The Semeliškės Police Vanish From the Town Page

On the first day of Sukkot 1941, 962 Jews were murdered. Lithuania’s National Library names the local police who marched them to the pit on one page and omits them on another.

On October 6, 1941, 962 Jews were murdered at a forest edge northeast of Semeliškės. Lithuania’s National Library publishes two accounts of that massacre. Its specialist entry on the ghettos of Trakai County says Semeliškės policemen marched the Jews in columns to the killing site and that local and Trakai County policemen participated in the shooting. Its general Semeliškės town entry keeps the date, the number, and the German order. The Lithuanian policemen disappear.

Karl Jäger’s December 1, 1941 report lists the victims as 213 Jewish men, 359 Jewish women, and 390 Jewish children. The total was 962.

October 6 was 15 Tishrei 5702. Hebcal’s Diaspora calendar identifies that Monday as Sukkot I, the first day of Sukkot. No source establishes that the massacre date was chosen because it was Sukkot, and this article makes no such claim.

From Rosh Hashanah to Sukkot

The same National Library encyclopedia records that on September 22, 1941, all Jews in Vievis were arrested and assembled in the market square. The Vievis police chief ordered them to carry their gold in their hands so it could be taken from them. Germans, local policemen, the Vilnius Special Squad and town activists participated in the arrests; the Jews were then marched to Semeliškės under local police and activist guard. September 22 was Rosh Hashanah I.

The English text of the Pinkas Hakehillot entry for Semeliškės posted by JewishGen says armed Lithuanians continued robbing and harassing the confined Jews even during Yom Kippur prayers. On the evening of October 5, as Sukkot began, an SS man arrived and demanded 5,000 German marks under threat. Four Jews were selected to raise the money. They failed.

The next day, the same English text says, the 962 Jews were taken to the place where young Jewish men had already been killed “by a group of Lithuanians led by the local priest.” It then says the 962 were “shot dead by a squad of armed Lithuanians” and adds that the names of the Lithuanian murderers are held in the Yad Vashem archives.

That English text calls October 6 “the festival intermediary day.” Hebcal fixes the calendar point: October 6 was Sukkot I; Chol ha-Moed began on October 8. JewishGen itself cautions that it does not verify the accuracy of the translation or the original work. Yad Vashem’s published testimony of Meir Korn independently dates the killing to “the first day of Sukkot.” Korn said the police and the Lithuanian “partisans,” the term used in 1941 for the armed nationalist activists that VLE elsewhere calls white-armbanders (baltaraiščiai), drove the Semeliškės Jews from the hall and “herded them on foot” toward the killing site.

The encyclopedia identifies the Lithuanian machinery

The National Library’s Trakai County ghetto entry records local attacks on Semeliškės Jews from the first days of the German-Soviet war: homes entered, property taken, humiliation, and violence. In early September the town’s Jews were confined in a former club building next to the church. The first families placed there, the entry says, were arrested on the initiative of Semeliškės police chief A. Adukonis. Police from Semeliškės, Trakai, Vievis, Žasliai and later Žiežmariai guarded the prisoners.

For October 6, the entry identifies the killing force as German security police, the Vilnius Special Squad (Ypatingasis būrys), and local and Trakai County policemen. VLE describes the Special Squad as an SD unit of Lithuanian volunteers and states that it participated at Semeliškės. The ghetto entry says Semeliškės policemen marched the Jews in columns to the killing site. Meir Korn corroborated the march: the police herded them there on foot.

The specialist entry cites Neringa Latvytė-Gustaitienė’s Holokaustas Trakų apskrityje and Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis’s study of the persecution and mass murder of Lithuanian Jews in 1941. The institution already publishes the local police role under its own name.

Then the policemen disappear

The separate Semeliškės town entry compresses the massacre to one sentence: on October 6, 1941, 962 Jews from Semeliškės and surrounding localities were murdered on the order of the Nazi German occupation authorities.

German authority ordered the crime. The specialist entry also identifies the Lithuanian volunteer unit, the local and county policemen who joined the shooting, and the Semeliškės policemen who marched the Jews there. The victims remain. The identified Lithuanian participants do not.

