We Will Not Mention Here

On September 6, 1943, a Lithuanian nationalist statement was prepared for the information of Major General Just, commander of the Security District Lithuania. Section VIII was headed “German atrocities against the civilian population.” It recorded peasants shot for failing to meet compulsory deliveries, bailiffs and village overseers shot for shortfalls in their districts, innocent inhabitants shot for damage caused by saboteurs landed by parachute, deportations to concentration camps, and atrocities by Ukrainian units. Then it reached the Jews.^[1]

“We will not mention here what horror was felt among the Lithuanian people beacuse of the annihilation of Jews, which is still continuing.”

The misspelling is in the printed volume. So is the present tense. The authors knew the annihilation was continuing, named it inside an inventory of atrocities, and wrote down the choice not to enumerate it for the officer commanding the security district.

The material was not a Soviet reconstruction. Lithuanian documents moved through Stockholm while Germany still occupied the country. Remeikis records that some of the couriers who carried material to Antanas Valiukėnas held official positions in Lithuania and, “as functionaries in German service, could freely travel to Germany.” The American Legation forwarded the material to Washington. Vilnius University Press published the collection in 2005.^[2]

They counted the murdered

On December 19, 1942, Winthrop S. Greene, the American Chargé d’Affaires ad interim in Stockholm, sent Washington Despatch No. 1244 with six Lithuanian documents that had bypassed German censorship. Greene summarized them as showing “German policies aimed at the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania, as well as Lithuanian intellectuals and farmers.” The enclosure outline put the sequence on paper: “Extermination of Jews,” “Removal of Intellectuals,” “Annihilation of Lithuanian farmers.”^[3]

One enclosure was a memorandum prepared about the middle of 1942 by the Lithuanian Activist Front, Kazys Škirpa’s organization. The volume itself describes the Front as the body that organized the revolt against the Russians, declared Lithuania independent in 1941 and set up a Government, and describes Škirpa, Lithuanian Minister in Berlin until the outbreak of the war, as head of the group of Lithuanians that escaped Soviet-occupied Lithuania and planned to overthrow the Soviet regime.^[4]

The memorandum’s section “Extermination of the Jews” called German treatment “inhuman and atrocious” and said conduct of this kind “has never even been thought of before in the twentieth century.” It then counted: approximately 220,000 Jews at the outbreak of war; about 20,000 gone east with the Bolsheviks; about 30,000 of the remainder still in Lithuania after nine months of German occupation.^[5]

“This means that about 170,000 Jews have been murdered in Lithuania during that time.”

The word is “murdered.” It appears in Lithuanian political material while the killing was still underway.

The memorandum then inventoried the economic position of the people it had just counted dead: ninety-eight percent urban, about sixty percent of imports, more than twenty percent of exports, and Jews as “not only merchants” but industrialists, bankers and house owners. It said the German administration intended through annihilation to take over commerce, industry and urban houses; Germanization of the towns supplied the reason “why the Germans are annihilating the Jews in Lithuania.”^[6]

On the same page the memorandum changed the scale of the story. “German aims are directed, however, not only against the Jews, but also against the Lithuanian nation.” The German civil administration, it continued, had begun “the second part of its plan: the extermination of Lithuanian intellectuals.”^[7]

Jewish annihilation became the first stage of a larger national sequence. The modern form is what I have called the Genocide Equalization Doctrine. The logic was already available in Lithuanian political writing before the Soviet return.

The property survived the owners

The same underground corpus named Jews readily when property was at issue. Circular No. 11, printed in the volume under the name “Association of Fighters for the Freedom of Lithuania,” described German colonists being installed on farms that had been nationalized or had belonged to Jews or “aliens.” It asked: “What right have the Germans to seize the property of Jews and aliens? That is all part of the general wealth of the Lithuanian nation and the Lithuanian State.”^[8]

A separate memorandum signed by Kazys Grinius, Jonas Aleksa and Mykolas Krupavičius on November 1, 1942, went further. In describing the farms subject to German eviction policy, it listed the holdings of active Poles, Russians and Jews. It then proposed that Lithuanians who had been dispossessed could be compensated from holdings formerly belonging to Germans and, in addition, from holdings of Polish activists, Russians and Jews.^[9]

The political grievance was not simply that Germany had stolen from Jewish owners. Jewish holdings were also available inside a proposed Lithuanian compensatory scheme.

