuania has an answer ready whenever the machinery of the Holocaust is traced through Lithuanian offices, police departments, battalions, prisons and files.

Not every Lithuanian was a killer.

True.

Nazi Germany directed the extermination campaign.

Also true.

Neither proposition answers the charge.

The documentary accusation is not that an entire people became murderers. It is that an organized Lithuanian fascist faction, already seeking German support for anti-Jewish violence before the Soviet occupation, captured enough of the local coercive apparatus in July 1941 to become indispensable to the German killing program.

The nation did not have to become an apparatus. A prepared faction could capture one.

Lithuania’s alibi changes the defendant. It turns evidence against named factions, offices and commands into an accusation against every Lithuanian, defeats the invented accusation, and declares the institutions absolved.

That is a diversion.

The charge Lithuania invents

In 1938, Not 1940, I documented the prehistory. By 1939, Lithuanian Voldemarists were seeking German money and weapons for pogroms against the Jews of their own country. Their antisemitism did not begin with the Soviet occupation of June 1940. Their organization did not begin with Germany’s invasion in June 1941. The political program, the German connections and the appetite for violent ethnic purification were already present.

Two years later, they no longer needed to ask Berlin for weapons. They needed offices.

On the night of July 23-24, 1941, figures associated with the Lithuanian Nationalist Party and the old Voldemarist movement attempted to force Lithuania’s Provisional Government from office. They failed. The government refused to resign and remained nominally in place until the German civil administration dissolved it in August.

A failed overthrow sounds like a failed coup.

It was not.

The radicals did not capture the cabinet. They captured crucial parts of the machinery beneath it: military command, police leadership, battalion command, security structures, prison administration and the appointment channels through which armed men could be selected and deployed.

The government survived. Its command structure changed underneath it.

The Voldemarists did not need a plebiscite. They did not need every Lithuanian to approve. They did not need every policeman to be an ideological fascist or every soldier to join for the same reason. They needed authority over uniforms, weapons, police records, detention cells and armed formations.

They acquired enough of it.

The coup beneath the government

The Lithuanian Provisional Government had proclaimed the restoration of independence before German forces entered Kaunas. Germany never recognized it as a sovereign government. The occupiers wanted Lithuanian administrative and police assistance without permitting an independent Lithuanian center of power.

During the first weeks of occupation, officials associated with the former authoritarian regime of President Antanas Smetona occupied important positions in the reconstituted Lithuanian structures. Colonel Jurgis Bobelis became military commandant of Kaunas. Andrius Butkūnas commanded the Tautinio darbo apsaugos battalion, known as the TDA. Colonel Jonas Šlepetys served as minister of the interior.

These men were not defenders of Jewish equality. Before the Voldemarist action, Jews were already being beaten, detained and murdered. TDA personnel had already participated in shootings at the Seventh Fort. Bobelis and Kaunas mayor Kazimieras Palčiauskas had already directed the city’s Jews into the Vilijampolė ghetto.^[1]

The struggle of July 23-24 was not a contest between persecution and protection. It was a contest over who would control the structures performing the persecution.

The Smetonist establishment had suppressed the Voldemarists after their failed 1934 putsch. The radicals returned in 1941 with an organized network, German connections and experience in conspiracy. They also carried a political history in which the exclusion and removal of Jews had been treated as national renewal.

Lithuanian Nationalist Party figures Juozas Pyragius and Ignas Taunys coordinated the action against the Provisional Government with elements of the German military administration and Gestapo. The government remained. The personnel beneath it began to change.

Bobelis was removed from the Kaunas commandant’s office. Captain Stasys Kviecinskas replaced him. Major Kazys Šimkus replaced Butkūnas as commander of the TDA. Vytautas Reivytis emerged as director of the Lithuanian Police Department. Šlepetys’s ministry was stripped of effective control.

