Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

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Andrius Kulikauskas
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Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#1

Post by Andrius Kulikauskas » 17 Jul 2014, 18:55

I'm conducting "A Moral Inquiry into the Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania". I first became interested in this subject through a discussion at an online Litvak website where one participant blamed the Lithuanians for the genocide of Lithuania's Jews. As I looked into this, I was surprised that there was no article on Holokaustas Lietuvoje in the Lithuanian wikipedia, and so I wrote one.

Growing up as a Lithuanian in California in the 1970s, I became aware of the Holocaust. In Lithuanian Saturday school I learned several myths about Lithuanian participation. We were taught that few Lithuanian participated, that they were the dregs of society, that they were forced to do so by the Germans, and that it all took a long time. Now I know that, unfortunately, it was quite the opposite. With the exception of a remnant in the Vilnius, Kaunas and Siauliai ghettos, a vast majority of Lithuania's Jews were killed by November 25, 1941, as documented by Karl Jaeger's in his report. This was before the Wansee conference of January, 1942 where the Germans planned for the Final Solution. Indeed, as historian Christopher Browning concludes that Adolf Hitler's decision to indiscriminately kill Jews was probably made in September 1941 and is known to have been made by December 1941. In March 1941 he simply instructed his generals that Communist commissars and Communist Jews would be killed. Whereas I am finding evidence that some Lithuanians planned mass violence against Jews, including genocide, at that date and prior to it. These Lithuanians were not dregs but rather impressive, even inspiring people, most notably air force pilots, the astronauts of their time.

In this thread I want to collect and share my findings and learn more with your help. I have benefited from the posts at Axis History Forum, especially research by Michael Mills, who I wish I could get in touch with. In this first post, I share a letter which I wrote to historian Christopher Browning, along with a summary of my findings on three groups of Lithuanians who conpired mass violence against Lithuania's Jews. I attach a diagram, too.

---------------
Christopher Browning,

Thank you for your large and helpful book on "The Origins of the Final Solution". I'm writing you to share some findings from my own research into the origins of the indiscriminate killing of Jewish men, women and children in Lithuania.

I have collected quotes and facts from more than 100 sources, many of them in Lithuanian. I have gotten in touch with Lithuanian historians Arunas Bubnys, Saulius Suziedelis, Vygantas Vareikis, Liudas Truska, Petras Stankeras, Augustinas Idzelis and they are supportive of my work. (I share my letter with them as well). My information seems basically correct and it is perhaps time to consider that Lithuanian activists proposed the violence to the Germans rather than the other way around.

I have also developed a method of moral inquiry by which I have been able to collect these facts in just a few hundred hours. I have focused on those people who comprehensively dedicated themselves to the indiscriminate killing, in that they would take a stand, follow through and reflect, over and over again. The key people (Jonas Pyragius, Richard Schweizer, Vytautas Reivytis) were those who wished for the outcome, recruited others and justified it. I attach a diagram. Most participants were driven by other motives, such as advancing their careers, acquiring wealth, exacting revenge, indulging in sadism or simply going along with others.

A tipping point was the Voldemarininkai coup that replaced Jurgis Bobelis so that Jews would be killed. I think it is possible that without this coup the "pilot projects" by Stahlecker and others would have exhausted themselves. The fate of the Soviet Jews might then have been similar to those in Poland. Adolf Hitler seems to have had his heart in other things.

I welcome your feedback. If you are interested, then I could send you more information. Here is a sketch of an article I'm writing for http://www.defendinghistory.com, a historical timeline and some quotes and photos.

Please, do you know how I might seek sponsorship for related work? I hope a sponsor might pay me to assemble and translate into English the many sources I've found.

