Before the pit came the police file

On July 5, 1941, a Lithuanian troop commander asked what should be done with nine captured Jews and their families, described as suspected of communist affiliations. Michael MacQueen reproduced the surviving document on page 39. Stasys Čenkus, commander of the Saugumas for all Lithuania, wrote the answer in the margin: “Liquidate them at the first opportunity.” The families were included. The paper required no rifle. It made the rifle inevitable.

Eighty-five years later, Arūnas Bubnys remains acting director of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC. The Seimas appointed him on April 22, 2021, for a five-year term. On June 11, 2026, after that term expired, the Seimas rejected the Centre Council’s proposed successor, Donata Kabelkė, by secret ballot: 28 votes in favor, 43 against, and 18 abstentions (archived copy). The consequence is not speculative. The institution remains under the acting authority of the historian whose published record contains the contradiction at the center of this article.

Bubnys’s 1997 article, “Vokiečių ir lietuvių saugumo policija (1941–1944),” appeared at pages 160–175 of Genocidas ir rezistencija. Near the end of the Lithuanian text, he wrote: “LSP vaidmuo naikinant žydus buvo pagalbinis ir mažareikšmis” — “the LSP’s role in exterminating Jews was auxiliary and minor” (author’s translation from the Lithuanian). That phrase does not appear in the English summary on page 175.

Six years later, Bubnys published “Lietuvių saugumo policija ir holokaustas (1941–1944)” at pages 22–39, with its English summary at pages 39–40. The published English summary says that the Lithuanian Security Police became “an integral part of the repressive mechanism,” closely cooperated with German security agencies, organized mass arrests and transports to prisons and massacre sites, and in some provincial districts supervised the massacres themselves.

Scholars may revise conclusions. A state institution must identify which conclusion it accepts. The LGGRTC continues to publish both accounts while their author remains its acting director.

American federal courts, reading Lithuania’s own archives, did not treat searches, arrests, interrogations, confiscations, prison files, and transfers as minor. They reconstructed the institution that delivered Lithuanian Jews to death. The shooting pit was the final station. The police file arrived first.

The murder was administered.

The office behind the gun

Nazi Germany designed and directed the extermination of Europe’s Jews. German Security Police and SD officers controlled the occupation and supplied the genocidal command. That does not dissolve Lithuanian agency. It identifies the command under which Lithuanian institutions made the murder executable.

The clearest description of the arrangement was written by the Germans, and it was not a complaint. The Stahlecker Report stated that the Lithuanian Security and Criminal Police operated under the orders and guidelines of Einsatzkommando 3, under constant German surveillance, and performed security-police work the SD lacked personnel to carry out, particularly searches, arrests, and investigations. After unsuitable personnel were removed, Stahlecker recorded that the Lithuanian force produced “entirely satisfactory work.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reproduced the report in its decision affirming Algimantas Dailidė’s denaturalization.

The American record set out the killing of Vilnius Jews as procedure: arrest and transfer to Lukiškės hard-labor prison; movement to Paneriai; shooting in groups. Einsatzkommando 3 controlled the killing operation. The Lithuanian Security Police supplied local knowledge, personnel, custody, and paperwork.

Aleksandras Lileikis conceded the institutional case while trying to escape personal responsibility. The federal judgment records that he did not deny personally ordering Saugumas officers under his command to cooperate with the Nazis in arresting, detaining, and delivering thousands of Jews to the death squads. His defense was that the role was “purely ministerial and custodial.” The administrative defense was stated by the administrator himself.

A clerk entered a name. A policeman made an arrest. An interrogator opened a file. A prison accepted a detainee. An administrator signed a transfer. Each act appeared limited from inside the office. The victim experienced the institution whole.

Gita and Fruma Kaplan

The federal judgment renders the mother’s name Gita Kaplan; Attorney General Michael Mukasey later used Gitta. Gita was born in Vilnius in 1896. She and her six-year-old daughter Fruma escaped from the ghetto and were hidden at the Baltoji Vokė estate in Rudamina Township by Adolfas Domeikas, aged sixty-three, and Juozapatas Domeikas, aged thirty-eight. Those names, ages, and the place of rescue survive inside Lileikis’s own “Decision.”

On December 1, 1941, Lileikis ordered Gita, Fruma, Adolfas Domeikas, and Juozapatas Domeikas confined in Lukiškės prison. The next day he ordered Gita and Fruma turned over to the Chief of the German Security Police. The execution cards, as quoted by Judge Richard Stearns, state that mother and child were “treated according to orders” on December 22.

Mukasey used the slightly different wording “handled according to orders” and identified it as a Nazi euphemism for murder. He also recorded that no prewar photograph or other document about the mother and child had been found and that no family member had been identified. Everything now known about them survives because the police force wrote it down while killing them.

