Sutton - The massacre of the Jews of Lithuania: Lithuanian collaboration in the final solution, 1941-1944

Copyright Karen Sutton
Jerusalem 2008/5768

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Layout: Marzel A.S. Jerusalem
Cover Design: S. Kim Glassman

ISBN: 978-965-229-400-5
Edition1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

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To my dear parents
Sam and Tobie Ehrlich

Lithuanian collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Final Solution the extermination of the Jewish people is deservedly a highly charged and controversial issue. This book probes Lithuanian-German collaboration, its significance, and the factors and historical circumstances that prompted many, many Lithuanians to act as they did. I show that amidst the indifference of masses of Lithuanians toward Jews, Lithuanian officials abetted the Final Solution in administrative ways and Lithuanian auxiliaries participated actively in the extermination actions themselves. The Germans achieved appalling success in ridding Lithuania of nearly all of its Jews, and Lithuania established the climate that made it possible.

Lithuania endured two occupations during the war years: Soviet and German. One problem with treating either period of occupation is that many sources on this period are blatantly biased pro- or anti-German or pro- or anti-Soviet. Lithuanian accounts tend toward exculpation and post-Soviet sources toward rehabilitation. Jewish sources speak of betrayal.

Contemporary Lithuanian historians tend to explain their countrys conduct during the Holocaust by tracing anti-Jewish hostility to one factor only: an alleged Jewish affinity for Communism and complicity in, if not active support of, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Lithuania in June 1940. The study that follows refutes this explanation. Although the importance and consequences of the Soviet reign in Lithuania cannot be denied, other factors economic, political, cultural, religious, and opportunistic go equally far in explaining Lithuanians behavior after the German conquest in June 1941.

My most significant argument is that the Lithuanians were not mindless puppets of the Germans. When their vital interests were at stake, they resisted and circumvented German directives adroitly. When the Germans demanded the mobilization of Lithuanians for military and civilian labor, national and local leaders refused. When the Germans demanded deliveries of grain, Lithuanian authorities resisted successfully. Thus, were it not for the collaboration of Lithuanian officials, churchmen, and political leaders, it is doubtful that the Germans would have managed to murder more than nine out of every ten Lithuanian Jews.

My debt to those who have given direction to my undertaking is by no means small. My Ph.D. advisor, Richard S. Levy, Professor of History at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is an outstanding representative of an endangered species, a mentor who mentors with unconditional wisdom, guidance, and patience. Others, too, have played important roles. Yehuda Bauer and Dov Levin lent me valuable early help. Simcha Brudno was an irreplaceable passport to the Lithuanian American community in Chicago. Yehuda Kahnovitch led me through difficult translations (may they both rest in peace and their souls be lifted). The staffs at the Bundesarchiv (Germany), Yad Vashem (Israel), the National Archives (Washington, DC) and the Lithuanian American Council (Chicago) assisted me immensely in researching and sifting through hundreds of documents. The Fulbright Foundation, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, particularly Benjamin and Vladka Meed, lent me their support at a crucial time. George Berman, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, painstakingly went over every page of the text, correcting, amplifying, and helping to get the complicated details right. My editors, Naftali Greenwood and Kezia Raffel Pride, helped transform the dissertation into a book suitable for a general reading audience always my ultimate goal.

Michael Friedman, Miriam Kassenoff, Sheldon Wernikoff, Ursula Selig, Mira Van Doren, Leon Segen, and Sanford Schlesinger, my gracious and willing partners in historical dialogue, offered suggestions which I have gladly incorporated. I owe respect and gratitude to Theodore Lauer, Stanley Boylan, and Bernard Lander, my Touro College family, for giving me an academic home to teach the Holocaust and continue my quest to understand it.

I could not close without thanking my parents, Sam, proud World War II veteran, and Tobie, to whom this book is dedicated. I am so grateful to my daughters, Laura and Julie, who shared their adolescence with this tragic history. And finally, I thank my dear husband, Leon, for his unstinting loyalty, support, and encouragement. For all of this, it is fitting to give thanks.

Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union, was going well. The Slavic Untermenschen reeled and retreated in shock. The Aryan master race would soon have the Lebensraum that it craved. And the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia prepared for incorporation into the German sphere of influence. Hitlers senior officials, however, had a higher duty to perform. On July 31, 1941, six weeks after Barbarossa began, Hermann Gring, Reichsmarshal and economic dictator of the Third Reich, empowered Gruppenfhrer (Lt.-Gen.) Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, to undertake all necessary preparations with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.

Thus the Nazis proposed to unleash the total solution the final solution as other Nazi documents termed it in the Baltic states, foremost Lithuania, where a large majority of Baltic Jews lived. Karl Jger, Commander of the German Security Police in Lithuania, explained the practicality of the scheme in graphic terms.

The goal to clear Lithuania of Jews was rendered feasible because of a mobile unit under the command of SS Obersturmfhrer (First Lieutenant) Joachim Hamann, who adopted my goal without reservation and successfully ensured the cooperation of Lithuanian partisans and civilian institutions concerned in this matter.

Hamann did not bother to mention that the slaughter of Lithuanian Jewry had already begun, without German direction. Lithuanian partisans, for example, had executed 2,977 Jewish men and women on July 4 and July 6. Hamanns mobile unit would do a much more thorough job than that. It was comprised of eight to ten German members of Einsatzkommando 3, part of Einsatzgruppe A (one of four mobile killing forces), and a Lithuanian battalion commanded by Major Antanas Impulevicius, consisting of eighteen officers and 450 enlisted men. By December 1941, this force and other units of Einsatzkommando 3 would murder 133,346 Lithuanian Jews, about 60 percent of the 220,000 Jews in Lithuania. By the end of the war in Lithuania, in the summer of 1944, more than 90 percent of the community would perish.

The Final Solution as practiced in Lithuania was a cumbersome process: rounding up, guarding, transporting, and ultimately shooting thousands of civilians. Could the Nazis alone have succeeded in killing so many in so short a time? Given the German methods of coercion and persuasion, could Lithuanias leadership and populace have done anything to thwart the German policy of annihilation? What active assistance or aid could they have offered their Jewish compatriots, had they desired to offer it? One must acknowledge that the Jews constituted an economically distinct, culturally isolated group within the body politic; Jews were not seen as Lithuanian compatriots. This raises the question of how badly this factor dampened their desire to aid Jews even if the opportunity arose.