Nazis, Soviets, and Collaborators

Lithuania names its rescuers. It anonymizes its murderers.

Thirteen years ago this week, a man died in Sutton, Massachusetts. Vladas Zajanckauskas was ninety-seven. A federal court had stripped his citizenship in 2005. An immigration judge had ordered him removed to Lithuania in 2007. He was never removed, because Lithuania would not take him back.

Hold that fact. It is this post in miniature.

In May I published “What Lithuania Means When It Says ‘Vanished,’ ‘Lost,’ or ‘Perished.’” That article was about verbs. This one is about a noun, and about the adjective Lithuania attaches to it only when the attachment flatters.

Lithuanian diplomats have a formula for the Holocaust. Jews were murdered by Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators. It sounds complete. Read it again. Germany supplies the Nazis. The Soviet Union supplies the Soviets. The collaborators arrive from nowhere, holding no citizenship, wearing no uniform, serving in no police battalion, occupying no municipal office, carrying no name.

Now watch what the same ministry does with the rescuers.

Nationality as an honor

At a Lithuanian consular program in Calabasas in September 2025, an exhibition honored the Righteous Among the Nations. The Foreign Ministry announced that Lithuania ranked second in the world per capita and that 924 men and women from Lithuania had been recognized by Yad Vashem. There were Lithuanian dances and a performance of “Lietuva brangi.” The rescuers were not simply remembered. They were placed inside a celebration of the nation.

This was not isolated. In 2020 the Consulate General, the Foreign Ministry, and Holocaust Museum LA dedicated a tree and plaque to rescuers from Lithuania. In May 2026 Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys described the courage of the Righteous as a “moral foundation” Lithuania must protect and transmit.

A month later, visiting Yad Vashem, he walked the Avenue of the Righteous, “where 928 Lithuanians who rescued Jews are commemorated”. The same ministry statement referred to Jews murdered by “the Nazis and their collaborators.”

One document. The rescuers receive a nationality. The murderers receive a category.

The counts differ between those two events, 924 and 928, because Yad Vashem continues to recognize new cases. That is unremarkable in itself. The asymmetry is not. One column rises every year. The other has never moved off zero, because Lithuania has never identified a single perpetrator as a Lithuanian perpetrator in any of these releases.

The conversion

Yad Vashem’s Lithuania list is territorial. It records rescue that took place within a territory, and it includes Polish and Russian citizens of Lithuania. It is not a roster of ethnic Lithuanians.

Lithuania converts it anyway. The territorial list becomes 924 Lithuanians, then a per-capita ranking, then a claim about who Lithuanians are.

The same state then encounters territorial perpetrator records. German personnel files recording men born in Lithuanian towns, holding Lithuanian citizenship, previously serving in the Lithuanian Army. And it refuses the identical conversion.

Territory becomes nationality when the record is honorable. Territory stays territory when the record is criminal.

That is not a difference in the evidence. It is a decision about which conversions the state permits.

The arithmetic

Silvia Foti did the math in “Exception of 1 in 2,500 Becomes National Irony.” Against a 1939 population of roughly 2.432 million, 924 recognized rescuers is about 0.038 percent.

Every element of that calculation favors Lithuania. The 2.432 million figure precedes the return of Vilnius; after October 1939 the population ran nearer 2.9 million, and the Yad Vashem list covers the Vilnius region. The rounding favors Lithuania too. A rate of 0.038 percent is one person in roughly 2,630. Call it one in 2,500 and Lithuania keeps the benefit of the rounding as well.

One in 2,500 is not a portrait of national conduct. It is a departure from one.

But the population is the wrong denominator. Set the 924 against the dead.

Roughly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, about ninety-five percent of the community. Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in Europe. I set out that record, and the men who carried it out, in “How many Jews did Lithuanians murder?”.

Against that figure, 924 does not describe a national character. It measures how rare refusal was.

The rescuers have earned every honor, and Yad Vashem recognition is not a complete census. Some rescuers died without witnesses. Others were never nominated. That limitation is real, and it does not repair Lithuania’s argument, because Lithuania itself publicizes the official total and converts it into a ranking and a self-description.

