‘Marginal’ Arithmetic

On 15 August 1941, at the foot of Alka hill in Lithuania, about twenty Skuodas auxiliary policemen and four local volunteers shot Jewish women and children from Skuodas. Mykolas Vitkus directed the shooting. About forty Jewish girls remained under guard at the nearby Dimitravas camp. In September, Lithuanian camp guards took them to Darbėnai and locked them in the synagogue. The Jewish girls were later murdered. What happened to them during those weeks under guard?

I followed the surviving records in ‘Marginal’ Arithmetic, my longer investigation on Substack. It begins at Alka and asks what the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania means when it publishes an account calling Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust “essentially marginal.” The records tell us who took Jewish families from their homes, who guarded them, who marched them to the camps and killing sites, and who fired. At Dimitravas, they tell us where the guards took the Jewish girls. I want to know what else the records say about their confinement.

The Alka graves were opened in December 1944. The exhumation commission counted 510 bodies in four graves, including 31 children. Bubnys reports that the children’s remains showed no gunshot wounds. From that finding he concluded that they had been buried alive.

The phrase “essentially marginal” appears on page 40 of the Centre’s 2020 volume on the Holocaust. Darius Furmonavičius begins with a condition, “If there were Lithuanians who took part in these events,” then argues that the SS command structure shows their contribution was “as supporting cast and thus essentially marginal.” I asked the Centre to correct or annotate the passage. On 3 November 2026, it declined. Arūnas Bubnys, the historian whose work documents the roles of the Skuodas police and the men at Alka, signed the decision as acting director general.

Bubnys’s own research supplies numbers the reader can test. In a 2006 study published in the Centre’s journal, he identifies the 3rd Company of the Lithuanian 1st Police Battalion as the core of Joachim Hamann’s mobile detachment. He counts 104 men from that company who took part in shootings across its operations. The eight to ten Germans cited in the Centre’s volume were Hamann’s German cadre. An account that stops with those Germans leaves out the company Bubnys identifies and the shooters he counted.

Karl Jäger, the SS commander who recorded the killings, described the work involved in his report (sheet 7, sheet 8). At Rokiškis, 3,208 people had to be moved four and a half kilometers to be killed within twenty-four hours. Of the eighty Lithuanian partisans available, more than sixty were assigned to move the victims and seal off the site. The others took part in the shooting alongside Jäger’s men. Jäger’s report lets us ask exactly who did what, including who brought the victims to the place where they would be killed.

At Dimitravas the question is what the surviving records can tell us about forty Jewish girls. Bubnys’s account gives the date, file number and pages of a 1963 interrogation that he cites for their transfer to Darbėnai and their murder. He cites other interrogations about the march from Skuodas, the camp administration and the shooting at Alka. Postwar testimony about the march includes allegations of beatings and sexual violence by guards. That testimony makes it all the more urgent to find out what the records say about the weeks the Jewish girls spent under guard.

I have filed a request with the Centre for the complete interrogation protocols and related records it holds. I asked for the full documents, including their attachments, so readers can see what the witnesses said and assess how their testimony was used. For any record held elsewhere, I asked the Centre to identify the custodian. For any document or page it withholds, I asked for the specific legal basis and for the release of any portions it can disclose. Read the signed records request.

Eighty-five years after the murders, does Lithuania still classify any Holocaust records as “Top Secret”? If so, why? I have yet to establish whether that classification applies to any of the Dimitravas records. The Centre can answer directly. It should identify any classified records it holds on Dimitravas, name the authority that classified them and explain why access is still restricted.

The full investigation goes beyond Dimitravas. It examines what the Centre’s own publications say about local police, the men who guarded the killing sites and the units that fired. It includes the sources so readers can check each claim and put a question to the Lithuanian government. Which part of that work was marginal? Preservation copy of the full investigation (PDF).

Read ‘Marginal’ Arithmetic on Substack for the names, the numbers and the records behind them.