Vilnius Street 260
A cupboard. A pair of warm boots. A desk. A bookshelf. Two wooden beds with mattresses. A wardrobe. A buffet. A mirror. Two bedside tables.
Rūta Vanagaitė found the list in the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. It recorded Jewish property acquired by Lithuanians during the German occupation. One of the names on it was Jonas Noreika, then head of Šiauliai County, and the address given was Vilnius Street 260.[1]
Nothing on that list is remarkable. That is the difficulty with it. These were not gold bars in a Reich vault or canvases routed to Göring’s collection. They were the contents of somebody’s rooms, and the man whose name sits beside them administered the county from which their owners were being removed.
The office
Noreika took over Šiauliai County from Ignas Urbaitis on August 3, 1941. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has returned to that date repeatedly, because several anti-Jewish measures in the county were signed while Urbaitis still held the post.[2]
The distinction is legitimate. Documents signed by Urbaitis are Urbaitis’s. It does not help much, because the documents that belong to Noreika are not scarce.
On August 22, 1941, he issued Order No. 962 to the district heads and mayors of Šiauliai County. It transmitted an instruction from Gebietskommissar Hans Gewecke: all Jews and half-Jews in the county’s towns and districts were to be in Žagarė by August 29, with the local municipalities responsible for moving them. The order also dealt with what they would leave. Lists of their property were to be sent to the county chief.[3]
People and possessions travelled up the same administrative chain, in the same document, over the same signature.
The Žagarė mayor reported back on August 29 that 949 Jews had arrived from elsewhere in the county. By late September, Bubnys puts the Jewish population of the town at 2,402, against 3,164 non-Jews. On October 2 the Jäger Report recorded the execution there of 2,236 Jews: 633 men, 1,107 women, 496 children.[4]
Silvia Foti, Noreika’s granddaughter, has written at length about the signatures, and there is no point repeating her.[5] The address is a different kind of evidence.
Robbing the living
Dieckmann and Vanagaitė devote a chapter of How Did It Happen? to Jewish property. They called it “Robbing the Living.”
The looting acquired an administrative system. Lithuanian municipal administrations, police departments, orphanages, schools and hospitals took delivery of houses, land, livestock, furniture, medical equipment, radios, blankets and dishes out of Jewish homes.
Then Dieckmann mentions Noreika: the head of the Šiauliai district moved into an empty Jewish house with his family and lived there.[6]
Vanagaitė follows with what she found at the Academy library. Noreika at Vilnius Street 260, and beside the address the household goods listed above.[7]
Dieckmann explains how goods like these reached Lithuanian homes. Once the German and Lithuanian administrations had taken what they wanted, the remainder went to public auction in cities, towns and villages.[8]
An auction does not convert the transaction back into commerce. The owners had lost control of their property because they were Jews. They had been ordered out. What they left was inventoried by an administration that had assigned itself the authority to decide what would be stored, allocated, given away or sold. A receipt establishes that money changed hands. It establishes nothing about consent.
Three weeks after the Žagarė order, the machinery got more specific. On September 10 Noreika issued instructions for the liquidation of movable property belonging to Jews and to escaped Communists. The Genocide Centre’s own memorandum sets out the arrangements: expensive furniture, cloth and unworn clothing to be stored; other property assignable to schools, district administrations, post offices, shelters and hospitals; the rest distributed to war victims or auctioned, with the money paid into the county administration’s cash office.[9]
A family’s furniture became something an official could allocate. Clothing became stock. A cow became a rentable asset. A house became available as soon as the people in it had been compelled to leave.
Dispossession appears in these instructions as ordinary county business.
The shooting record is only part of this history. The property record shows what was happening on the other side of the removal: houses acquired new occupants, furniture went to auction, institutions received equipment, and municipalities kept the proceeds.
Dieckmann records German and Lithuanian administrations competing over that property, with Lithuanian officials at times resisting German attempts to take the auction receipts because they wanted the money kept for Lithuanian purposes.[10] The occupation system contained competing German and Lithuanian interests, and Jewish property had become something worth fighting over.