Inside the Saugumas, the Lithuanian Security Police, officials associated with the old regime were arrested or purged. Officers who had fled to Germany returned with German training and German connections. Radical personnel entered positions controlling surveillance, interrogation, detention and files.

Lithuania’s alibi does not have to deny those appointments. It simply changes the scale of the accusation. Instead of answering what named men did with named offices, it announces that millions of Lithuanians cannot be collectively guilty.

They were never collectively charged.

How a faction becomes an apparatus

The coup was not important merely because one set of officers replaced another. It became an appointment machine. Historian Michael MacQueen found correspondence in the Kaunas Military Headquarters collection concerning officers seeking positions in the newly formed police battalions. Applicants were recommended by men who could attest to their political reliability. Some recommendations carried the emblem of the Lithuanian Nationalist Party.^[2]

The faction did not control every police post in Lithuania. It did not need to. Control over selected senior commands allowed it to influence who received authority, who received weapons, which formations were organized and where those formations were deployed.

That is how a minority multiplies itself through an institution.

The German occupation authorities would not permit the restoration of a Lithuanian national army. They did permit Lithuanian police and auxiliary battalions because German forces needed guards, escorts, local intelligence, arrest teams and shooting personnel.

Germany controlled the extermination program. Lithuanian officers and administrators supplied local reach.

That distinction is essential. It is also routinely abused.

German operational command does not transform Lithuanian policemen into spectators. German orders do not identify every Jewish family by themselves. They do not search local homes, compile local names, guard local roads, staff local prisons or assemble local victims without people and institutions capable of performing those functions.

The extermination program required a local apparatus. The faction that captured senior offices helped supply it.

The First TDA Battalion, identified in Bubnys’s study as the 1st (13th) Lithuanian Police Battalion, became one of the principal Lithuanian formations used in mass murder. Its Third Company supplied the core of Joachim Hamann’s mobile killing detachment. Other Lithuanian police and auxiliary personnel gathered Jews, guarded them, transported them, secured killing sites and participated in shootings. Research by Arūnas Bubnys attributes participation in the murder of at least 36,000 Jews to the battalion acting with German Gestapo personnel and local auxiliaries.^[3]

The chain did not run from a single coup order to every killing pit. Nazi Security Police and SD officials remained the principal organizers. Einsatzkommando 3 supplied German operational command. Hamann directed the mobile killing unit. Karl Jäger recorded the totals.

None of that erases the Lithuanian chain. It defines the relationship.

German agencies directed. Lithuanian institutions identified, assembled, detained, guarded, transported and killed.

Murder as administrative sequence

Vytautas Reivytis shows what institutional capture made possible. Before the war, he had connections with German military intelligence. After the July power struggle, he headed the Lithuanian Police Department.

Secret Circular No. 3, issued by Reivytis and dated August 16, 1941, instructed county police chiefs to arrest all Jewish men over the age of fifteen and women identified as conspicuous in Bolshevik activity, assemble them along the main roads, and report immediately to the Lithuanian Police Department the location, number and category of those detained. Police were to guard them pending transport.^[4]

The language was administrative. The result was murder.

A central instruction passed to a district police chief. A local precinct received it. Police entered homes. Names were recorded. Families were assembled. Guards were assigned. Numbers were reported. Transports were organized.

The destination was a killing site.

The apparatus did not require every participant to fire a weapon. Some compiled lists. Some arrested families. Others guarded roads, drove vehicles or delivered victims to the men who shot them.

The division of labor did not divide responsibility out of existence.

The same structure operated through the Saugumas. The Lithuanian Security Police conducted surveillance, arrests and interrogations. It identified Jews, Communists, Soviet officials, Polish activists and other designated enemies. Its files moved through a system in which intelligence could become detention and detention could become execution.

MacQueen records a handwritten instruction by senior security official Stasys Čenkus concerning nine Jews and their families: “Liquidate them at the first opportunity.”^[5]

That was not a national mood. It was an instruction written by an official inside an institution.