On May 24, 1996, Judge Stearns revoked Lileikis’s citizenship. The court described the man revealed by the documents as anything but a “disembodied signer of orders.” It found that he ordered arrests for being suspected of Jewish identity, escaping the ghetto, or hiding a six-year-old child, and then ordered prisoners removed from his custody and delivered to the German Security Police or the Ypatingasis būrys. The judgment supplied the controlling answer: “it is inconceivable that in enacting the RRA, Congress intended to exclude from the United States the triggermen of genocide while opening the door to their commanding officers.”

Lileikis attacked the records as possible Soviet forgeries. The court set out the authentication chain: the Director of the Lithuanian Central State Archives confirmed the documents as authentic; the Head of the Legalization Division of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry attested them; and a consular official of the United States Embassy in Vilnius certified them. Secret Service examiners found no indication of alteration or false dating, and an immigration laboratory matched the “Lileikis” signatures to known handwriting. The Lithuanian archive carried the American judgment.

Gita and Fruma did not arrive at Paneriai by themselves. A police institution found them. A named official signed the papers. Guards moved them through the system. The execution was the last administrative act, not the first.

The police built the trap

The Lileikis judgment documents a Saugumas sting. A truck driver working for the Saugumas offered, for a fee, to smuggle Jews out of Vilnius. He carried at least three truckloads beyond the city and delivered them into Saugumas hands. The captives were sent to Lukiškės and then transferred to the German Security Police to be shot by the Ypatingasis būrys at Paneriai. The Saugumas did not merely catch escapes. It manufactured them.

The Milinavičius Report, dated October 31, 1941, recorded that Izrael and Riva Soak had escaped the ghetto and were waiting at Leon Lejsak’s apartment. It named the officers who searched the premises and arrested them on October 30. Dailidė was one. A second report listed twelve Jews detained while attempting to escape Vilnius toward Lyda, the Soaks among them. All were taken to the Security Police, personally searched, and jailed. The report ended with an operational promise: the same plan would be used against other Jews trying to escape.

Lileikis’s List of Jews Arrested by the Lithuanian Security Police, dated November 5, recorded that the Soaks and ten others remained in Lukiškės prison at the disposition of the German authorities. The appellate record did not establish that every person on the list was killed; at least one survived. It established the police method: inducement, arrest, search, prison, and transfer into German control.

The Dailidė Report of November 3, 1941 carried Dailidė’s own signature. He searched Mark Šapiro, inventoried 2,443.50 rubles and transferred the money to the Germans, retained the passport, and returned the wallet and pocket knife. Šapiro appears on the German arrest list. His ultimate fate was not established in the American case. His arrest, search, confiscation, and imprisonment were.

Judge Eric L. Clay’s lead opinion treated the prison interviews as selection. Lukiškės was overcrowded; prisoners had to be screened so that those classified as serious offenders could be liquidated; and the answers obtained by Dailidė helped determine who would be released and who would be killed. Judge Danny Boggs’s dissent called that account “hotly disputed.” Judge David A. Nelson did not join the screening rationale. His controlling concurrence affirmed on the narrower and independently sufficient ground that Dailidė had participated in arresting the Soaks for escaping the ghetto.

The screening evidence remains in the lead opinion. The Soak arrests supplied the holding.

The dissent could not erase the institution

The Sixth Circuit affirmed Dailidė’s denaturalization on September 5, 2000. Judge Clay wrote the lead opinion. Judge Nelson supplied the decisive second vote. Judge Boggs dissented because he believed citizenship should not have been revoked on summary judgment while material disputes remained.

Boggs did not concede everything. He disputed the lead opinion’s account of the interrogations. He nevertheless wrote that the government had conclusively proved Saugumas assistance to Nazi atrocities and persecutions, accepted ample evidence that Dailidė arrested Jews for trying to escape the ghetto, and accepted that Dailidė lied about his wartime service.

The panel divided over summary judgment and the sufficiency of particular acts. It did not divide over whether the Lithuanian Security Police served the Nazi apparatus of persecution.

The countryside was prepared

The same architecture operated outside Vilnius. Local police knew the families, roads, houses, and hiding places. They concentrated Jews in temporary camps and ghettos, guarded them, and notified headquarters.

MacQueen describes rural killing operations in which local authorities completed the preparation before the mobile killing force arrived. In some districts, formations of up to two hundred Lithuanian soldiers accompanied no more than eight to ten German SS men. The Germans did not have to discover who was Jewish or assemble the victims. Lithuanian police had done the work.

A shooting detachment could enter, kill hundreds, and leave because permanent institutions remained. The police station reopened. Its files survived the family it delivered.

Spontaneous violence does not produce arrest reports, prisoner registers, signed transfers, confiscation inventories, screening interviews, and numerical returns to headquarters.

Lithuania inherited that record intact. It produced no punishment, and it produced a hero.

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This article is Part I of two. The complete text appears in a single article on Substack.