The Centre Called It a Manifestation

In June 2024, Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre reprinted 1941 Lithuanian Activist Front texts telling Jews to leave Lithuania and directing activists, at the decisive moment, “jų turtą perimkite į savo rankas” — take their property into your own hands. The Centre described what it had reprinted as “antisemitizmo apraiškų” — manifestations of antisemitism — and concluded that Kazys Škirpa, who led the Berlin LAF, was not a collaborator. The document is No. 9R-598.

A Centre report proves what the Centre is willing to print. Institutional authorship does not make the proposition true. The LAF texts, contemporaneous diplomatic records and independent scholarship have to carry the historical claim.

The Centre’s rule

Report 9R-598 says the antisemitic passages in Berlin LAF documents suggest that the so-called Jewish problem was to be solved “ne genocido, o išvarymo iš Lietuvos būdu” — not by genocide, but by expulsion from Lithuania. It adds that Berlin LAF members had no information before the war that the Nazis planned the total murder of the Jews.

Each distinction has a legitimate use, but only within its proper question. They limit a claim that Škirpa knew of a later extermination program. His presence in Berlin limits a claim that he personally directed shootings in Kaunas. Lack of proof that he wrote a particular leaflet limits personal authorship.

But none of those limits answers the problem created by the Centre’s own quotations: how should historians describe a political program that collectively blames Jews, orders them out, denies them a place in the national community, threatens their ability to live there and anticipates transfer of their property?

The report then adopts a definition of collaboration centered on service inside an occupation administration and concludes: “Tad jis nebuvo kolaborantas.” Therefore he was not a collaborator. That may answer the Centre’s chosen definition. It does not resolve the historical meaning of the antisemitic program the same report reproduces.

Lithuania already had a standard

Lithuanian Holocaust scholarship had already supplied a less forgiving analytical vocabulary. In Vygantas Vareikis’s study of antisemitism and the preconditions of the Holocaust, he identifies the “Jew-Communist” and “Jew-exploiter” stereotypes, rising antisemitic incidents and the devaluation of Jews as parts of the environment in which coercion against Jews became easier to imagine.

At the end of that study, Vareikis describes antisemitic leaflets distributed by the Berlin LAF headquarters, portraying Jews collectively as agents of Communist ideology and as responsible for Sovietization, and says they “circulated at the ripe time.” His surrounding discussion presents the claim that some Jews welcomed the Red Army as part of the belief-world through which many Lithuanians interpreted Sovietization, not as a warrant for collective Jewish guilt.

The International Commission later wrote the rule more bluntly. Its conclusions approved on 19 June 2002 say that LAF leadership “cancelled ‘the right of welcome granted to the Jews by Vytautas the Great’”, demanded that Jews abandon Lithuania and flee to Russia, and that antisemitic proclamations from the Berlin headquarters reached Lithuania and significantly influenced attitudes.

That is a historical continuum, not a criminal verdict: stereotype, collective accusation, political exclusion, coercion, dispossession and then violence. It does not say propaganda mechanically caused every murder. It says the program matters before the last stage of killing.

Vareikis’s March 2025 essay on Škirpa does not erase that framework. He quotes a December 1940 LAF review complaining that independent Lithuania had failed to restrain “žydai ir panašūs elementai” — Jews and similar elements — and says Škirpa’s political orientation was unquestionably toward Germany. He also places Škirpa inside a vision of a German-dominated New Europe and identifies LAF antisemitism, the Provisional Government, persecution, property seizure and killings as central to the dispute.

There is no need to portray Vareikis as having changed sides. His earlier analytical categories are sufficient to test the state’s later treatment of Škirpa.

A neutral archive, not a Soviet file

The Finnish Foreign Ministry archive now adds a source layer that cannot be dismissed as Soviet manufacture. Finland preserved material transmitted through diplomatic channels in 1941.

On 23 July 1941 Škirpa sent the Finnish Minister in Berlin a German memorandum on Lithuania’s legal position and wishes. He asked that Lithuania enter, as an equal member, the German-led “community of destiny and solidarity” of European peoples. He described the uprising as tangible assistance to the German army and called the resulting Waffenkameradschaft — comradeship in arms — a guide of Lithuanian foreign policy. He also presented continued participation in the struggle against Bolshevism as a prerequisite of the European New Order.

The memorandum does not mention Jews. Report 9R-598, however, records that 3,027 people were murdered in the July killing operations at the Seventh Fort, 3,020 of them Jews.

