Where Lithuania Starts the Clock

The official origin date of the Lithuanian Holocaust was chosen to put a German hand on the rifle.

The Government of Lithuania are, in my judgment, the worst Holocaust revisionists in Europe. Not because they deny that the Holocaust happened. They do something more useful to power. They accept the corpses, mourn them in public, place wreaths for cameras, and then arrange the calendar, vocabulary, honors, museums, state history, and prosecutions so that Lithuanian perpetrators disappear from the sentence.

Ask the Lithuanian state when its Holocaust began, and it will hand you a date with a German finger on the trigger.

June 24, 1941. Gargždai, a border town eleven miles from the German frontier and one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Lithuania. About two hundred Jewish men and one woman were marched to a ditch and shot. The firing squad was German, drawn from the Tilsit Gestapo and the Memel police, acting on an order that ran up through Walter Stahlecker to the Reich Security Main Office. The historian who directs Lithuania’s state genocide research center, Arūnas Bubnys, calls Gargždai the first massacre of Jews in Lithuania, perhaps the first in the entire Soviet Union. He adds one detail, and he adds it with care. Lithuanians, he says, took no part in the first Gargždai shooting.

Hold that sentence. It is doing the work of the wreath.

I wrote about the wreath. The argument there was that the state laying flowers for the murdered Jews of the Lietūkis garage is the same state that lifts the men who governed in their name into the national pantheon. Lithuania posthumously honored the acting prime minister of the Provisional Government that sat in Kaunas while Jews were being humiliated, beaten, concentrated, and murdered under the authority that government claimed for the restored Lithuanian state.

This is the sequel. It moves the clock back three days, because the beginning has been staged as carefully as the mourning.

Start before the start. The Lithuanian Activist Front documents published before the German invasion demanded a Lithuania purged of Jews so that none would remain. The Front’s manifesto declared the hospitality once extended to the Jews by Vytautas the Great revoked for all time. I set out that paper in What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”. The leaflets were written before a single German crossed the Nemunas. The killing kept their schedule.

June 22. The invasion opened and the uprising opened with it. Gargždai fell that afternoon after hard fighting. By evening, as Saulius Sužiedėlis and Christoph Dieckmann document, the Front’s organizational work was under way across the Kretinga district, with committees naming the men who would command the insurgents. These were the same units that would soon guard, deliver, and shoot.

June 23. The order went out from Tilsit. Hans-Joachim Böhme directed the murder of Jews and Communists in a strip running twenty-five kilometers inside the Lithuanian border.

June 24. Gargždai. The Tilsit group worked down the frontier through Kretinga and Palanga. The local administrative and police apparatus was being reconstituted at the same moment, and it quickly became an instrument of the killing itself.

Now put the state’s careful sentence against the record. The official line is that the first Gargždai shooting was German and that Lithuanians were absent. But the German squads in the border zone were short of men and filled out with local police, about a hundred and twenty-five in all. The apparatus that arrested the Jews of Gargždai and held them for the executioners was local. The organizing in the district had begun two days before the shooting. And the rest of Gargždai’s Jews, the women and the children, were shot that September by local policemen and white-armband men from the town itself, as the JewishGen Gargždai memorial record also preserves. The Germans pulled the trigger for one morning. The hand that emptied the town was Lithuanian before that morning, and after it.

June 25 into 26. The largest of the early killings began in Kaunas. Algirdas Klimaitis and his armed men were put into motion. They fell on Slobodka, the Jewish quarter across the river, home to one of the great yeshivas of Europe. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry recorded the murder of the rabbi of Slobodka, Zalman Osovsky. Osovsky was tied to a chair. His head was placed on an open volume of Talmud and sawed off. His wife and son were murdered after him. His head was placed on the windowsill with a note: “THIS IS WHAT WE’LL DO TO ALL THE JEWS.”

By Stahlecker’s own count, more than fifteen hundred Jews were killed the first night, and over two thousand more in the nights that followed. The figures are his, and they have been doubted as inflated. Halve them. They still describe a massacre, run by locals, in one city, in seventy-two hours.