Noreika sat in an unusual place inside it. He administered the process, and on Vanagaitė’s record he also acquired from it. At Vilnius Street 260 the distance between the policy and the benefit is about the width of a doorway.
Noreika did not invent Nazi racial policy. German authorities held sovereign power in occupied Lithuania. German agencies initiated and directed the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The August 22 order itself passes on an instruction from Gewecke. None of that is in doubt, and an inventory of furniture does not show that Noreika shot anybody.
Those facts do not answer the questions raised by Noreika’s own record: why he accepted the county office in August 1941, signed orders moving Jews and requiring inventories of what they left behind, issued instructions for disposing of Jewish property, lived in what Dieckmann calls an empty Jewish house, and appeared on the list Vanagaitė found. Nothing larger needs to be claimed.
The house did not empty itself
“Empty Jewish house” is the kind of phrase a reader slides past. The house had not been empty for long. The beds, the wardrobe, the mirror and the bedside tables belonged to somebody’s ordinary domestic life until racial orders removed the people who owned them.
The Jews of Šiauliai County did not evaporate and incidentally solve a housing shortage. They were moved, on paper, under a signature, and the paper survives. The August 22 order tied their removal to an inventory of what they left. The September instructions governed where it went. Dieckmann puts Noreika and his family in one of the houses. Vanagaitė puts his name beside the contents of one.
Vilnius Street 260 is where the abstraction becomes domestic.
The hero
Independent Lithuania chose to commemorate the later chapters. Noreika resisted the Soviet occupation, was arrested, sentenced to death and shot in Vilnius on February 26, 1947. On February 16, 1997, fifty years afterward, the Republic of Lithuania posthumously conferred on him the Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Vytis. His daughter came from the United States to receive it.[11]
That belongs in the biography. So does 1941.
The argument over his commemoration has run for years. A plaque honoring him was smashed with a sledgehammer in April 2019 and quickly replaced. In late July the city removed it, on the initiative of Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, who said he acted because Noreika had signed documents establishing a Jewish ghetto and expropriating Jewish property. In September a nationalist organization installed a larger replacement overnight, to patriotic songs. Lithuania’s Jewish community welcomed the removal. Politicians argued over who had the authority to order it.[12]
The dispute has never really been about whether Noreika fought the Soviets. It is about whether a national hero has to carry his whole biography.
The plaque came down again a few years later, this time for repairs to the building’s façade, with the library’s director stating that it would go back up when the work was finished.[13] The 1997 decoration has never been revoked.
The Academy appears three times in this story. Its library held the property list Vanagaitė found. The plaque honoring Noreika is attached to the library building. After the war, Noreika worked for the Academy as a legal expert. American reporting on the controversy has described the plaque plainly as hanging on the building where he worked.[14]
Noreika’s defenders often treat his biography as a balance sheet, setting anti-Soviet resistance, Stutthof and his Soviet execution against his 1941 record. Later persecution cannot undo earlier conduct, and a postwar execution could not return a Jewish family to its home.
The objects at Vilnius Street 260 resist that kind of accounting because they are ordinary and specific: a cupboard, warm boots, a desk, two beds, a mirror. Vanagaitė’s published account cannot tell us who polished the cupboard, wore the boots or slept in the beds. It does tell us why such property had become available, who administered Šiauliai County at the time, and whose name she found on the list.
Lithuania has spent decades arguing about the plaque on the wall. The furniture is less accommodating.
[1]Christoph Dieckmann and Rūta Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen? Understanding the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), ch. 20, “Robbing the Living.” Vanagaitė states that she found in the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences a list of Jewish property acquired by Lithuanians during the German occupation, and identifies Jonas Noreika at Vilnius Street 260. Publisher record: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-did-it-happen-9781538150313/. These facts are attributed to Vanagaitė as she published them; this article does not claim independent inspection of the Academy library record.
[2]Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC), “Activity of Jonas Noreika (General Vėtra) in Nazi-Occupied Lithuania,” October 2015, English translation: https://grantgochin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/noreika-memorandum-2015-EN-Genocide-Center.pdf. The Centre’s chronology places Noreika’s succession to Urbaitis on 3 August 1941; a separate archival reference gives 5 August. See also Arūnas Bubnys, “The Žagarė Ghetto,” in The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941–1944 (Vilnius: LGGRTC, 2020).
