My Grandfather Went to Stutthof: That Doesn’t Erase What He Did to Jews

For decades, Lithuania has pointed to my grandfather Jonas Noreika’s imprisonment at the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof as proof that he was an anti-Nazi hero. The story is emotionally powerful: the Nazis arrested him, deported him and imprisoned him. But the historical record tells a more complicated story. Noreika’s imprisonment in 1943 cannot answer for what he did two years earlier, when, as governor of Šiauliai County, he participated in the persecution of Jews and the administration of their stolen property.

The question is not whether Jonas Noreika suffered under the Nazis. He did. The question is whether that later suffering can be used to erase, excuse or overshadow the evidence of his actions in 1941.

It cannot.

Stutthof tells us what Nazi Germany did to Jonas Noreika in 1943. It does not tell us what Jonas Noreika did to the Jews in 1941.

The Story I Inherited

I grew up with Stutthof as one of the cleanest parts of my grandfather’s story. Jonas Noreika had been arrested by the Nazis. He had been sent to a concentration camp. In the Lithuanian story I inherited, that settled the question of who he was: a patriot, an anti-Nazi, a victim of Germany. When I was a girl in Chicago, adults admired that part of our family history. I admired it too.[1]

How Stutthof Became an Alibi

Years later, after my mother asked me to write about her father and I began pulling his life apart document by document, Stutthof became much more complicated. I learned that the fact of his imprisonment had been made to do far more historical work than it could possibly carry. It was not simply evidence that the Nazis persecuted him in 1943. It had become a way to obscure what he did in 1941.[2]

There is no evidence he was an anti-Nazi resistor, according to wartime American diplomatic reports and a later study produced under Lithuania’s International Commission.[3]

Together they show something Lithuania should have said clearly a long time ago: the March 1943 Stutthof group was not a roster of forty-six proven anti-Nazi resistance leaders.

The Failed Mobilization—and the German Reprisals

In February and March 1943, the Germans tried to raise a Lithuanian SS formation. The effort collapsed. American diplomats in Stockholm followed the crisis through German-controlled Lithuanian newspapers, radio reports, material coming from Lithuanian sources, and reports that reached them through diplomatic channels. The record they assembled does not read like a case file against forty-six individually identified underground fighters. It reads like an occupation regime furious that a country had refused to give it the men it demanded.[4]

One American Legation dispatch, dated May 5, 1943, was devoted to conditions in Lithuania during March. It described the mobilization crisis and the German retaliation that followed. German propaganda blamed what it called educated or intellectual circles for influencing the population against the mobilization. Universities were closed. The occupation authorities threatened punishments connected to labor, property, education and public life.[5][6]

A second dispatch, dated May 11, 1943, is even more revealing. Its subject was the attempted German military mobilization in Lithuania and its consequences. The report said the mobilization had failed so badly that those obtained amounted to only about 0.2 percent of those eligible. Students and young men disappeared from the cities. Men hid in the countryside. Even some who initially appeared escaped before they could be sent away.[7][8][9]

Then came the reprisals.

The contemporary report describes arrests taking place while Lithuanian universities and other institutions were being closed. Representatives of Lithuanian public life were summoned and pressured to support a German-approved appeal. They complained about arrests and deportations. Rumors circulated that lists had been prepared of members of the Lithuanian intelligentsia marked for still harsher punishment, even physical destruction.[10]

That is the setting in which my grandfather was arrested.

Forty-six Deportees, but Only a Few Resistors

Now compare that contemporary record with the later research of Dr. Rimantas Zizas of the Lithuanian History Institute, produced under the research program of Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes. Zizas asks directly what consequences followed the boycott of the SS legion. His answer is that Lithuania has spent decades turning this group into a symbol of anti-Nazi resistance.[11]

On March 16 and 17, 1943, forty-six prominent people from Lithuanian public, cultural and intellectual life were arrested and sent to Stutthof. Zizas lists the mixture: government counsellors, professors, gymnasium directors, advocates, priests, teachers, journalists and others.[12][13]

They were arrested without concrete individual accusations. They were not interrogated and they were imprisoned without trial.[14]

He adds that only a few of the deportees were directly involved in anti-Nazi activity.[15][16]

Only a few.

That is not a small qualification. It destroys the easy equation I was taught: Stutthof prisoner equals anti-Nazi resister.