Here is where the staging shows. In his October 15, 1941 Einsatzgruppe A report, Stahlecker set out the method. It was the duty of the Security Police, he wrote, to set the “self-cleansing” movements in motion and steer them. Just as important was to establish a verifiable fact for the future, that the freed population had taken the harshest measures against the Jews on its own initiative, with no recognizable German order. In Kaunas this was managed through Klimaitis in such a way that no German order or instigation was noticed from the outside. In Kaunas and in Riga the first executions were filmed and photographed to prove they had been carried out by Lithuanians and Latvians.

Read that against the wreath and the trick reverses in your hands. In 1941, the German worked to make the killing look Lithuanian, because Lithuanian hands gave Berlin its deniability and built a record of local initiative. In 2026, the Lithuanian state works to make the killing look German, because a German firing squad at Gargždai gives Vilnius its deniability and a clean place to begin the calendar. Two sets of stage directions, written eighty-five years apart, arranging the light over the same bodies. Stahlecker wanted you to see Lithuanians. The ministry wants you to see Germans. The corpses do not move.

The army was told, and the army understood. Stahlecker recorded that the self-cleansing actions ran smoothly because the Wehrmacht authorities, once informed, showed understanding. Three days later that understanding had a window. The German Sixteenth Army kept its headquarters two hundred meters from the Lietūkis garage and watched Lithuanian men beat dozens of Jews to death with iron bars and crowbars. German soldiers watched and photographed. The Provisional Government heard the report that same day. Minister Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis informed the cabinet of the extremely cruel torture of Jews at the garage. The government’s recorded concern was not that Jews were being murdered. It resolved that, notwithstanding the measures that had to be taken against Jews, partisans and individual citizens should avoid public executions. A man climbed the pile of corpses and played the national anthem. I told that story in The Wreath and the Knife.

So choose your starting point. Start with the leaflets of December 1940. Start with the uprising of June 22. Start with the German rifle the state prefers, on June 24, with a Lithuanian apparatus already feeding it. Start with the first Lithuanian-run pogrom on the night of June 25. Start in the courtyard on June 27. There is no place to set the hands of the clock where Lithuanian hands are not already on it. The argument over which killing was first is a shell game. Move the pea wherever you like. The hand beneath every shell is the same.

The state has an answer ready, and it should be named. Its historian separates the June uprising, which he frames as a fight to restore independence, from the Holocaust, which he frames as a later and separate German project, and dates the killing to after the rising had ended. The separation does not survive its own calendar. The men who rose on June 22 were holding Jews for the executioners by June 24 and killing them in Kaunas by June 25. Bubnys concedes the join himself in the same LRT interview: when the uprising ended, some rebels joined German police battalions or squads and contributed to massacres of Jews. Renaming a man’s cause does not give him different hands.

There is a cleaner test of who takes a murder seriously, and Lithuania fails it against the country that committed the crime. West Germany put the men of Einsatzkommando Tilsit in a courtroom at Ulm in 1958, and the trial so shamed its own public that it forced the creation of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes that has pursued Nazi crimes ever since. The state that supplied the firing squad at Gargždai tried the firing squad. Lithuania has refused to punish one man for Gargždai, for Slobodka, for the courtyard, for any murder of a Jew on its soil. Paper proceedings without punishment are not punishment. It chose instead to award the Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Vytis to the head of the government that watched.

That is why the Government of Lithuania are the worst Holocaust revisionists in Europe. Their revisionism is not a fringe pamphlet. It is state language. It is state ceremony. It is state history. It is state decoration. It is a diplomatic performance in which the Jewish dead are mourned only after Lithuanian killers have been grammatically removed and politically protected.

So when the official starts the clock at a German rifle on the morning of June 24, understand what the gesture is for. He is not telling you when the killing began. He is telling you where he would prefer you to look. Three days before that morning, the killers were Lithuanian. Three days after it, the killers were Lithuanian. On the one morning he names, Germans fired the shots into a room that Lithuanians had already filled.

The clock did not start when the Germans fired. It started when Lithuania resolved that the Jews would not remain. It has not been allowed to stop. A country that will not punish a single killer has forfeited the right to tell the time.