The Genocide Centre’s Škirpa Report Omits What He Told Berlin About Jews

Lithuanian scholars published two 1939 episodes from Škirpa’s Berlin posting in 2017. The Centre’s 2024 report, which found him no collaborator, discusses neither.

In June 2024, Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre told Vilnius that Kazys Škirpa “nebuvo kolaborantas” (was not a collaborator) and that the text of a proposed plaque honoring him “atspindi teisingą informaciją” (reflects correct information) about his life.

The report runs seven pages. It records that Škirpa became Lithuania’s envoy in Berlin at the end of 1938. It says nothing about what he did there in 1939.

Two studies published by Vytautas Magnus University in 2017 cover that year. One describes Škirpa telling a senior German official that Lithuania already had too many Jews. The other describes Lithuania’s own foreign minister criticizing Škirpa’s “openly Nazi rhetoric.” Neither episode appears in the Centre’s report.

What Škirpa told Berlin

In the autumn of 1939, Germany drove Jews from the Suwałki region toward the Lithuanian border. Historian Šarūnas Liekis reconstructs the crisis in The Suwałki Triangle: A Window into the Genocidal Future.

On October 27, German soldiers forced Jews toward the border and threatened to shoot returnees. Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys cabled Škirpa to intervene. After German troops withdrew, refugees returned to the German side but remained trapped outdoors for more than ten days. Liekis records illness and deaths.

Liekis identifies Ernst Woermann as head of the German Foreign Office’s Political Department. His account of the December exchange cites a report sent by the Lithuanian legation in Berlin to the Political Department director in Kaunas on December 14, 1939 (Lithuanian Central State Archives, f. 383, ap. 7, b. 2230, l. 5 and reverse). Škirpa headed that legation.

Liekis describes Woermann and Škirpa as speaking in a joking tone. Škirpa said Lithuania had too many Jews and suggested a ghetto near Lublin instead. Liekis renders his position: “the Reich had the right to do what it pleased with its own Jews, but it should not burden Lithuania.”

Germany had already begun deporting Jews to Nisko in October 1939 under what the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the Nisko, or Lublin, Plan. That context does not identify the precise destination Škirpa intended or establish knowledge of the later extermination program.

The reported joking tone belongs in the record. It does not make the proposed treatment of Jewish refugees harmless.

Liekis calls Lithuania’s response “bureaucratically clumsy and inefficient.” He says the government did not expel refugees already inside Lithuania, while seeking German readmission.

What his own minister said

Four months before the Woermann meeting, Urbšys had already objected to Škirpa’s conduct in Berlin.

Simonas Jazavita’s study of Škirpa’s cooperation with Japan’s military attaché Hiroshi Oshima, published in the same journal and, like Liekis’s, reprinted in the 2017 volume Casablanca of the North, describes a private letter Urbšys wrote on August 15, 1939, to Deputy Prime Minister Kazys Bizauskas.

Writing from holiday, Urbšys criticized Škirpa’s Berliner Börsen-Zeitung article. Jazavita describes his objection to its Nazi rhetoric and alignment with the aggressor that had taken Klaipėda. In the scholar’s English rendering, Urbšys asked: “How come Škirpa is competent in these matters? Does he participate in Fuhrer’s secret meetings?” The letter is in Bizauskas’s papers at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania (F. 61, b. 231, l. 7–8).

This letter documents a diplomatic objection; it supplies no evidence of Urbšys objecting on behalf of Jews or delivering a reprimand directly to Škirpa. It predates Soviet occupation. Lithuania’s circumstances permitted disagreement inside its own government about Škirpa’s public alignment with Germany.

Jazavita also credits Škirpa with assisting H. Flashenberg, a Jewish press attaché, citing Škirpa’s own 1996 memoir, page 438. I have not seen the memoir passage. The scholar’s tentative discussion of tactical antisemitism does not establish motive. Help for one colleague cannot settle the assessment of conduct toward other Jews. Antisemitism adopted to please Berlin was still a choice.

What the Centre weighed instead

The Centre’s report No. 9R-598, dated June 25, 2024, bears the names of Arūnas Bubnys and Alfredas Rukšėnas. An interinstitutional commission requested the assessment after considering the Vilnius City Council Historical Memory Commission’s proposed plaque. The report was issued two days after the city removed a plaque that National Alliance activists had installed on the same building without permission.

The report reproduces antisemitic LAF material but distinguishes expulsion from genocide. It uses an occupation-administration definition to reject the collaborator label and reports no evidence connecting Škirpa to the July 1941 Seventh Fort killings. It cites a June 25, 1941 report in Draugas, a Chicago Lithuanian newspaper, that Škirpa had reportedly forbidden the persecution of Jews. It then asks why he forbade it: “Kodėl K. Škirpa uždraudė žydų persekiojimus Lietuvoje” (Why did K. Škirpa forbid the persecution of Jews in Lithuania). A newspaper’s report became the premise of the Centre’s question. I have challenged that treatment before.

Its conclusion endorses the proposed inscription’s information about Škirpa. The reservations concern the building: the Constituent Assembly never sat there, and he did not organize the uprising from it. The Centre proposed commemorating the military commandant’s office that operated there instead.

None of this reaches 1939. A definition of collaboration built around occupation administration cannot address an envoy’s conduct in Berlin before any occupation began.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community rejected the report and opposed honoring Škirpa.

The Centre’s own standard

In letter 55R-951, dated September 29, 2026, and registered October 2, the Centre told me it had not examined the 1970 Lübeck judgment in the case of Ewald Bub “because it is not digitized.” It conceded that its earlier statement that Bub had been completely acquitted was probably not legally correct.

Both 1939 studies are open access.

The Bub case concerns another man. Its relevance is the Centre’s admission that it had published a conclusion without examining the judgment. A Centre conclusion shows what the Centre decided. Whether it is true depends on the records behind it. Here, the published studies supply a concrete reason to examine the cited records and reassess the omission.

I have relied on those published accounts, not on the archival originals. The originals are held in Lithuania’s own archive and national library. If the scholars misread them, the Centre is well placed to show it.

What the Centre owes

The Centre should state whether it examined either 1939 episode before calling the plaque’s account of Škirpa correct. If it did not, it should examine the originals and publish a reasoned assessment of both.

That request does not depend on proof that Škirpa foresaw the Holocaust, or on any criminal finding. Public honor is a different question: what a state asks its citizens to admire.

A Lithuanian minister criticized Škirpa in 1939. Lithuanian scholars published the record. The responsibility now lies with the institution that told Vilnius his plaque was accurate.

The Centre called the plaque’s account of Škirpa correct. Its report does not mention what, by Liekis’s account, Škirpa told Berlin about Jews in December 1939.