The Missing Rebuttal in Report No. 9R-598
Hilberg supplied the frame. Lithuania’s own Commission supplied the evidence. The 2024 report does not engage either one.
The Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre issued Report No. 9R-598, dated 25 June 2024, as a seven-page historical-archival assessment of Kazys Škirpa for the proposed commemorative plaque process. The report is careful in places. It reproduces severe antisemitic language from the Berlin Lithuanian Activist Front. It distinguishes Škirpa personally from formations operating in Lithuania. Those distinctions are legitimate subjects of historical argument.[1]
The problem is not that the Centre reached a conclusion I dislike. The problem is the scholarship against which its conclusion was tested — or, in the public report, was not tested.
The report makes a severance
The report says that the Kaunas Tautinio darbo apsauga (TDA) battalion was subordinate to German military administration, the German Security Police and SD, Karl Jäger, and the Kaunas commandant. It records that Jäger-directed killing operations at the Seventh Fort on 4, 6, 9 and 19 July 1941 killed 3,027 people, including 3,020 Jews. It then says there is no information connecting the Berlin-based Škirpa personally to those killings.
Then comes the institutional move that matters here. The report says the Kaunas TDA Battalion “cannot be linked” to Jäger’s August–November mass-killing operations because reorganization into the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Auxiliary Police Battalions began in early August (my translation). The reorganization is treated as a boundary.
That boundary is difficult to square with the Centre’s own published scholarship. In “The First (13th) Lithuanian Police Battalion and the Killing of Jews in 1941”, Arūnas Bubnys states that the purpose of his study is to show the role of the TDA Battalion in the 1941 killings. He identifies the 3rd Company of the 1st Police Battalion as the core of Joachim Hamann’s mobile killing detachment, estimates that the 1st Battalion participated with German Gestapo personnel and auxiliaries in the murder of at least 36,000 Jews, and says that most of the battalion was involved in the Holocaust in one way or another.[2]
That does not establish Škirpa’s personal responsibility. It does establish that reorganization cannot, by itself, erase the later history of the formation and its companies. When a 2024 report signed by Bubnys relies on reorganization as a reason to sever the TDA from later mass killing, Bubnys’s own published research is directly relevant to the method.
Hilberg’s frame — and where it actually sits
Raul Hilberg’s Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 was published by Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins in 1992 (ISBN 0-06-019035-3). Part I is titled “Perpetrators.” Chapter 8, “Non-German Volunteers,” begins at p. 81. The discussion of Baltic police begins at p. 96; Lithuania itself is treated at pp. 98–99.[3]
Those pages do more than shelve Lithuania under a heading. Hilberg describes Lithuanian police collaborators drawn from anti-Soviet partisans, the conversion of selected men into police companies, local police and volunteers assisting Einsatzkommandos, Lithuanian personnel in the Vilnius ghettoization cordon, and police battalions later deployed outside Lithuania. The chapter placement is therefore corroborative, not dispositive.
The stronger sentence appears later — and, importantly, it appears in Part III, “Bystanders,” Chapter 18, “Nations in Adolf Hitler’s Europe.” On p. 197 Hilberg writes: “The closest resemblance to the Reich in the near-totality of involvement must be sought in the Baltic region.” That is the exact wording in the 1992 edition. Its location matters. Hilberg is not pretending that every person in the Baltic states belonged in one category. In the chapter where he compares national behavior across occupied Europe, he expressly distinguishes the Baltic scale of participation from ordinary spectatorship.
The comparison is regional, not Lithuanian-only. It is historical analysis, not adjudication. But Lithuania is one of the three Baltic cases Hilberg then discusses, including tens of thousands who served as civilians, auxiliaries and police. A modern Lithuanian state assessment is free to reject that framework. It should show the reader why.
Lithuanian scholarship has corrected Hilberg before. Saulius Sužiedėlis, in “The Perception of the Holocaust: Public Challenges and Experience in Lithuania”, wrote that Hilberg had misread a German document in The Destruction of the European Jews and thereby transformed Algirdas Klimaitis into the head of the “anti-Soviet partisans.” Sužiedėlis attributes later escalations of Klimaitis’s status to other authors, not to Hilberg.[4]
That correction concerns a different Hilberg book. It therefore removes, rather than supplies, the easiest defense of Report No. 9R-598. Lithuanian historians have demonstrated the capacity to identify a Hilberg error, name the document, and publish the correction. I have found no comparable published correction of the specific Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders framework used here.
Lithuania already commissioned the harder history
The stronger internal comparison is not American. On 20 April 2005, Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania approved conclusions based on research by Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis. The approved English text says: “Indigenous cooperation considerably facilitated the persecution, ghettoization and mass murder of the Jews.”[5]
The underlying study, The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941: Sources and Analysis, was later published in book form in 2006. The Commission describes it as archive-based research that reconstructs the mechanism of mass murder and analyzes the circumstances of Lithuanian participation.
That matters because Report No. 9R-598 does not merely ask whether Škirpa personally pulled a trigger. It makes affirmative claims about the LAF, the TDA, the relation between Lithuanian initiative and German authority, the significance of Škirpa remaining in Berlin, and the evidentiary effect of the TDA reorganization. Those are precisely the kinds of questions the Commission study and Bubnys’s battalion research illuminate.
