The Basketball Game We Cannot Prove
Lithuania investigated a July 7 game. The strongest eyewitness account points to July 6.
Basketball.
In Lithuania, the word carries more than sport.
This week Lithuania begins the second round of the 2027 FIBA Basketball World Cup European Qualifiers. It plays Türkiye in Istanbul on August 28 and Bosnia and Herzegovina in Vilnius on August 31.
Another Lithuanian basketball team belongs to a different record.
Its game cannot presently be proved.
The date of that game cannot even be kept still.
The story
In 2023, Grant Gochin wrote about Joseph Gar’s 1948 account of a basketball game in occupied Kaunas.
Gar’s documentary history of the destruction of Jewish Kovno described a German team playing a Lithuanian team. Lithuania had been European champion. The Lithuanians supposedly won.
Then came the detail that made the story unforgettable.
The winners were supposedly allowed to shoot Jews at the Seventh Fort.
But even the transmitted details do not remain stable.
The English rendering used in Gochin’s 2023 article says each player was allowed to shoot a dozen Jews. Alex Faitelson’s 2006 reproduction of Gar says ten. The version of Gar that reached Lithuanian prosecutors in 2004 also says ten.
Ten. Twelve.
And then the date moves.
The submission received by Lithuania’s Prosecutor General on March 10, 2004 attributed a July 7 game to Gar’s book. An ESPN report broadcast in April put the alleged game on July 6. But the Gar passage Faitelson actually prints carries no date. Even what Gar is said to contain changes in transmission.
The number moved.
The date moved.
That is not proof that nothing happened.
It is proof that the legend cannot be used as evidence without disassembling it first.
The second account
Itzhak Nemenchik survived the Seventh Fort.
His account is different. Faitelson traces it to the Central Historical Commission operating under the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the U.S. Zone and to Fun letstn khurbn, no. 7, p. 67, published in Munich in 1948. Faitelson reproduces the account on pp. 54-55.
Nemenchik did not describe a basketball prize.
He described basketball players.
According to the account, on the evening of July 6, 1941, a Lithuanian basketball team famous throughout the Baltic states arrived at the Seventh Fort carrying rifles. Nemenchik said the players beat prisoners, selected thirty men from the crowd and led them toward the embankment.
A few minutes later, he heard rifle fire.
He said the players then left the fort singing.
That account may be wrong.
But it is not a July 7 basketball-game allegation.
It is a July 6 eyewitness allegation about armed basketball players at the fort.
July 6
The Jäger Report was dated December 1, 1941. Its first two execution entries are introduced with a specific attribution: Lithuanian partisans carried them out on Jäger’s instructions and orders.
July 4, Kaunas, Seventh Fort: 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women. Total: 463.
July 6, Kaunas, Seventh Fort: 2,514 Jews.
Only after those two entries does Jäger introduce the Hamann mobile unit and a different formula for subsequent killings.
Jäger’s surviving Seventh Fort entries are not a complete count of everyone killed at the fort. Gar, for example, estimated roughly 8,000 dead there, while later institutional estimates also vary. That discrepancy is another reason to treat Gar as a historical narrative to test, not as an administrative ledger.
But the July 6 entry is not ambiguous.
Nemenchik placed armed Lithuanian basketball players at the Seventh Fort that evening.
Jäger recorded 2,514 Jews killed there that day by Lithuanian partisans acting under his orders.
Jäger did not identify the partisans as basketball players.
Nemenchik did.
That bridge is the question.
The newspaper
The connection between elite basketball players and Lithuanian partisan formations is not a postwar invention.
The Kaunas newspaper Į Laisvę announced on July 15, 1941 a game between the partisan detachment of the Palace of Physical Culture and players from other partisan detachments. Faitelson reproduces the notice and the July 17 follow-up on pp. 59-64.
The roster included Puzinauskas, Norkus I, Norkus II, Vytautas Leščinskas, Kulakauskas and others. The follow-up recorded a 41-32 result and again named the players. This article does not identify who the roster labels “Norkus I” and “Norkus II” were; the notation alone does not establish that they were Vytautas and Algirdas Norkus, the twins publicly accused in 2004.
That proves membership in partisan formations.
It does not prove murder.
The difference is the whole case.
What Lithuania investigated
On June 3, 2004, ELTA reported the result of the Lithuanian inquiry.
State Security officers in Kaunas refused to open a pretrial investigation into Efraim Zuroff’s submission. The Kaunas Regional Prosecutor’s Office said it had found no objective evidence tying basketball players to genocide or another crime, and no archival data confirming athlete participation.
That conclusion is important.
So is the question it actually answered.
The inquiry was framed around a specific proposition: that the Perkūnas basketball team had played a German team on July 7, 1941 and that the victors were then allowed to shoot Jews at the Seventh Fort. Prosecutors emphasized that no such Lithuanian-German basketball game took place on July 7.
Perkūnas. July 7.
Nemenchik’s account names neither. It describes an unnamed Lithuanian basketball team at the fort on July 6.
And the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre told those same investigators that mass killings at the Seventh Fort occurred on July 4, 6, 9 and 19, with TDA soldiers participating in the executions.