The Councilors General complained that property of people deported or killed had not been handed to legal heirs and that a German trading corporation had taken Jewish property together with Lithuanian private companies. The companies named in the printed text were Pienocentras, Maistas and Lietukis. Other passages defended Lithuanian holdings against colonization.^[10]

The market beside the killing pits is documented in The Shoes Were Still Warm. These wartime texts expose another part of the same economy: murdered Jews could disappear as owners while Jewish property remained available for national accounting and redistribution.

The sentence Lithuania can point to

The November 1942 Grinius–Aleksa–Krupavičius memorandum reached the Jews once. The authors wrote:

“The Lithuanian people are greatly agitated concerning mass evictions of Lithuanian and Polish peasants from their farms. The Lithuanian people cannot approve of such measures, just as it cannot approve the measures taken against the Lithuanian Jews.”^[11]

That is a written Lithuanian statement of non-approval, addressed to the German administration, in November 1942. It is not a protest against mass murder. The Jews appear in a subordinate comparison attached to the eviction of Lithuanian and Polish peasants. The memorandum says “measures.” It does not say murder, annihilation or extermination. Its two operative requests on the next page are that colonization of Lithuanian land be discontinued and that evicted peasants receive their property back “irrespective of their nationality.” Neither request concerns the Jews.^[12]

Five months earlier, the July 1942 memorandum of Grinius and Krupavičius had put five grievances before the Lithuanian Councilors General: lack of representative government, German colonization, lack of police protection, German shooting of innocent people and compulsory labor. The American Legation called the document careful and dispassionate, said its facts could safely be taken as accurate, and praised the courage of its authors. Jewish murder was not one of the five grievances.^[13]

The uprising the documents claimed

The Lithuanian Activist Front did not describe June 1941 as an event in which it had been merely present. Its memorandum claimed 100,000 partisans as members of the organization, more than 4,000 dead, and 125,000 Lithuanians participating in the uprising. It called the uprising a “dress rehearsal” for future armed action.^[14]

A September 1943 nationalist statement was more explicit. It said Lithuanian youths and students had joined the insurgents and carried out military tasks “in accordance with a plan previously formulated in concurrence with the German Army.” Elsewhere it put the number of partisans at about 100,000, said they had cleared Kaunas and Vilna before the German Army entered, and recorded almost twenty battalions “designated for police duties.”^[15]

The November 1942 Grinius–Aleksa–Krupavičius memorandum complained that German authorities forced district officials, police and Lithuanian Selbstschutz or self-defense battalions to take part in evicting peasants. That document concerns colonization, not Jewish killing. It still fixes the institutional category in Lithuanian words: self-defense battalions could operate as coercive instruments inside the occupation administration.^[16]

The documentary chain from the July uprising into Lithuania’s police and military machinery is developed in The Coup That Captured Lithuania’s Killing Apparatus. The Stockholm material adds the actors’ own retrospective language about the plan, the battalions and the national claim made for the uprising.

The Provisional Government remained protected inside the wartime narrative. The LAF memorandum praised it for restoring private ownership and economic organizations in the summer of 1941. The September 1943 statement described it as exercising Lithuanian sovereignty until German civil administration displaced it. The March 1944 Baltic declaration remembered the Lithuanian Government as the product of the June revolt.^[17]

The political achievement remained explicit. The Jewish consequences of those weeks did not.

