The Ledger Records What They Became

How participation in Lithuania’s first killings produced units capable of murdering entire communities

I was born in Riga. Most of what I know about how the Jews of the Baltic states were murdered, I learned from paperwork produced by the men who murdered them.

One document does more work than any argument I could construct around it. Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, compiled what he titled a “Complete List of Executions Carried Out in the EK 3 Area up to 1 December 1941”. It was neither complete nor wholly accurate. Michael MacQueen identified omitted regions, omitted actions and inaccurate totals. The defects do not rescue the record. They establish that the sequence Jäger preserved is a minimum.

The ledger

The list opens with two entries at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas. On 4 July 1941, 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women. On 6 July, 2,514 Jewish men. Jäger introduced the entries by identifying the shooters: Lithuanian partisans acting on his instructions and orders. He named no German firing unit for either action.

A new organization then appears. SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann commanded a mobile killing apparatus built around a small German directing element and Lithuanian auxiliaries. For the next six weeks, the entries follow a pattern. Jewish men dominate the totals. Women appear in smaller numbers. Children do not yet appear on a mass scale.

On 15 and 16 August at Rokiškis, Jäger recorded 3,200 Jewish men, women and children. A separate entry covering 9–16 August at Raseiniai lists four Jewish children. Because that range ends on 16 August, it establishes no priority in either direction. Rokiškis marks the point that cannot be disputed: family extermination had arrived on a mass scale.

The proportions then invert. On 23 August at Panevėžys, Jäger listed 1,312 men, 4,602 women and 1,609 children. At Kaišiadorys on 26 August and Prienai on 27 August, the clerk stopped separating the categories and recorded that all Jewish men, women and children had been killed. By early September, entire districts disappeared in single lines.

The ledger does not prove that identical personnel served at every site. It records continuity of the German-directed operational system. The organization remained available, Lithuanian formations supplied most of its manpower, and the victim category widened until selective murder became community destruction.

What the first killings produced

Michael MacQueen, then with the Office of Special Investigations at the United States Department of Justice, divided the destruction into three overlapping phases: terrorization from late June to mid-August, concentration from mid-July to late August, and mass extermination from late August through December. His evidence for the first phase included the Kaunas forts. Between 4 July and 9 August, 3,770 people were shot there. All but six were Jews. Most were men; 136 were women.

MacQueen stated what the first phase was for. It sought to intimidate the Jews who remained and “to rehearse the fledgling Lithuanian auxiliaries in the tactics and practice of mass murder.” He found the same pattern in Vilnius, where the early July shooting lists contained very few women. The rehearsal conclusion belongs to MacQueen. The ledger records what followed.

The strongest domestic command chain runs through Bronius Norkus. In How Did It Happen?, Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė record that the Third and Fourth Companies of the National Labour Protection Battalion were placed at the disposal of the German Security Police. The Third Company, commanded by Norkus and Juozas Barzda, was assigned to guard prisoners at the Seventh Fort and carry out executions.

Dieckmann and Vanagaitė also record that, after the war, Jäger blamed Norkus for the uncontrolled firing into the imprisoned crowd. The statement was self-exculpatory. It could not erase Jäger’s own written admission that Lithuanian shooters acted on his instructions and orders. It nevertheless identifies Norkus at the first mass shootings.

The same study later identifies Norkus among the experienced Lithuanian officers who led mobile killing operations. That establishes command continuity from the Seventh Fort into the provincial extermination campaign. It does not establish that every man who fired in July fired again in September. No complete roster spanning both phases has been produced.

The method became portable. Lithuanian police and local officials concentrated the victims and selected the sites. Guards enclosed the prepared killing grounds. Konrad Kwiet records that in the earliest border shootings the victims themselves were made to enlarge the pits, and that during the later large-scale operations Soviet prisoners of war were forced to do that work. A small German directing element could then dispatch a much larger Lithuanian force under an experienced Lithuanian officer. Jäger recorded an average journey of four to five kilometres from assembly point to grave.

Repeated deployment made the procedure institutional rather than local. The apparatus no longer depended on one mob or one town. Police offices located and confined the victims, battalions supplied manpower, and German command assigned the operation. The next district could be destroyed the following week.

The offices supplying those men had been seized during the July struggle inside the Lithuanian administration. A radical faction failed to remove the Provisional Government but captured the Kaunas commandant’s office, the battalion, the Police Department and positions in the security and prison systems. The documentary record of that seizure is set out in The Coup That Captured Lithuania’s Killing Apparatus. Its consequence is visible in the ledger.

The apparatus exported

A second chain began inside the same Kaunas auxiliary-police system. It must be kept separate from the Norkus chain because the surviving evidence does not show that Norkus’s men, or the identical Seventh Fort shooters, formed the unit sent to Belarus. What the evidence shows is institutional replication.

In August 1941, the Second Auxiliary Police Service Battalion was formed in Kaunas under Major Antanas Impulevičius. Research published through Lithuania’s own Genocide Centre records 485 officers and men. Approximately 450 members, encompassing all three companies, participated in killing operations. In October the Lithuanian battalion was deployed to the Minsk region with German Reserve Police Battalion 11.

The provenance is damaging. These figures do not come from an external polemic. They appear in the journal of the Lithuanian institution charged with studying occupation-era crimes. Nearly the whole battalion participated.

MacQueen notes that the United States Department of Justice brought successful denaturalization and deportation proceedings against former members of the Kaunas Second Battalion. He describes the unit as tied to the murder of more than 17,000 Jews and Red Army prisoners in and around Minsk during October and November 1941.