A Collective Accusation is Not Individual Proof

Zizas explains what happened next. The German Security Police and SD chief in Lithuania later applied a standard accusation to the whole group, accusing them collectively of leading resistance and inciting the population against mobilization. A standard accusation is not forty-six individualized findings. It is a label placed on a group after a mass retaliatory arrest.[17]

When Lithuania Knows What Real Resistance Looks Like

The same study makes the distinction even clearer because, when it turns to another Stutthof transport in April 1943, it knows exactly how to describe genuine underground activity. Zizas identifies sixteen people arrested as publishers, distributors and supporters of the anti-Nazi underground press. In other words, the study distinguishes between the March group and a later group whose anti-Nazi activity it specifically identifies.[18]

Nine of the forty-six March deportees were dead by May. The survivors were later given the status of prisoners of honor, with improved conditions.[19]

The Problem with the Jonas Noreika Narrative

This is where Lithuania’s handling of Jonas Noreika becomes so revealing. A 2016 article published in Genocidas ir rezistencija, the journal associated with the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, describes my grandfather as engaged in anti-Nazi resistance during the very period in which he served as governor of Šiauliai County. The same article acknowledges that, on August 22, 1941, he transmitted the order relocating the county’s Jews to the Žagarė ghetto and that Lithuanian municipal officials, Noreika among them, administered the taking over and disposal of Jewish property.[20][21]

Those are 1941 facts.

For Lithuania, however, the 1943 Stutthof story has repeatedly been allowed to wash backward over the earlier one. The Nazis arrested him, therefore he resisted the Nazis. He resisted the Nazis, therefore he could not have participated in persecution under Nazi rule. He suffered in Stutthof, therefore the evidence from 1941 must somehow mean less.

I understand why that story is attractive. I believed it myself. It lets a family keep its hero. It lets a country keep one too.

But it is not history.

Chronology is Stubborn

My grandfather came into conflict with the Germans in 1943. By then, the illusion had collapsed: Lithuanian nationalists had learned that Hitler was not going to reward their cooperation with the sovereign, ethnically defined state they had imagined for themselves. In 1941, when German victory still appeared to offer them that future—and when antisemitic ideology supplied a rationale for removing Jews from it—they had worked alongside the occupiers. Once it became clear that Lithuania would receive no independence and that Lithuanians themselves were instead expected to become soldiers for Hitler, that relationship changed. None of those propositions reaches backward through time and changes an order issued in 1941, a Jewish family driven from its home, property transferred, or a ghetto filled with people who were later murdered.

1941 Still Comes Before 1943

If Lithuania wants to establish that my grandfather carried out specific acts of anti-Nazi resistance before his arrest, it must establish those acts with evidence. His camp number cannot substitute for the evidence. His later suffering cannot be turned into a character certificate. And it certainly cannot be offered as an answer to the record of 1941.

Stutthof was the perfect fact for that purpose. It was terrible enough to inspire sympathy, simple enough to fit into a heroic biography, and late enough in the war to cover what came before it.

But chronology is stubborn.

1941 still comes before 1943.

My grandfather’s Stutthof imprisonment tells us what Nazi Germany did to Jonas Noreika in 1943. It does not tell us what Jonas Noreika did to the Jews in 1941.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti

[1]   Silvia Foti, ‘What it really meant to be an honorary prisoner in Nazi camp,’ The Times of Israel Blogs, 28 December 2021. Foti recounts growing up in Chicago hearing that her grandfather Jonas Noreika was an ‘honorary prisoner’ at Stutthof and that his imprisonment was presented as evidence of anti-Nazi activity. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-it-really-meant-to-be-an-honorary-prisoner-in-nazi-camp/

[2]   Silvia Foti, The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal (Regnery History, 2021); see also Foti, ‘What it really meant to be an honorary prisoner in Nazi camp,’ describing her mother’s request that she write the story of Jonas Noreika and her later reassessment of the Stutthof narrative.

[3]   Tomas Remeikis, ed., Lithuania under German occupation, 1941–1945: despatches from US legation in Stockholm (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2005), 731 pp.; bibliographic record, Lituanistika, https://www.lituanistika.lt/content/66378. See also Rimantas Zizas, Persecution of Non-Jewish Citizens of Lithuania, Murder of Civilian Population, Lithuanian History Institute / International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, research study, https://www.komisija.lt/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/R.Zizo-Civiliai-20031008_ENG.pdf.