They told the Allies they had protested

The September 1943 refusal to enumerate Jewish annihilation was not the last word. A Lithuanian diplomatic Note and a Protocol of the Lithuanian Council, transmitted through the same Stockholm channel, made a much stronger exculpatory claim to Allied and neutral governments:

“And they have repeatedly made spoken and written protests against mass-murder of the civil population (mainly citizens of Jewish extraction).”^[18]

The Note was printed on Legation of Lithuania in Stockholm letterhead and was to be signed and presented by Vytautas Gylys, with B. K. Balutis and P. Zadeikis doing the same in London and Washington. The claim was not an underground assertion. It was to enter the Allied and neutral capitals as the diplomatic correspondence of a state whose legation Sweden still hosted.^[19]

The sentence appears twice, three weeks apart. Neither text identifies one of the repeated protests by date, author, addressee or archival locator. The surviving printed Stockholm material supplies two substantial Grinius–Krupavičius protest instruments: the July memorandum with five grievances and no Jewish-murder grievance, and the November memorandum with the single non-approval clause about “measures” and no operative demand concerning the Jews. The Councilors General complained to von Renteln under economic, financial, cultural and administrative heads. The circulars argued over colonization, eviction and property.^[20]

The printed channel therefore does not supply a written protest matching the later description of repeated protests against the mass murder of civilians, mainly Jews. Remeikis states that some despatches and enclosures were omitted from the published volume; material outside the printed record may exist. The 1943 claim, however, names no protest that a reader can check.^[21]

The writers were capable of naming Jewish annihilation. They were capable of saying they disapproved of “measures” against Jews. They were later capable of telling the Allies that repeated protests had been made. What the surviving texts do not show is the documentary object that would turn that claim into a demonstrated wartime protest against mass murder.

The arithmetic changed with the audience

The declaration of October 14, 1943, prepared for presentation to the governments of the United Nations and of the neutral countries, counted more than 250,000 Lithuanian losses since the beginning of the war. About 45,000 were assigned to Soviet occupation. More than 4,000 were said to have died bearing arms in the June uprising. More than 200,000 were put to death during German occupation. Then it stated: “The greater number of those destroyed during the German occupation were Lithuanian citizens of Jewish origin.”^[22]

The declaration immediately used the total to argue that Lithuania, although not a belligerent, had proportionately lost more people than any belligerent state. The murdered Jews counted as Lithuanian national loss when their number strengthened Lithuania’s claim on Allied sympathy.

Five months later, a joint declaration of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian undergrounds listed 50,000 Lithuanians put to death or deported during the first Soviet occupation and warned that the returning Red Army would bring “slavery, misery and final extermination.” The Soviet-period Lithuanian figure had risen from about 45,000 to 50,000. On the surviving printed pages, the earlier figure of more than 200,000 German-period dead, expressly identified as mostly Jews, does not appear in the new political arithmetic.^[23]

The evidence was in print in Vilnius

Approximately 212,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, about 96.4 percent of the prewar Jewish population. Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe. The sources for the completed toll and the Lithuanian role in the killing apparatus are set out in How Many Jews Did Lithuanians Murder?.

The documents in Remeikis do not establish a continuous institutional chain from every wartime organization into every office of the restored Republic. Important features of the modern state narrative already existed in the actors’ own wartime words.

LGGRTC’s official treatment of the June uprising, the Provisional Government and the institutions that emerged from 1941 cannot be insulated from the actors’ own documents. The modern state-memory method is documented in The Ministry of Memory and in Where Was Vanagas in 1941?. Remeikis moves the chronology backward. By 2005, the inconvenient evidence was in print in Vilnius. LGGRTC cannot treat it as a later foreign discovery.

LGGRTC’s problem is therefore not that a foreign critic has imposed a hostile reading on the uprising or the Provisional Government. The organizations themselves left a record containing the Jewish death count, the property claims, the assertion of repeated protests, the coercive use of self-defense battalions and the explicit refusal to enumerate Jewish annihilation. The Centre cannot preserve the heroic claims and treat the rest as somebody else’s interpretation.

The accusation runs against the organizations that wrote these documents and against LGGRTC’s modern treatment of the uprising, the Provisional Government and their claims. It does not run against Lithuanians, some of whom carried this material out of the country at risk to themselves so that it would be read.