At Slutsk on 27 and 28 October, the force identified in the German record as Police Battalion 11 from Kaunas carried out the destruction of the town’s Jews. The full record preserved as Nuremberg document 1104-PS states that the formation arrived with four companies, two of them Lithuanian. The Slutsk operation was therefore the work of the combined police formation, not Impulevičius’s Lithuanian battalion acting alone.

The Gebietskommissar, Carl, described Jewish workers being removed from factories and workshops, driven from their homes and killed outside the town. His report condemned the brutality of the German police and “particularly the Lithuanian partisans.” Belarusians were beaten alongside Jews. Bodies remained in the streets. Carl ended with a request to the Generalkommissar in Minsk: spare me in future from this police battalion.

Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar for White Ruthenia, forwarded Carl’s report on 1 November. Kube applied for criminal prosecution of the responsible officers, from the battalion commander down to the last lieutenant. He wrote that the unit had gravely damaged German standing and reported that seriously wounded victims had been buried alive and had worked their way back out of the graves. He thought the episode warranted notification to Hitler and Göring.

The point is not that Nazi administrators objected to killing Jews. They objected when an imported police formation disrupted labor, damaged German authority and made the occupation harder to administer. The unit was not hesitant or unpractised. Its violence had become excessive even inside the machinery that had ordered the extermination.

The two chains prove different propositions. Norkus documents operational continuity from the Seventh Fort into provincial family massacres. The Second Battalion and the combined Slutsk formation document institutional export from the Kaunas police apparatus into Belarus. The record does not establish that the same shooters passed through every stage. It establishes that the apparatus reproduced the capacity across formations.

What Lithuania still preserves

Juozas Krikštaponis served as a company commander in the Second Battalion. Lithuanian state institutions have made strong and contradictory claims about what he commanded and when.

A 2022 study published in the Genocide Centre’s journal did not leave the question open. Working from Lithuanian Special Archive and Central State Archive documents, Mindaugas Pocius concluded that Krikštaponis commanded the battalion’s Second Company on 10 October 1941, when the prisoners of the Rudzensk ghetto were killed, and on 15 and 16 October 1941, when prisoners of Stalag No. 352 were murdered near Minsk. Pocius also recorded what the state had given him: volunteer-soldier status, the rank of colonel, the Order of the Cross of Vytis, the memorial stone in Ukmergė and a street name in Panevėžys.

The Centre then lost the memorial case. On 28 March 2025, the Regional Administrative Court annulled its 2023 decision requiring alteration of the memorial stone in Ukmergė. The ruling turned on defective procedure, including failures of transparency and impartiality. It did not adjudicate Krikštaponis’s historical innocence.

The same court report carried the evidence the article must not hide. When asked to produce legal proof of Krikštaponis’s personal participation in crimes against humanity, the Centre said it possessed none. Bubnys also acknowledged that the documentary testimony conflicts: some records place Krikštaponis in command when his company killed; others identify another officer.

That is not an exoneration. It is the distance between what the Centre publishes and what the Centre will defend. Its own journal carried a historian’s dated conclusion, drawn from Lithuanian archives, naming the company and the operations. Asked in court to stand behind it, the Centre produced nothing.

The memorial stone itself remained part of Ukmergė’s public landscape. In February 2026, municipal project documents described integrating it into a redesigned square while changing its location; the municipal administration said the precise placement was still under consideration. Thirty-six years after the restoration of independence, Lithuania was still deciding where to preserve the memorial, not whether the unresolved record required public judgment.

MacQueen was precise about who stands accused. The killers he called Lithuanian formed a minute fraction of the nation. Other Lithuanians sheltered Jews at mortal risk. His conclusion identifies the responsible structure: a fascist clique multiplied its influence by capturing key military and police positions and became the principal Lithuanian instrument of destruction within German command.

Germany designed the extermination, commanded it and supplied the objective. Lithuanian formations supplied much of the manpower, local administration and repeated participation that made the objective executable across the country. That capacity was accumulated through action, then embedded across battalions, police offices and provincial commands.

Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe. Approximately 212,000 of 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered. The Lithuanian state has punished no Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. Its own scholars have documented the units, the officers and the procedures. Its institutions still retreat from certainty when commemoration carries consequences.

Jäger’s ledger is not the whole murder record. MacQueen’s catalogue of its omissions makes completeness impossible. The surviving pages are enough. They record what repeated participation produced. Independent Lithuania has had thirty-six years to read them. The public stone in Ukmergė records what the state still refuses to decide.

Source note: Michael MacQueen’s three-phase analysis, indigenous-auxiliary finding, Kaunas forts figures, account of rotating detachments, discussion of U.S. denaturalization proceedings and rehearsal conclusion appear in “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 27–48, especially 39. Jäger’s chronology and figures are read with MacQueen’s warning that the report omitted killings and contained inaccurate totals. The Seventh Fort and Norkus passages follow Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen? Understanding the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), in the discussions of the Seventh Fort and Hamann’s mobile killing organization. The Second Battalion figures are from Alfredas Rukšėnas, “The Kaunas Second Auxiliary Police Service Battalion and the Massacre in Belarus in 1941–1943,” Genocidas ir rezistencija 2, no. 22 (2007), 25–64, DOI 10.61903/GR.2007.202. The combined Slutsk formation, Carl report and Kube covering letter are Nuremberg document 1104-PS. The account of pit preparation follows Konrad Kwiet, “Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 3–26. The Krikštaponis section uses Mindaugas Pocius, “Juozas Krikštaponis (Krištaponis): The Question of Participation in the Holocaust and the Problem of Historical Memory,” Genocidas ir rezistencija 1, no. 51 (2022), 7–38, DOI 10.61903/GR.2022.101, together with the Centre’s 2023 public statement and the March 2025 court report. The latest municipal posture cited is from February 2026. Current-status statements are as of 31 July 2026.