Uniformed police arrested people and delivered them to security offices, prisons or killing detachments. The men did not all wear the same uniform. Their files moved between the same offices.

What the coup changed

The July action did not begin the Holocaust in Lithuania. German-directed murder had already started. Lithuanian participation had already begun. Jews had already been forced toward the Kaunas ghetto. Men serving under officials displaced in the coup had already enforced anti-Jewish measures and participated in killings.

The coup did not turn innocent institutions into guilty ones overnight. It changed the concentration of power, the personnel controlling it and the efficiency with which radical networks could use it.

Before July 23, coercive authority was divided among German agencies, Provisional Government ministries, Smetonist officers, Lithuanian Activist Front structures, partisan groups and newly forming police bodies. After the struggle, Voldemarist and Lithuanian Nationalist Party networks held a growing number of the offices through which armed Lithuanian participation was organized.

They entered the war with a pre-existing network. They had officers, German contacts and experience in clandestine organization. They had already sought foreign support for pogroms.

Now they had commands.

The institutional pattern MacQueen reconstructs is clear. A relatively small fascist clique multiplied its influence by gaining control over key military and police positions. Within the limits imposed by German rule, it acquired something close to a monopoly over the available Lithuanian means of violence and became a principal local instrument of destruction.^[6]

No theory of collective guilt is needed.

A small faction can commit enormous crimes when it captures the structures that allow orders to become actions. The innocence of people who did not participate does not acquit the offices that did. The existence of rescuers does not empty police files, reverse appointments, dissolve battalions or return murdered families from pits.

Germany’s guilt is not diminished by naming Lithuanian participation. Lithuanian participation is not erased by repeating Germany’s guilt.

The diversion

Lithuania’s defense turns an institutional accusation into an ethnic accusation, defeats the ethnic accusation, and declares the institution absolved. The police department disappears behind the population. The battalion disappears behind the nation. A written order disappears behind the German commander who demanded its execution.

The wrong defendant is acquitted. The right one is never tried.

This method protects more than the reputations of dead officials. It protects the modern state from the consequences of the documentary record. Once the accusation is recast as collective hatred of Lithuanians, every demand for institutional accountability can be dismissed as defamation of the nation.

That is how historical evasion becomes state innocence.

In 1939, Voldemarists asked Berlin to support pogroms against Lithuanian Jews. In July 1941, men from the same radical political current captured offices controlling police leadership, armed formations, security files, detention and appointments.

The request had become an institution.

Lithuania answers by insisting that an entire people were not guilty.

No serious accusation says they were.

That is why the alibi is a diversion.

[1] Grant Arthur Gochin, “Jewish Soldiers, Lithuanian Independence, and the Betrayal of 1941”. See also United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Kovno”. Later apologetic accounts rest on Krupavičius’s memoirs, published posthumously in 1972, and on Palčiauskas’s own account of the episode annexed to his August 30, 1974 letter to Juozas Brazaitis. That retrospective source chain does not displace the contemporaneous order, its August 15 deadline, or the completed confinement of Kaunas Jews in Vilijampolė.

[2] Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 37–38; see also 46 n. 40, identifying correspondence in LCVA collection R-1444, including an August 6, 1941 officer recommendation bearing the Lithuanian Nationalist Party emblem.

[3] Arūnas Bubnys, “The First (13th) Lithuanian Police Battalion and the Killing of Jews in 1941”, Genocidas ir rezistencija 2, no. 20 (2006): 31–52. The English abstract attributes the murder of not fewer than 36,000 Jews to the battalion acting with German Gestapo personnel and auxiliary policemen.

[4] Arūnas Bubnys, Holocaust in Lithuanian Province in 1941, reproducing Secret Circular No. 3. For the archival locator, see Saulius Sužiedėlis, Lithuanian Collaboration during the Second World War: LCVA, F. R-683, Ap. 2, b. 2, l. 1.

[5] Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 39.

[6] Michael MacQueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 41.