A second Finnish file is equally important. The Lithuanian Provisional Government drafted a 5 August 1941 memorandum to the German Generalkommissar on the day the government ceased to function. On 23 September, Škirpa forwarded that memorandum, Protocol No. 35 and the 28 July Lohse proclamation to Finnish envoy T. M. Kivimäki.

The memorandum described the strongly national and anti-Communist orientation of LAF youth as “dem deutschen Nationalsozialismus ideologisch verwandt” — ideologically related to German National Socialism. It also said Lithuanian regular soldiers and partisans had entered the fight against the Red Army “nach einem mit der deutschen Heeresleitung vorher verabredeten Plan” — according to a plan agreed in advance with the German army command.

That sentence belongs beside 9R-598’s collaboration test. The Provisional Government that named Škirpa prime minister described the uprising as fought under a plan agreed in advance with the German army command, and Škirpa himself later sent that description to Finland. A definition of collaboration that cannot reach a government fighting ‘according to a plan agreed in advance with the German army command’ is not a historical finding. It is a filter.

The Finnish records should be used for what they actually establish. They do not prove that Škirpa personally ordered the Holocaust, wrote every LAF antisemitic text or knew the future course of the Final Solution. They establish the political and military framework in which the Berlin LAF and the government created in its name described their project.

Compare the programs before power

The fair comparison starts before Hitler possessed the German state.

On 24 February 1920, Hitler presented the Nazi Party’s 25-point program. Point 4 excluded Jews from membership in the nation and citizenship. Point 5 allowed a non-citizen to live in Germany only as a guest. Point 8 demanded that “all non-Germans who entered Germany after 2 August 1914 shall be required to leave the Reich forthwith.” The same program appears in the Avalon Project’s Nuremberg document collection.

In 1920 Hitler’s party had no German state apparatus, no police power and no extermination program. It had an antisemitic political program defining who could belong, who could possess citizenship and who could remain. USHMM presents that document as the Nazi Party Platform, not as a marginal rhetorical episode.

That is the like-for-like problem with the Centre’s Škirpa method. When the evidence concerns a political movement before state power, the absence of a later extermination plan cannot be the measure of whether its antisemitic program was historically grave.

Then compare what power did

The second stage is what happened after the Nazis acquired the state. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records more than 400 laws, decrees and regulations restricting Jewish public and private life between 1933 and 1939. Jews were pushed out of public service and professions, stripped of citizenship, excluded from education and economic life, forced to register property, and subjected to the transfer of Jewish businesses and assets into non-Jewish hands.

Nazi policy still officially encouraged Jewish emigration until October 1941. The USHMM account of German Jewish refugees notes that Jews leaving Germany faced an increasingly heavy emigration tax and mounting restrictions on taking assets with them.

This was not yet the full extermination program. It was still persecution. The distinction between expulsion and extermination is historically real. It does not turn expulsion, exclusion and dispossession into incidental antisemitism.

What the comparison does not claim

Kazys Škirpa was not Adolf Hitler. The evidence here does not establish that he personally ordered mass shootings, knew in advance of the Final Solution, or authored every antisemitic LAF text. Anti-Soviet resistance was not itself illegitimate, and Lithuanian aspirations for restored sovereignty were real.

The comparison is about method. If collective Jewish blame, exclusion from the nation, deprivation of livelihood, forced departure and property transfer are recognized as central antisemitic persecution when they appear in the history of the Nazi movement, the same categories cannot become analytically marginal when they appear in a Lithuanian movement led by an honored Lithuanian figure.

The category has consequences

The wording matters because it carries commemorative consequences. Škirpa’s official honor record includes the Cross of Vytis (1919), the Lithuanian Army Founders Volunteers Medal, and the Order of Vytautas the Great, 3rd Class (1935). On 27 September 2026, I asked President Gitanas Nausėda to review and withdraw those honors under Lithuania’s State Awards Law. As of 20 October, I have identified no reply from the President’s Office to that application.

That application does not ask the President to conduct a criminal trial. It asks whether the documented record is compatible with continuing state honor.

“Manifestations of antisemitism” sounds cautious. But once the Centre itself has printed demands for Jewish departure, instructions concerning Jewish property, a distinction between expulsion and genocide, and a conclusion resting partly on the absence of knowledge of future extermination, the category becomes an argument.

Applied to Hitler’s 1920 party program, that argument collapses. It would allow exclusion from the nation, denial of citizenship and forced departure to be treated as historically minor because the movement had not yet formulated extermination.

Applied to Škirpa, the Centre uses that boundary.

That is not a consistent historical standard. It is an exemption.