[3]Order No. 962, 22 August 1941, transmitting the instruction of Gebietskommissar Hans Gewecke. Bubnys, “The Žagarė Ghetto”; LGGRTC, “Activity of Jonas Noreika.” The order and the mayor’s telefonogram replies are reproduced in translation and facsimile at https://www.silviafoti.com/noreika-archives/.
[4]Telefonogram No. 220, Žagarė city mayor to the Šiauliai district chairman, 29 August 1941, reporting 949 Jews settled in Žagarė from other towns and villages. Bubnys gives the Žagarė population on 20 September 1941 as 2,402 Jews and 3,164 non-Jews. The Jäger Report of 1 December 1941 records the execution at Žagarė on 2 October 1941 of 2,236 Jews: 633 men, 1,107 women and 496 children.
[5]Silvia Foti, “The Signature that Still Haunts Lithuania,” Times of Israel, 21 May 2026, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-signature-that-still-haunts-lithuania/; Silvia Foti, “What Lithuania Did with the Signature,” Times of Israel, 28 May 2026, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-lithuania-did-with-the-signature/.
[6]Dieckmann and Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen?, ch. 20. Dieckmann places Noreika’s residence in an empty Jewish house within the wider redistribution of Jewish property to Lithuanian municipal bodies, police departments, hospitals, schools and other institutions.
[7]Ibid. Vanagaitė lists the property recorded against Noreika at Vilnius Street 260 as a cupboard, warm boots, a desk, a bookshelf, two wooden beds with mattresses, a wardrobe, a buffet, a mirror and two bedside tables.
[8]Ibid. Dieckmann explains that property remaining after German and Lithuanian administrative appropriation was sold at public auction in cities, towns and villages, and describes Lithuanian authorities seeking to retain auction proceeds for Lithuanian purposes.
[9]LGGRTC, “Activity of Jonas Noreika,” October 2015. The Centre’s own account describes the 10 September 1941 instructions governing storage, institutional allocation, distribution to war victims and auction sale of Jewish movable property, with proceeds paid into the county administration’s cash office.
[10]Dieckmann and Vanagaitė, How Did It Happen?, ch. 20.
[11]“Jonas Noreika,” Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, https://www.vle.lt/straipsnis/jonas-noreika/. VLE records the Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Vytis, 1997, posthumous, and the interment of his remains in the Tuskulėnai columbarium on 2 November 2004. The decoration was conferred on 16 February 1997 and presented to his daughter Dalia.
[12]LRT/BNS, “Vilnius removes plaque for anti-Soviet partisan and accused Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika,” 29 July 2019, https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1082989/vilnius-removes-plaque-for-anti-soviet-partisan-and-accused-nazi-collaborator-jonas-noreika; LRT/BNS, “Protesters reinstall controversial Noreika plaque in Vilnius,” 6 September 2019, https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1095055/protesters-reinstall-controversial-noreika-plaque-in-vilnius. On the April 2019 destruction of the plaque and its replacement, see Lithuanian Jewish Community, 28 July 2019, https://www.lzb.lt/en/2019/07/28/vilnius-mayor-removes-noreika-plaque/.
[13]SA Jewish Report, 4 May 2023, https://www.sajr.co.za/noreika-plaque-flies-in-face-of-holocaust-apologies/, quoting Library Director Sigitas Narbutas that the plaque was removed for façade repairs and would be replaced once the work was complete. On the decoration remaining in force, see Silvia Foti, “My Grandfather’s Antisemitism Did Not Begin With the Nazis,” Times of Israel, 3 August 2026, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/my-grandfathers-antisemitism-did-not-begin-with-the-nazis/.
[14]Andy Eckardt and Alexander Smith, NBC News, 4 April 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-chicago-teacher-sparked-memory-war-forcing-lithuania-confront-its-n1262889, reporting that the memorial plaque is displayed in Vilnius on the building where Noreika worked, and that after his release at the end of the war he worked as a legal expert at the Academy of Sciences. See also LRT/BNS, 29 July 2019, at note 12.
