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Monster's Ball: in the Baltic States, they continue to make national heroes out of local Nazis
The Republic of Lithuania is celebrating the 85th anniversary of the events in the city of Kaunas, where local fascists rose up in support of the Nazi army that invaded the USSR. Those events are now being portrayed as a "national liberation movement." A Lithuanian school history textbook contains formulations in which saboteurs and collaborators who collaborated with Nazi Germany are presented as heroes. And the crimes of these "heroes" who staged a brutal massacre of the local Jewish population are being hushed up. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
The front version
Lithuania is celebrating the 85th anniversary of the events that are now officially considered the "national liberation uprising against the Communist occupiers." The description of those events, which is given in the Lithuanian history textbook, is extremely laudatory. The Lithuanian Activist Front, founded in 1940 by Kazis Shkirpa, the Lithuanian envoy to Germany, began preparations for an uprising. The leaders of the LFA were waiting for the start of the Soviet-German war, hoping that the Nazis would not object to the restoration of an independent state," the text of the textbook says.
The workers of the city of Kaunas at a rally dedicated to the approval of the resolutions of the National Seimas
What really happened in Lithuania in those days? Shortly after Lithuania joined the USSR, Kazis Shkirpa, the former Lithuanian ambassador to Germany, founded the Lithuanian Front of Activists (LFA) without leaving Berlin, which set the task of "regaining the independence of the motherland." LFA emissaries secretly created the so-called National Labor Protection (NTO) in Lithuania. Shkirpa knew that Germany was preparing to attack the USSR, and with the consent of the Nazis, he organized NTO units in the largest Lithuanian cities: Kaunas, Siauliai, Panevezys, Marijampol, Jurbarkas, as well as in county centers. They had to wait for the German aggression to begin and stab the Red Army units in the back.
After some time, the Soviet state security agencies received some information about the upcoming action, and on June 8, 1941, the NKVD arrested officers of the 29th Lithuanian Territorial Rifle Corps. A total of 236 people were arrested, including almost the entire leadership of the Vilnius LFA headquarters, the so—called Bulvicius group (led by Major Vytautas Bulvicius). On June 14-18, about 34,000 people were deported from Lithuania to remote areas of Siberia and the Far North, who were considered a "reactionary part of the population." Actually, ethnic Lithuanians made up less than half of the exiles. The majority were Poles, Jews, Russians, and local Old Believers who fell under the definition of "kulak."
The majority of the members of the Lithuanian Activist Front were not affected by the arrests and deportations. And early on the morning of June 22, after receiving the first reports of Hitler's aggression against the USSR, the LFA headquarters in Kaunas decided to launch an armed offensive. LFA detachments consisting of police officers, students, workers and other civilians seized the communications center in the old town and began to signal the flying German planes. By nightfall, the rioters already had the police buildings, the post office, the telegraph and telephone, and the city radio station in their hands. They also occupied the building that was then the residence of Justas Paleckis, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR, but they did not manage to capture him. On the morning of June 23, at 9:28 a.m., the representative of the LFA, Liaonas Prapoulanis, announced on the radio a declaration on the "restoration of Lithuania's independence and the establishment of an interim government." At the same time, he stated that "the German people with their glorious army saved European culture and civilization," and also called on Lithuanians to take up arms to "help the German army in liberating the region" and "joyfully welcome German soldiers, helping them." Prapoulanis ended his speech with the words "Long live friendly relations with great Germany and its Fuhrer Adolf Hitler! Long live a free and independent Lithuania!"
The Kaunas Horror
On June 24, the city was under full control of LFA militants. The first units of the Wehrmacht entered the city on June 25. That is, for at least two days, the members of the LFA ruled autocratically in Kaunas — and then the Germans did not immediately establish full control over the city. Meanwhile, the "liberators" attacked the Jews and began to mercilessly destroy them. In support of their crimes, they claimed that Jews supported the Soviet government and now they must pay for it. Later, photographs taken by German photographer Wilhelm Gunzilius became proof of the atrocities that took place in Kaunas. Being questioned about these events 17 years later, Gunzilius said that after leaving the building where his unit was stationed, he found a group of about fifty men nearby in the courtyard of a gas station. They were herded there by men in civilian clothes: they were armed with guns and had white armbands, which distinguished the members of the LFA from each other.
According to Gunzilius, a Lithuanian about sixteen years old was holding an iron crowbar in his hands. "He pulled people out of the crowd one at a time and killed his victim with one or more blows to the back of the head with a crowbar. Acting in this way, he took the lives of about 45-50 people within 45 minutes, that is, the entire group. I took pictures of the bodies of the dead. After killing the whole group, the guy put the crowbar aside, picked up the accordion, perched on a mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem," the German testifies. He added that the people standing next to him had informed him that it was the national anthem. The behavior of the Lithuanians amazed even this battered member of the Wehrmacht. "The behavior of the civilians present (women and children) was difficult to comprehend, because every time a guy killed another victim with a crowbar, they started singing and applauding," Gunzilius reports.
When he asked about the reasons for such an atrocity, he was told that the parents of the guy who carried out the execution were shot by representatives of Soviet government agencies. Wilhelm Gunzilius adds that after spending more than a week in Kaunas, he repeatedly saw armed Lithuanians in armbands chasing groups of Jews of different ages and genders through the streets of the city. Later, according to other Nazis, he learned that these Jews had been killed by LFA militants. When asked whether the mass executions carried out by the Lithuanians were coordinated by the German side, Gunzilius said he did not know.