[4]   Remeikis, Lithuania under German occupation, pp. 358–365, Despatch No. 1718, American Legation, Stockholm, 5 May 1943, ‘Conditions in Lithuania in March 1943 as Revealed by German-Controlled Press and Radio’; and pp. 400–429, Despatch No. 1746, 11 May 1943, ‘Attempted German Military Mobilization in Lithuania and its Consequences.’

[5]   Remeikis, pp. 360–365. The enclosed material records the German-controlled press response to the failed mobilization, including attacks on intellectual and educational circles and announced punitive measures affecting higher education, labor obligations, property and administration.

[6]   Remeikis, pp. 358–359, Despatch No. 1718, 5 May 1943, with enclosed memorandum on conditions in Lithuania in March 1943.

[7]   Remeikis, pp. 401–404. The report describes avoidance of registration, students and young men leaving cities, hiding in the countryside, and failures even among those initially assembled.

[8]   Remeikis, pp. 401–403. The report states that the number obtained for the mobilization barely reached about 0.2 percent of those eligible.

[9]   Remeikis, p. 400, Despatch No. 1746, American Legation, Stockholm, 11 May 1943, ‘Attempted German Military Mobilization in Lithuania and its Consequences.’

[10] Remeikis, pp. 404–405 and 414–420. The reports describe arrests occurring together with university closures; representatives of Lithuanian public life being summoned; complaints about arrests and deportations; and fears or rumors of prepared lists of intellectuals for further repression or physical destruction.

[11] Rimantas Zizas, Persecution of Non-Jewish Citizens of Lithuania, Murder of Civilian Population, Lithuanian History Institute, research undertaken pursuant to the program of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. The study’s table of contents places ‘Repressions for Sabotage of Military and Labour Force Mobilisation’ at pp. 69 ff. Commission-hosted English PDF: https://www.komisija.lt/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/R.Zizo-Civiliai-20031008_ENG.pdf.

[12] Zizas, p. 73. The study identifies among the deportees four counsellors, five professors, four gymnasium directors, three advocates, two priests, as well as teachers, journalists and others.

[13] Zizas, pp. 73–74. Zizas records that on 16–17 March 1943, 46 prominent representatives of Lithuanian society, culture and the intelligentsia were arrested in Kaunas, Vilnius, Marijampolė and Šiauliai and transported to Stutthof.

[14] Zizas, p. 73. The study states that the deportees were arrested without concrete accusations, were not interrogated, and were imprisoned without trial.

[15] Zizas, p. 73. The study states: ‘There were only few persons who were directly involved in the anti-Nazi activities among them.’

[16] Zizas, p. 73. The study says the composition of the deportees permits the conclusion that people who collaborated with the Germans suffered more in this action than those who resisted.

[17] Zizas, pp. 73–74. Zizas describes the later accusation by the German Security Police and SD chief in Lithuania, Karl Jäger, as a standard accusation applied to the group as a whole: that they led resistance and incited Lithuanians against mobilization.

[18] Zizas, p. 74. In contrast to the March group, the study specifically identifies a second group arrested in April 1943 as 16 publishers, disseminators and supporters of the anti-Nazi underground press who were also sent to Stutthof.

[19] Zizas, p. 74. Nine of the 46 March deportees had died by May 1943. On 31 May, the surviving members of the group were designated ‘prisoners of honour’; their conditions improved, including exemption from compulsory labor and removal of ordinary prisoner-number requirements, though they remained imprisoned.

[20] Rukšėnas, ‘Controversy in the Biography of Jonas Noreika-General Vėtra,’ abstract. The article acknowledges that on 22 August 1941 Noreika transmitted the order concerning relocation of Jews of Šiauliai County to the Žagarė ghetto, and that Lithuanian municipal officials, including Noreika, administered the taking over and disposal of Jewish property.

[21] Alfredas Rukšėnas, ‘Controversy in the Biography of Jonas Noreika-General Vėtra,’ Genocidas ir rezistencija 1(39) (2016): 39–64, DOI 10.61903/GR.2016.102. The article, published on the platform of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, states in its English abstract that during Noreika’s third biographical subperiod he engaged in anti-Nazi resistance, describing underground organizational actions, partial non-cooperation and disobedience. https://doi.org/10.61903/GR.2016.102