I write below about three groups of Lithuanians who planned mass violence against Lithuania's Jews.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
[email protected]
+370 607 27 665
Eiciunu km, Alytaus raj, Lithuania

--------------

Three Lithuanian Conspiracies

I have collected evidence about three different groups which planned mass violence against Lithuania's Jews:
  • Kazys Skirpa and the Berlin chapter of the Lithuanian Activist Front planned ethnic cleansing.
  • Jonas Pyragius, Stasys Puodzius, Klemensas Brunius and other Voldemarininkai planned genocide.
  • Pranas Germantas-Meškauskas attempted to organize a Lithuanian National Socialist Party and proposed that Nazi Germany fund pogroms.
With a few exceptions, these individuals and groups were not anti-semitic. They simply were desperate to ingratiate themselves with Nazi Germany. Thus they seem to have proposed this violence to the Nazi Germans rather than the other way around.

Kazys Skirpa was Lithuania's representative in Berlin and a leader in Lithuania's ambassadors' protests against the Soviet annexation of Lithuania. He was the leader of the Lithuanian Activist Front. It's Berlin chapter consisted of anti-Soviet refugees, and especially, Voldemarininkai. Kazys Skirpa planned for Lithuania to declare independence after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet-occupied Lithuania but before the German troops arrived. Nazi Germany did not approve of this and so he had to keep his strategy and tactics secret from them. He wrote a 20-page instruction dated March 24, 1941, which detailed that at this time it was also important to chase out all of Lithuania's Jews so that they would flee with the retreating Soviet army. His instructions include the creation of the TDA, Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos battalion, the "Defense of National Work" battalion, which is to say, defense of national socialism. Ethnic cleansing was the focus of most of the underground leaflets coming from LAF Berlin, which were authored by Bronys Raila. It was also acted upon in the first week of the war, as in the use of the password "TDA" and the creation of the TDA battalion. Philosopher Antanas Maceina coined the phrase "Catholic morality" I think to distinguish ethnic cleansing (scaring Jews away or keeping them in ghettos) from genocide (killing them). I think that Skirpa proposed this ethnic cleansing to Peter Kleist and Georg Leibbrandt at their meetings in June and July, 1940 when they worked together on a strategic report on Lithuania's role in an upcoming war. When war broke out a year later, Skirpa was kept under house-arrest in Berlin.