The moral weight of a rescuer was never that she proved the nation good. It is that she proved another choice existed. Hiding a Jewish child was possible, because someone did it. Warning a family was possible. A policeman could decline a roundup, and a few did. The Righteous do not absolve the environment they acted in. They measure it.

The men without a nationality

My new study, “The School at Trawniki: Lithuanian Men Trained for Operation Reinhard,” follows Lithuanian recruits into the SS training system that supplied manpower for the destruction of Polish Jewry.

Note the theater. These men were not deployed against Lithuania’s own Jews. They were exported. That is what the territorial formula cannot survive. A Lithuanian did not stop being Lithuanian when a German train carried him into occupied Poland.

The German files did not describe atmospheric collaborators. They recorded birthplace, prior citizenship, military service, photograph, signature, thumbprint, identification number, rank, promotion, and destination.

Liudvikas Kairys was a Lithuanian citizen and a former Lithuanian soldier. At Trawniki he became number 1628. He was promoted three times and rose to platoon commander, serving as an armed guard at the Treblinka I forced-labor camp, where Jewish prisoners were starved, beaten, worked past exhaustion, hanged, and shot.

Vladas Zajanckauskas was born in Aukštadvaris and had served in the Lithuanian Army. He became Trawniki number 2122, advanced to noncommissioned rank, and by April 1943 was training other guards. That month his name appeared on the roster of 351 Trawniki men ordered to Warsaw. The Justice Department called him an accomplice in Nazi mass murder.

And in the casualty section of his own report on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop recorded eleven wounded watchmen from the training camps as “probably Lithuanians, to judge by their names.”

Stroop made that identification from surnames, in 1943, in a document written for his superiors and never meant for us. He was a more candid record-keeper of Lithuanian participation than the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry is in 2026.

Neither man was punished

American courts tested the personnel files, signatures, thumbprints, rosters, and service records under evidentiary standards far more demanding than any historian faces. Both men lost their citizenship.

Then the process stopped.

Kairys designated Germany as his destination and was deported there in 1993. The Seventh Circuit recorded that he faced no prosecution there, or anywhere else. Zajanckauskas was ordered removed to Lithuania in August 2007. Six years later the Justice Department reported that the European country to which he had been ordered deported would not readmit him. The Associated Press reported that summer that no country, Lithuania included, would take him. He died in Massachusetts on August 5, 2013.

Lithuania withholds the word Lithuanian from its perpetrators. When the United States tried to return one, Lithuania withheld the man.

That is the same architecture I traced in “The Coup That Captured Lithuania’s Killing Apparatus”: service established, identity established, and no punishment at the end of it.

Design, not carelessness

I do not claim to know what any individual diplomat intends, and I do not need to. Intent is inferable from a policy repeated across years, institutions, ceremonies, speeches, and official releases.

A state that counts its rescuers to the last individual, publishes their nationality, calculates a global ranking, and calls their courage its moral foundation is a state that knows exactly how to attach the word Lithuanian to a person. It has simply never done so on the other side of the ledger.

Consistency of that order is not an accident of drafting.

A true sentence can still be built to deceive. Collaborator is not a false word. Kairys collaborated. Zajanckauskas collaborated. So did the Lithuanian policemen who guarded ghettos and marched Jews to pits. The deception lies in using the word as a replacement for nationality rather than a description added to it.

Finish the sentence

The target here is a state apparatus and a political class, not a people. Lithuanians alive today committed none of this. Nor did most of their grandparents, and the rescuers among that generation are owed more honesty than the state currently gives them. Their courage grows when the surrounding danger is described accurately. They were exceptional precisely because they refused what others accepted, enabled, profited from, or carried out.

So name the rescuers as Lithuanians. Keep German authorship and German command at the center, because Germany conceived Operation Reinhard and ran it. Then finish the sentence.

Nazi Germany organized the annihilation. Lithuanian collaborators helped execute it. Lithuanian rescuers resisted it.

Remove any one of those clauses and commemoration becomes distortion. Lithuania removes the middle one, and it removes it every time.

The full documentary study is here: The School at Trawniki: Lithuanian Men Trained for Operation Reinhard.