“We will not mention here” is not evidence that Jews were never mentioned. The opposite is what makes the sentence damaging. They were known, counted and discussed. What happened when their annihilation collided with the national story is answered in September 1943, in a Lithuanian nationalist statement’s own words: “We will not mention here.”

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^[1]Thomas Remeikis, comp. and ed., Lithuania under German Occupation 1941–1945: Despatches from US Legation in Stockholm (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press / Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, 2005), Desp. No. 2680, 13 January 1944, pp. 540–559, enclosure no. 1, “The Failures of the Mobilization of Men and Women in Lithuania for War Employment and Their True Reasons,” subtitled “For the information of His Excellency Major General Just, Commander of the Security District Lithuania,” at pp. 544, 556 and 559. Section VIII itemizes the shooting of peasants who insufficiently complied with the German decrees for compulsory deliveries, the shooting of bailiffs and village overseers of districts in which the compulsory deliveries were too small, the shooting of innocent inhabitants for damage caused by saboteurs landed by parachute, deportations to concentration camps, and atrocities by Ukrainian units. The quoted “beacuse” is spelling as printed in the volume.

^[2]Remeikis, Introduction, pp. 4–6, especially p. 5 on Antanas Valiukėnas and the courier routes: materials were transmitted from Lithuania by reliable couriers who held official positions in Lithuania and, “as functionaries in German service, could freely travel to Germany.” See also Desp. No. 1244, pp. 166–169, on Lithuanian documents that did not pass the official German censorship.

^[3]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, 19 December 1942, pp. 166–192, signed Winthrop S. Greene, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, file no. 852; Greene’s summary at p. 167, enclosure outline at p. 169, Part V (a) “Extermination of Jews,” (b) “Removal of Intellectuals,” (c) “Annihilation of Lithuanian farmers.”

^[4]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1388A, 4 February 1943, pp. 230–236, at pp. 232–233. The volume describes the Lithuanian Activist Front as the organization “which organized the revolt against the Russians and which declared Lithuania independent in 1941,” and which “set up a Government”; and describes Colonel Škirpa, Lithuanian Minister in Berlin until the outbreak of the war, as “the head of the group of Lithuanians that escaped from Soviet-occupied Lithuania and planned to overthrow the Soviet regime in Lithuania.” Leonas Prapuolenis is named at p. 233 as the Front’s Chief of Staff, arrested by the Germans and sent to Dachau.

^[5]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 181–182, Part V (a), “Extermination of the Jews.” The Legation describes the memorandum as prepared about the middle of 1942; its population calculation is keyed to “after 9 months of German occupation” and does not date the document.

^[6]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, p. 182. The memorandum gives the urban and trade figures and states that Germanization of the towns “provides the reason why the Germans are annihilating the Jews in Lithuania.”

^[7]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, p. 182: “German aims are directed, however, not only against the Jews, but also against the Lithuanian nation”; the German Zivilverwaltung had commenced “the second part of its plan: the extermination of Lithuanian intellectuals.”

^[8]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 186, 189–191, especially p. 190, circular no. 11. The volume renders what may be the same body under several English or transliterated names: “Association for the Freedom of Lithuania” (p. 167), “Association of Fighters for the Freedom of Lithuania” (p. 186), “Laisves Kovovojai” (Desp. No. 2502, p. 500) and “Union of Combatants for the Liberty of Lithuania” (p. 504). Identity across those forms is not asserted here beyond the label printed with circular no. 11.

^[9]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1462, 25 February 1943, pp. 281–288, enclosure dated Kaunas, 1 November 1942, at pp. 282–283. The memorandum enumerates the categories liable to the eviction action as farmsteads of Poles belonging to the active Polish element, farmsteads of Russians, and farmsteads of Jews; and states that dispossessed Lithuanians may be compensated by holdings which formerly belonged to Germans and “furthermore by the holdings of Polish activists, Russians and Jews.”

^[10]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 174–175 and 178. The printed text at p. 175 names “Pienocentras,” “Maistas” and “Lietukis.”