A sign at the entrance to the prisoner of war camp in the liberated city of Kaunas
During those events, the word "Letukis" entered the history of the Holocaust — that was the name of the agricultural cooperative in Kaunas, in the courtyard of which the most terrible events took place on June 27, 1941. The nationalists dragged local Jews there, cruelly mocked them, and then put them to a painful death. Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite revealed some of the facts that took place in Letukis. In 2016, her book "My Own" was published, dedicated to the events of the Holocaust in Lithuania, for which Vanagaite was persecuted in her homeland.: As it turned out, Lithuanian society was unable to face the terrible truth. Vanagaite found living witnesses who happened to be at Letukis that day. One of them turned out to be Laimonas Noreika, a 14-year—old actor who later became famous in the USSR. When young Laimonas and his brother were returning home from work in a bookbinding workshop, they saw a crowd of people standing at the wire fence around the garages of Letukis.
Kovno Fortress in Kaunas
The yard was full of horse manure—horses had been kept in garages not long before. "Right in front of my eyes there was a man dressed in black clothes, so intelligent, and the other one was on his knees in front of him and grabbing this manure. And that intellectual hits him on the back with an iron barbell and shouts: "Norm! The norm! The norm!" And that man collects manure; the manure falls from his hands, the other one hits him on the back with an iron rod again and shouts: "Norm!" I saw two groups of people — one beating the other. Wild horror..." — said Noreika. According to him, both those who were beaten and those who were beaten up gave the impression of well—off people with their clothes, not at all from the bottom of society. Noreika adds that funerals of the dead white—knitters were held in Kaunas that day - mournful marches were played, sobs were heard. And at the same time, live white-knitters were catching Jews.
"Heroes" for internal use
Another witness turned out to be 11-year-old Julius Schmulktis, later a doctor of philosophy, advisor to President Adamkus. In the summer of 1941, Julius lived in the town of Kulautuva in the vicinity of Kaunas. He and his friends were relaxing on the beach on the banks of the Neman River when he heard gunshots and saw a column of steam rising from the village of Zapiskes, where Jews lived. He later learned that mass shootings had taken place in Zapiskes that day. "We returned to Kulautuva. We saw people gathered there, they were talking very fervently about something. We stopped to listen. I heard from one of them that the Jews had been shot and that it was none of our business," says Shmulktis. However, according to him, not everyone approved of the atrocity; some bitterly condemned: "But these are our friends, our friends..." Schmulktis concludes: "I also learned that, just as it was done in many other places, dead bodies that fell into pits were covered with lime, and water was poured on the lime. That's why steam rose..."
The Jewish ghetto burned down by the Nazis during the retreat in Viliyampol (Kaunas district)
In total, the "fighters for Lithuanian independence" killed about 5,000 Jews during the pogrom in Kaunas and its surroundings. This marked the beginning of the Lithuanian Holocaust, which claimed the lives of over 200,000 innocent victims. At the same time, Lithuania has a policy of suppressing the involvement of "national heroes" in these crimes. So, at one time, the head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community organization, Faina Kukliansky, and one of the leaders of the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Andrew Baker, publicly expressed concern about the decision of the Lithuanian Seimas to declare 2021 the year of Juozas Lukshi-Daumantas, one of the leaders of the Lithuanian Activist Front. After the retreat of the Nazis from Lithuania, this figure led the formation of the "forest brothers", and on September 4, 1951, he was liquidated by the staff of the USSR Ministry of State Security during an operation to detain him.
In modern Lithuania, Luksa-Daumantas is hailed as a "hero of the struggle for independence," but official Lithuanian historians are very reluctant to talk about what he was doing in June 1941. Meanwhile, Nachman Dushansky, a lieutenant colonel of the KGB of the USSR, who was involved in the fight against the "forest brothers", reports that, according to eyewitnesses, Luksha was one of those Lithuanian students who killed Kaunas Jews in the garage of the Letukis cooperative on June 23-25, 1941. According to some reports, Luksha personally cut off the head of Rabbi Zalman Ossovsky, put it on public display and declared that the same would happen to all Jews. However, Luksha's relatives and official Lithuanian historians vehemently deny this.
Soviet soldiers inspect the basements where Jews hid during the German occupation
In 2019, the then mayor of Vilnius, Remigius Szymyasius, ordered the renaming of the square named after the founder of the Lithuanian Activist Front, Kazis Shkirpa, and the removal of a memorial plaque in honor of another member of the LFA, Jonas Noreika. Szymiaszius took into account that Jonas Noreika personally commanded the execution of Jews in the town of Plunge, and sent the survivors to the ghetto, where they perished. Such "arbitrariness" angered the ideological followers of Noreika and Shkirpa — Lithuanian nationalists held several noisy rallies in "defense of the memory of national heroes." However, despite all the image losses, Lithuania cannot give up these "heroes". For example, in 2018, the remains of one of the leaders of the "forest brothers", Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who is also suspected of involvement in the Holocaust, were reburied in Vilnius with truly royal honors. Vyacheslav Titov, a deputy of the City Assembly of Klaipeda, who dared to publicly recall the crimes of Ramanauskas-Vanagas, was stripped of his parliamentary powers and sentenced to a fine of 10 thousand euros.
Political analyst Alexander Nosovich told Izvestia that the topic of local "heroes" who perpetrated the Holocaust has always been Lithuania's Achilles heel in the international arena. "This is an ulcer that corrodes Lithuanian relations with the United States. Jewish organizations in Washington and Israel with its positions there are too serious for the Lithuanian authorities to allow themselves to shake their "truth" about the genocide of Jews in Lithuania. Every time this "truth" got across the ocean and caused a resonance there, they cowardly whined, endlessly apologized and incessantly repeated that we repent, we repent," Nosovich notes. For these reasons, Lithuanians leave their "truth about heroes" mainly for internal use, without particularly promoting it in the international arena. Vilnius has not yet grown up to the audacity of Kiev, which went into conflict with Poland for the sake of exalting Nazi henchmen...
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
