The Murder Was Administered
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.
The defense collapses inside the record
The Saugumas served under German direction. Subordination does not erase the subordinate. A Lithuanian office did not become German because it obeyed a German superior. Its officers remained Lithuanian. They read Lithuanian names, searched Lithuanian homes, questioned Lithuanian witnesses, and arrested Lithuanian Jews.
Germany supplied the exterminatory command. Lithuanian institutions supplied reach. Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe.
The target of this accusation is not Lithuanians as a people. Some Lithuanians hid Jews and died for it. Gita and Fruma survived as long as they did because Adolfas Domeikas and Juozapatas Domeikas chose rescue. The target is the state apparatus, the officials who operated it, and the postwar institutions that decided whom to punish, whom to excuse, and whom to honor.
Purpose-built procedure, no punishment
Independent Lithuania opened its archives to American investigators. Lithuanian officials authenticated the records. That cooperation carried the evidence and must be stated. It also sharpens the result. American courts entered judgments. Lithuanian courts imposed no punishment.
American courts stripped four Vilnius Saugumas officers of citizenship. Lileikis in Boston in 1996. His deputy Kazys Gimžauskas in Washington the same year. Adolph Milius in Tampa in 1998, for arrests of Jewish civilians carried out with Dailidė. Dailidė himself in Ohio. All four went to Lithuania. Milius died there in 1999. None was punished.
The United States revoked Lileikis’s citizenship on May 24, 1996. He returned to Lithuania the next month. In February 1998, Lithuanian authorities forwarded genocide charges to the Vilnius court, initiating what the Justice Department called the first prosecution for Second World War crimes in a successor state to the Soviet Union. The Lithuanian case charged him in connection with the murder of seventy-five Jews. Gimžauskas was charged in connection with five. Dailidė was charged with taking part in arrests of Jews and detaining two who had escaped the ghetto. The American judgment found that tens of thousands died under Lileikis’s command. Mukasey later described Fruma as one of almost fifty thousand victims of Lileikis.
Lithuania changed criminal procedure to keep the cases alive. On December 23, 1997, the Seimas amended procedure to permit a genocide case to proceed despite the accused person’s medical condition. On February 15, 2000, it amended the code again to permit a first-instance genocide trial in the defendant’s absence. Diplomat and historian Alfonsas Eidintas described the second measure as without precedent in Europe or the world.
The law was purpose-built. The result remained empty. Lileikis died in September 2000 before judgment. In February 2001 the Vilnius court found Gimžauskas guilty; the Justice Department records the conviction as participating in genocide. The court imposed no penalty after a special forensic medical commission found that age and illness had left him unable to comprehend his actions. He died shortly afterward.
The Dailidė proceedings ended the same way. The Vilnius Regional Court found on March 27, 2006, that he had systematically persecuted Jewish civilians, then released him from criminal responsibility. Prosecutors had sought five years’ imprisonment. In 2008, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish. The evidence produced culpability. The courts produced exemption.
Lithuania had the perpetrators, the archives, the victims’ names, special procedural legislation, and American judicial findings. It still produced no punishment.
The perpetrator restored
The administrative method did not end with the police files. It became state memory.
Lileikis tried the rescuer defense in 1996. He suggested that he had used his office to help persecuted people and relied on a story that he had saved a Jewish girl, Sifra Grodnikaitė. Judge Stearns called the claim “self-flattery” unsupported by fact, rejected the article offered for it as hearsay, and held that even if Lileikis had saved one Jew, that did not atone for the tens of thousands who died under his command. A district court is not a rule of American law. It is, however, the only court that has examined this defense on this record, and it refused it.
In December 2019 the LGGRTC applied the same structure to Jonas Noreika. The Centre announced that a testimony by Father Jonas Borevičius, found in the archive of the Lithuanian and Latvian Jesuit Province, showed a Jewish rescue network connected to Noreika. Read closely, the testimony says something narrower. Borevičius told a United States federal court in Chicago in 1986 that he organized a rescue group after being taught by Noreika. The claim was reported as new documentary proof that Noreika organized the network. It identifies no Jew whom Noreika saved, no act of rescue he performed, and no rescue operation he directed. Proximity to rescuers was converted into participation in rescue.
The borrowed credibility was real. Borevičius was honored in 2017 for saving Jews, on the proposal of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, and a memorial plaque was installed. The Centre did not invent a rescuer. It attached one to an administrator. The Sub-Commission had already rejected that exculpatory structure on April 11, 2019: contact with rescuers did not mitigate Noreika’s ghettoization and expropriation orders, and the Centre’s surrounding obfuscations were “utterly unacceptable” and, in some cases, “offensive to the memory of the victims.”
The standard was already public. On March 19, 2016, the Sub-Commission on Nazi Crimes of Lithuania’s International Commission adopted it: no person should be publicly commemorated where reliable evidence shows participation in any way in persecution or murder, regardless of later conduct. Noreika signed orders in 1941 directing the confinement of Jews and the seizure of their property. On April 11, 2019, answering the Centre’s statement of March 27, the Sub-Commission applied that standard to the LGGRTC’s defense of Noreika. It identified the orders, noted that nearly all the Jews confined and dispossessed under them were later murdered, and asked the question the state has never answered: if that was not participation in genocide, what was?
Eight months later the Centre answered with a rescuer.
Noreika is not a diversion from this article. He is the afterlife of its method. The police file once delivered the Jew to death. The state history file now delivers the perpetrator to national honor.
We remember and honor the victims named in the surviving record
Gita Kaplan — born in Vilnius in 1896; rendered Gitta by Mukasey; murdered December 22, 1941.
Fruma Kaplan — six years old; murdered December 22, 1941.
Chaja Lapyda — confined by Lileikis’s personal signature on November 21, transferred three days later, and “treated according to orders” on December 5, 1941.
Lucija Pojevanskaitė-Sutarskaitė — a Roman Catholic woman born in the United States; arrested on December 11 as “suspected of being a Jew,” transferred on December 17, marked “Jewess” on the execution card, and “treated in accordance with orders” on December 22, 1941.
Saulius Varsavskis — eighteen years old, one year into an economics degree, married to Ita Buchbinda, who remained in ghetto I; confined at Lukiškės on November 26, transferred on December 6, and “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941. The Sixth Circuit renders his surname Varsaskis.
Dovydas Palenbaumas — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.
Malka Strazaitė — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.
Antoni Konas — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.
Beila Levinson — recorded in the surviving prison and execution files.
Necha Berger-Levita — recorded in the surviving prison and execution files.
Jenta Rachmanienė — arrested for escaping the ghetto, imprisoned, and later executed.
Izrael and Riva Soak — arrested on October 30, 1941, searched, imprisoned at Lukiškės, and placed at the disposition of German authorities. The appellate record did not establish their individual fates.
Mark Šapiro — searched and robbed on November 3, 1941; rendered Sapyro and Sapiro in the American record. His ultimate fate was not established in the case.
Nine Jews and their families — unnamed in the surviving order, marked for liquidation at the first opportunity on July 5, 1941.
Of the names above, Judge Stearns wrote that they would have been lost to posterity but for the surviving records. The files preserved them because the institution had to account for its work. The state has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.
The murder was administered. The innocence was manufactured afterward.