^[11]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1462, p. 287. Signature block at p. 288: Dr. Kazys Grinius; Prof. Jonas Aleksa, Former Minister for Agriculture; Pastor Mykolas Krupavičius, Former Lithuanian Minister for Agriculture; Kaunas, 1 November 1942, with copies to the General Councilors. Desp. No. 2680, p. 553, records presentation to the Commissar General on 9 November 1942 and states that all who signed were subsequently deported.

^[12]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1462, pp. 287–288. The two operative requests are that the colonization of Lithuanian ground be discontinued and that peasants evicted from their farmsteads be given back their property “irrespective of their nationality.”

^[13]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 170–173. At pp. 170 and 173 the Legation states that the points “may be considered as reflecting the opinion of the Lithuanian nation, and the facts mentioned by them may be safely taken to be accurate,” and that the memorandum was “drawn up very carefully” and its authors “showed extreme courage in presenting it.”

^[14]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 181–182 and 185. The “dress rehearsal” passage appears at p. 185 and is transmitted a second time in Greene’s covering text at p. 168.

^[15]Remeikis, Desp. No. 2680, pp. 546 and 554. At p. 554 the statement records that Lithuanian youths and students “unanimously joined the ranks of the insurgents and carried out numerous important military tasks in accordance with a plan previously formulated in concurrence with the German Army.” At p. 546 it reports about 100,000 partisans, states that the German Army occupied Kaunas and Vilna almost without combat because the Lithuanian partisans had already cleared them of the enemy, and refers to “almost 20 battalions, which, by the way, were designated for police duties.”

^[16]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1462, pp. 284 and 287. The memorandum states that the German Administration forced the local authorities, “such as the district chiefs (Kreischefs), the police and even the Selbstschutzbataillone (battalions of self-defense),” to effect the ousting of the farmers. The memorandum concerns German colonization and peasant evictions, not the killing of Jews.

^[17]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, p. 184; Desp. No. 2680, p. 551; Desp. No. 3052, 22 March 1944, pp. 592–595, at p. 595.

^[18]Remeikis, Desp. No. 2502, 29 November 1943, pp. 496–509, enclosure 5, the Note, at p. 506, paragraph 6; and enclosure 8, Protocol of the Lithuanian Council, Vilna, 25 September 1943, at p. 508, paragraph 7. The two texts are identical on this passage.

^[19]Remeikis, Desp. No. 2502, pp. 505–506. The Note is printed on LEGATION OF LITHUANIA in STOCKHOLM letterhead, addressed “Sir,” and closing “Your faithful and sincere / Ministre of LITHUANIA.” The covering letter of Jurgis Uosis, Berlin, 27 October 1943, at pp. 499–500, instructs that the material be handed to the Royal Swedish Government and to the accredited Ministers of all the United Nations except the Soviet Union and of the neutral countries, and transmitted to B. K. Balutis in London and P. Zadeikis in Washington.

^[20]For the surviving printed protest material discussed here: Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, pp. 170–186; Desp. No. 1462, pp. 281–288; Desp. No. 2502, pp. 505–508. Desp. No. 1244 also contains the Councilors General’s communication to Commissar General von Renteln, whose heads are economic, financial, cultural and administrative, and the underground circulars on colonization, eviction and property.

^[21]Remeikis, Introduction, p. 6, states that “a number of the despatches and enclosures have been omitted because of their insignificance and irrelevance.” The assertion here is therefore limited to the surviving printed channel: it supplies no protest identified by date, addressee and text matching the 1943 claim of repeated written protests against mass murder, mainly of Jews.

^[22]Remeikis, Desp. No. 2502, pp. 501–504, especially p. 503. The declaration is dated Kaunas, 14 October 1943; the seven signatory organizations are listed at p. 504.

^[23]Remeikis, Desp. No. 3052, 22 March 1944, pp. 592–595, especially p. 594. The declaration states that when the Red Army occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia the first time, 50,000 Lithuanians were put to death or deported to die in the farthermost regions of Russia, and warns of “slavery, misery and final extermination.” The printed volume marks a page as missing after p. 595.