The Voldemarininkai were the followers of President Antanas Smetonas's former prime minister Augustinas Voldemaras. Many of them were air force pilots and as such were considered dashing, brave and patriotic. They had belonged to the "Iron Wolf", a semi-secret fascist organization of "storm troopers" which Smetona and Voldemaras organized in support of themselves, but which Smetona soon disbanded. The Voldemarininkai repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to force the "passive" (idealist) autocrat Smetona, who kept Lithuania neutral, to reinstate his former colleague, the "active" (realpolitik) Voldemaras, who might align or even unite Lithuania with Germany. Voldemaras had limited contact with them and, unbeknownst to them, was arrested and deported by the Soviets when he surprisingly returned to Lithuania on June 19, 1940 after Smetona had fled the country. The first signs of some anti-semitic slogans appeared in December 1938 with the organizing in Klaipeda (Memel) of the Lithuanian Activist Union as a coalition of anti-Smetona groups which included the Voldemarininkai, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. Lithuania was losing its grip on Klaipeda and so they were able to publish their newspaper Zygis there. However, Smetona coopted the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in a new government. The Voldemarininkai were very upset when Smetona declined Nazi Germany's invitation (sent by way of Peter Kleist to Kazys Skirpa) to seize Polish-occupied Vilnius in October, 1939. They plotted again so as to align or unite Lithuania with Germany. Smetona had key Voldemarininkai arrested in May 27, 1940 just before the Soviet occupation. Many Voldemarininkai took refuge in Nazi Germany. On August 23, 1940 these Voldemarininkai sent a letter from the Gleisgarben refugee camp to Kazys Skirpa as the only leader who might unite them in total commitment to Germany's upcoming "active struggle with bolshevism". Their letter made no mention of independence. It quite likely was intended as a "war on Jews". (This may have been explicit in the original as Skirpa published a presumably extirpated version). Klemensas Brunius and Stasys Puodzius were stationed in the Koenigsberg office of Abwehr. Stasys Puodzius recruited 20 Lithuanian agents for a two week course in March, 1941 where Lithuanian-German Schmidt taught them to organize underground cells in Lithuania that would be ready, among other tasks, to "kill all Jews". Some of the Voldemarininkai, led by anti-semite Jonas Pyragius, vigorously opposed Skirpa's plans for independence because they knew that this would upset the Nazis, and so they broke away in March or April 1941. It seems that these Voldemarininkai thought that if Lithuanians killed off their Jews, then this would prove to Hitler that Lithuanians were worthy of independence. They organized the Lithuanian Nationalist Party which promoted its own password "LNP". Key Voldemarininkai such as Stasys Puodzius and Klemensas Bronius stayed active in both the LAF and the LNP. Zenonas Blynas, the LNP's administrator, documented their world in his 600 page diary. It includes a document dated June 14 or 15, 1941, "Lithuania's National Socialist "Iron Wolf" Battle Front Program", which declared war within Lithuania's boundaries on the same enemies as the Nazis had in Germany and Europe, and which stated as it's first goal "A sovereign national socialist historically grounded Third Lithuania" and as its second goal "the deletion of Jews from life". The Voldemarininkai enthusiastically led the two companies of the TDA battalion which on July 4 and 6 executed 3,000 Jews held by LAF in Kaunas's 7th Fort, when ordered by the SS. Most importantly, Pyragius led them on July 23-24 in a midnight coup purportedly against Lithuania's Provisional Government, but actually, against Jurgis Bobelis, the Kaunas military commander in charge of the TDA who had stopped the killing of Jews. After the Voldemarininkai installed their own military commander, Stasys Kviecinskas, battalion chief Kazys Simkus and security police chief Vytautas Reivytis, the killing of Jews proceeded in the hundreds and thousands every day. Vytautas Reivytis ordered his network of local police to arrest all of the Jews, to beat and demean them into submission, to document that and report when they were passive. And so a total of 15 Germans SS with help from a few dozen members of the Lithuanian TDA were enough to kill all of the roughly 100,000 Jews in Lithuania's small towns, the shtetls. After the massive Rokiskis killings, Zenonas Blynas and others began to question not the killings themselves, but the fact that the Germans were using the Lithuanians, filming them but not themselves, letting them wear Lithuanian uniforms at these killings but not elsewhere, as if these killings were dishonorable. And they thought that the Lithuanians had already killed so many Jews that the LNP should be bold enough to want Germany to promise that Lithuania would be granted independence after the war. This position in the LNP won out, although others like Pyragius argued that killing all of Lithuania's Jews was a separate question, a good in its own right. On November 29, 1941, Kazys Simkus organized a great party for Karl Jaeger to celebrate the elimination of Lithuania's Jews, this "difficult but necessary work". On December 17, 1941, the LNP, the only legal party in Lithuania, was banned.