The Semeliškės page is not isolated. In the five other town histories examined, Vievis, Onuškis, Žasliai, Žiežmariai, and Trakai, the German order remains and the local participants named in the specialist Trakai County entry are gone. Onuškis gives no number at all. Aukštadvaris mentions its prewar synagogue but omits the murder altogether. Kaišiadorys gives the 1,911-victim count and names no perpetrator of any nationality; its ghetto entry names local administrators, policemen, volunteers, and the Joachim Hamann mobile killing unit.

This is a repeated editorial structure across the encyclopedia. Length does not explain the cut. The Semeliškės page that has no room for the local police names Lithuanian partisan commander A. Galinis in the next sentence. The Kaišiadorys page that names no killer counts 59 residents deported by the Soviets. The specialist entries preserve the local actors; the town histories repeatedly do not.

This is an editable public record

VLE describes its online portal as administered by the Science and Encyclopedia Publishing Center of Lithuania’s Martynas Mažvydas National Library. It says the encyclopedia is continuously updated, with about 15,000 existing articles renewed each year. Each article also provides a message-to-editor function.

When checked on September 17, 2026, every VLE page cited here was live and read as described.

No new archive discovery is required to correct the Semeliškės sentence. The missing fact is already published on the same institution’s website.

On the first day of Sukkot in 1941, 390 Jewish children were among the 962 Jews murdered near Semeliškės.

The town entry can be corrected from the National Library’s own specialist page: On October 6, 1941, on the order of the Nazi German occupation authorities, 962 Jews from Semeliškės and Vievis, together with several Jews from Žasliai who had been in hiding, were shot by German security police, the Vilnius Special Squad (an SD unit composed of Lithuanian volunteers), and local and Trakai County policemen, after Semeliškės policemen marched them in columns to the killing site.

Every element of that sentence is already on the National Library’s website.

The legal consequence

There is a legal consequence to this pattern. The repeated removal of identifiable Lithuanian participation from public accounts of the Holocaust is not an innocent shortening of history. On this record, the erasure is deliberate in the only sense that matters: the institution holds the fuller record, publishes it, and removes the Lithuanian actors at the point of general-public presentation. Whether that proves the criminal-law requirement of direct intent is a question for prosecutors and courts. In the terminology of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, it is Holocaust distortion.

IHRA’s working definition lists, first among forms of distortion, intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, “including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.” Its 2023 guide Understanding Holocaust Distortion: Contexts, Influences and Examples gives a closely matching example: treating the Holocaust as merely a Nazi German crime can become distortion when that framing ignores the role of local collaborators. Lithuania is an IHRA member, and IHRA’s Lithuania page itself lists the 2010 criminal-code amendment against condoning, trivializing, or denying genocide and crimes against humanity among Lithuania’s Holocaust-remembrance measures. The statute Lithuania presents to IHRA as evidence of good faith is the statute it is applying to Artur Fridman. Its government cannot invoke those standards while its own public encyclopedia repeatedly removes documented Lithuanian participants from the general histories.

Lithuania is willing to use criminal law. It is prosecuting Artur Fridman under Article 170² §1, together with Article 313 §2. The current text of Article 170² §1 criminalizes, among other things, public condoning, denial, or gross trivialization of Nazi German genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes when done in a threatening, abusive, or insulting manner, or when public order was or could have been disturbed. In the 2021 Rakutis refusal, prosecutors also stated that Article 170² §1 can be committed only with direct intent. Those are the state’s own limits, and they are the limits this article applies. Each documented instance in which a state institution possesses the record of Lithuanian participation, publishes it, and then removes that participation from the public account should be examined against exactly those elements, and charged where all are met.

This article does not assert that any VLE page meets those elements. It asserts that none has been examined against them. The speech acts are not identical. The point is equal application of the state’s own legal test: the same prosecutors willing to apply Article 170² to Fridman should apply the same elements to state-authored Holocaust distortion. An individual defendant does not get one standard and the state another.

The victims remain named as victims. Their Lithuanian killers disappear into the passive voice.

So what is the Lithuanian government doing about it?

Equal application of the law means equal application when the speaker is inconvenient and when the publisher is the state.