I checked the entire seven-page public report and its source apparatus. It cites, among others, Juozas Jankauskas, Valentinas Brandišauskas, Pilypas Narutis, Arūnas Bubnys, Sigitas Jegelevičius, Stasys Knezys, Alfredas Rukšėnas, Liudas Truska, Vygantas Vareikis and Vytautas Tininis. It contains no citation to Hilberg, Yitzhak Arad, Christoph Dieckmann or Saulius Sužiedėlis. That is a narrow, falsifiable observation about this report — not a claim that Lithuanian historians have never engaged these scholars.
Arad and the German record
Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Indiana University Press, 1987) opens Part One with “The Final Solution: From Shooting to Gas” at p. 7. On pp. 7–8, Arad describes Einsatzgruppen shootings with local collaborators and turns immediately to Lithuania, using the report of Einsatzkommando 3 to explain the organization of mass shooting: concentration points, pits, marching distances, groups of victims and repeated actions.[6]
That German-authored record is the Jäger Report, dated 1 December 1941. It itemizes executions by date, place and victim category and expressly records operations conducted under Jäger’s instructions and command with Lithuanian partisans. Arad is not a second verdict on Lithuania. He is corroboration that the organizational record Report No. 9R-598 is trying to delimit belongs inside the standard history of how mass shooting functioned.
A bystander was a real category
There is another reason not to turn Hilberg’s categories into ethnic labels. Kazimierz Sakowicz’s Ponary Diary, 1941–1943 was published by Yale University Press with the subtitle A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder. Sakowicz, a Polish journalist living near Ponary, watched and recorded. The English edition was edited and annotated by Yitzhak Arad.[7]
That is what a genuine bystander looks like in this history: someone who witnessed without commanding, arresting, guarding, transporting or shooting. The existence of bystanders, rescuers and resisters does not relocate police formations from the category created by their own conduct. I addressed that collective-innocence diversion separately in Lithuania’s Alibi Is a Diversion.
The methodological question
The necessary concessions can be stated once. Nazi Germany designed and directed the extermination program. Hilberg’s p. 197 comparison is Baltic, not Lithuanian-only. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders is a synthesis, not a Lithuanian archival monograph. Sužiedėlis has documented a Hilberg error in a different book. Report No. 9R-598 is an assessment of one individual, not a general history of the Holocaust. Soviet occupation and repression are indispensable facts of Lithuanian history.
None of those propositions answers the problem. The sequence of occupations is not a category of participation. A report may distinguish individual responsibility from organizational conduct. It may identify German command and still examine Lithuanian agency. It may argue that a reorganization changed legal identity or operational control. But when those distinctions materially narrow the significance of local participation, the reader is entitled to see how they survive contact with the scholarship Lithuania itself approved — and with the scholarship published by the Centre’s own director.
I have addressed the separate source-use defects of Report No. 9R-598 in The Škirpa Report Cannot Stand. I have also addressed the broader maneuver of substituting collective innocence for institutional accountability in Lithuania’s Alibi Is a Diversion. The question here is narrower still.
Report No. 9R-598 could be right in its ultimate judgment about Škirpa and still be methodologically incomplete. It could have confronted Hilberg’s Baltic comparison, noted Sužiedėlis’s published correction of Hilberg in another work, situated its LAF and TDA distinctions against the Commission’s 2005 conclusions and Dieckmann-Sužiedėlis study, and explained why Bubnys’s own battalion research did not undermine the reorganization severance. That would be a recognizable historical argument.
Instead, the public report asks the reader to accept the distinctions without showing that confrontation. Authority is not a substitute for method.
Silence is not a method.
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[1] LGGRTC, Dėl Kazio Škirpos asmenybės (istorinė-archyvinė pažyma), 25 June 2024, No. 9R-598 (9.6E), 7 pp.; the public PDF is hosted by the Centre.
[2] Arūnas Bubnys, “The First (13th) Lithuanian Police Battalion and the Killing of Jews in 1941,” Genocidas ir rezistencija 2(20) (2006). The Centre’s English summary states that the 3rd Company of the 1st Police Battalion formed the core of Hamann’s mobile detachment and that the battalion participated in the killing of not fewer than 36,000 Jews.
[3] Raul Hilberg, [3]Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945[3] (New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins, 1992), ISBN 0-06-019035-3, ch. 8, “Non-German Volunteers,” Baltic discussion pp. 96–99, Lithuania pp. 98–99; ch. 18, “Nations in Adolf Hitler’s Europe,” p. 197.
[4] Saulius Sužiedėlis, “The Perception of the Holocaust: Public Challenges and Experience in Lithuania,” Wilson Center Meeting Report 341, based on a presentation of 26 September 2007. The Klimaitis criticism expressly concerns Hilberg’s [4]The Destruction of the European Jews[4].
[5] International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, approved conclusions, “The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941: Sources and Analysis,” approved 20 April 2005; Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, full study published in 2006.
[6] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), ch. 1, “The Final Solution: From Shooting to Gas,” pp. 7–8; note 1 cites Yad Vashem Archives 0-18/245.
[7] Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad, trans. Laurence Weinbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