The state found no evidence that the July 7 Perkūnas game it had been asked to investigate occurred.
That does not adjudicate the narrower July 6 eyewitness allegation about an unnamed team.
It leaves that allegation unanswered.
The file the inquiry should have found
The 2004 report contains another unresolved lead.
Zuroff’s submission alleged that after the war at least two players from the same Lithuanian team were arrested by Soviet authorities and accused of killing Jews at the Seventh Fort. During interrogation, the submission said, they named four other basketball players from their team as participants.
That allegation is not proof that such interrogations were reliable.
It is not even proof, without the files, that the submission described them accurately.
But it creates a concrete archival question.
Where are the interrogation records?
Who were the two players?
Who were the four they allegedly named?
Were the statements voluntary, coerced, contradictory, retracted or corroborated?
The prosecutors said they found no direct victim or witness evidence and no archival data identifying athletes. The public account does not show what became of the interrogation lead described in the submission.
That is no longer an abstract demand to search the archives.
It is a request for a particular class of files.
The TDA connection
Even the version of Gar summarized in the 2004 submission tied the basketball team to the TDA.
The independent documentary record establishes the institution more firmly than the legend does.
The 1965 collection Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje (1941-1944): dokumentų rinkinys, Part I reproduces the July 11 TDA order as Document No. 47 on printed p. 71. It directs company commanders to rotate as commandant of the Seventh Fort according to which company supplied the guard. The printed archival reference is LCVA f. 1444, ap. 2, b. 1a, l. 17.
The same volume prints the Jäger Report as Document No. 115. July 11 cannot be moved backward to July 6.
It does establish an institutional TDA-Seventh Fort relationship.
In 2011, Vytautas Petrikėnas and Martynas Kosas published VII fortas: lietuviška tragedija. Its contents include a chapter titled, in the catalogue’s English rendering, “Basketball players of Perkūnas team – Jew-shooters. Facts and hypotheses.”
Its published English summary says the main mass-killing phase at the Seventh Fort ran from June 30 through July 6 and that soldiers of the 1st and 3rd TDA companies carried out most of the killings under German supervision and with German participation. Lithuanian post-Soviet scholarship therefore did engage the specific basketball allegation; it did not simply ignore it.
The Centre’s own later scholarship goes further. In the 2020 English edition of The Holocaust in Lithuania: 1941-1944, Arūnas Bubnys states that the TDA Battalion’s 3rd Company took part in the July 6 mass killing at the Seventh Fort and that Lieutenants Juozas Barzda, Anatolijus Dagys and Bronius Norkus were in charge, with members of the German Gestapo also participating.
The source note matters. Bubnys traces that specific July 6 attribution to J. Vosylius’s April 10, 1961 Soviet interrogation protocol in the Lithuanian Special Archives. That is not a contemporaneous 1941 record. It is a postwar interrogation source that still requires the same scrutiny demanded everywhere else in this article.
But it means Lithuania’s own post-Soviet Holocaust scholarship has gone beyond Jäger’s generic “Lithuanian partisans” and identified a company and named officers for the July 6 killing. Bronius Norkus in that record is a different person from Vytautas and Algirdas Norkus, and he should not be conflated with either the twins or the earlier roster entries labeled “Norkus I” and “Norkus II.”
July 6 again. TDA again.
The accused players
The names require the same discipline.
Vytautas and Algirdas Norkus were publicly accused in 2004. Both denied involvement. A contemporary Lithuanian report recorded their denials. An April 18 Associated Press report by Stephen Singer from Waterbury independently recorded both brothers rejecting the accusation.
Their denial belongs in the file.
A roster is not a verdict.
An accusation is not a conviction.
A denial is not an acquittal.
The archive decides what survives.
What remains
We cannot prove the famous game.
We cannot prove the prize.
We cannot even give the alleged game a stable date.
But we can separate the propositions.
The July 7 Perkūnas game investigated by Lithuania was not established.
The July 6 massacre is documented.
Nemenchik’s July 6 account is separate from Gar’s prize story.
Prominent basketball players belonged to partisan formations in Kaunas.
TDA units were institutionally connected to the Seventh Fort.
Lithuanian post-Soviet scholarship places the TDA 3rd Company in the July 6 killing and names Barzda, Dagys and Bronius Norkus as officers in charge, while tracing that identification to a Soviet interrogation file.
And a 2004 submission told prosecutors that Soviet interrogation files existed in which basketball players allegedly named other players.
Those files are now the shortest route between allegation and answer.
The scoreboard
On August 31, Lithuania’s national team will take the floor in Vilnius.
Those players owe no answer for 1941.
Guilt is not hereditary.
A jersey carries no criminal liability.
But national memory does inherit unresolved records.
The responsible conclusion is narrower than the legend and stronger than dismissal.
Lithuania investigated a July 7 Perkūnas basketball game and found no evidence that it happened.
The strongest eyewitness allegation points to July 6.
The state’s own researchers confirmed a mass killing at the fort on July 6 and TDA participation in the executions.
That is not proof of the basketball allegation.
It is proof that a negative finding about July 7 and Perkūnas cannot by itself close a July 6 allegation about an unnamed team.
The game remains unproved.
The file remains open.