Pranas Germantas (originally Meskauskas) led a third group which helped forge links between Nazi leaders and these other two groups. He was a doctoral student of linguistics at Leipzig university where Jurgis Gerulis, the German Lithuanian linguist, was rector. Gerulis was an active Nazi and ultimately became an Abwehr major. Pranas Germantas was infatuated with "Mein Kampf" and wanted to organize a Lithuanian National Socialist Party. In 1938, back in Lithuania, he worked briefly for Lithuania's security police. He accompanied Heinz Gräfe, who was the head of gestapo in Tilsit (and later, in East Prussia), and who was responsible for intelligence in the Northeastern countries. It seems likely that Pranas Germantas was involved in the June, 1939 proposal, which Reinhard Heydrich and Germany's Foreign Affairs Ministry discussed and declined, that Nazi Germany provide 100,000 litas and weapons to finance a coup and pogroms in Lithuania. I imagine he was inspired by Kristallnacht and was aware that the Voldemarininkai were planning another coup. After taking refuge in Germany, he worked at an institute for Eastern Studies, including as a translator for Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller. Heinz Gräfe promoted him to Kazys Skirpa. But he did not find a place with either LAF nor with the Voldemarininkai, as he declined lesser roles and they all considered him a gestapo agent. Germantas tried to advance the leadership of Stasys Rastikis. Germantas's circle included Stasys Cenkus, who he wanted to head the Lithuanian SS, and agents Mykolas Žilinskas, dr.Mikalauskas (Mikonis), Vytautas Alantas. They were for complete union with Germany. Thus I presume they thought Jews should be treated as they were in Germany or Poland. Pranas Germantas was an associate of Martin Kurmies, the German Lithuanian from Klaipeda who was head of gestapo in Lithuania until October, 1941. I imagine that Pranas Germantas's main role in the Holocaust was linking up LAF and LNP with his fellow linguist Jurgis Gerulis who connected them with the Abwehr, where Schmidt led courses for agents, including to organize underground groups to kill all Jews.

Finally, a key connector was Lithuanian German Richard Schweizer. In 1940-1941, he worked for SD from Eitkunai (Eydtkau) where he knew Vytautas Reivytis. At the Pretszch training camp he was assigned to be Einsatzgruppe A commander's Franz Walter Stahlecker's translator and at the outbreak of the war helped him recruit the Voldemarininkai Kazys Simkus and Bronius Norkus. I think that Schweizer opened Stahlecker's eyes to the possibility of killing many more Jews than had been ordered. In Kaunas, Schweizer was an SD officer and had contact with Pyragius.
MoralAnalysisOriginsHolocaustLithuania.png

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#2

Post by Paul Lantos » 18 Jul 2014, 16:11

"Moral" inquiry? When I took philosophy (ethics) as an undergraduate, it was explained that in lexical terms "moral" is personal and "ethical" is group. So if you are to accurately use the world "moral" you need to be sticking to either 1) your own judgments of other people's actions, or 2) evidence about the personal moral judgments made by individual actors. In reality you're probably talking about how group mentality overcame laws, ethics, and at a one-by-one level individual moral reservations.

An accurate and fact (rather than conclusion/inference) based history of the Holocaust in the Baltic states would be welcome. Browning indeed sets one great model for this, but remember that his book was the result of 1) extraordinarily exhaustive research into 2) a single, small subset of the phenomenon he was studying. There is rationale behind "generalizing" the findings from Browning's one police battalion to other police battalions, but in the end Browning really only wrote (at least in that book) about a single small group.


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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#3

Post by wm » 21 Jul 2014, 00:01

It seems you are saying the sociopathic leaders did it for political reasons, and the little people did it because of greed. But as Michael Mills (who maybe deserves clemency) claimed they did because of their innate antisemitism, you both are in disagreement of the root causes of the Holocaust here.
It's not a small difference, prejudice can be corrected by education, but sociopaths and greed will always be with us - so we may infer in favorable circumstances Holocausts will happen again - it's unavoidable.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#4

Post by Gorque » 27 Jul 2014, 23:01

Michael Mills is active on the history forums Historum.com

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#5

Post by Gorque » 27 Jul 2014, 23:19

Paul Lantos wrote:Browning indeed sets one great model for this, but remember that his book was the result of 1) extraordinarily exhaustive research into 2) a single, small subset of the phenomenon he was studying. There is rationale behind "generalizing" the findings from Browning's one police battalion to other police battalions, but in the end Browning really only wrote (at least in that book) about a single small group.
The OP referred to Browning's excellent analysis "The Origins of the Final Solution," which goes not only into much greater detail, but also in broader scope than his "Ordinary Men." "The Origins of the Final Solution" deals with the planning, execution and the problems experienced by the responsible organizations at their upper levels.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#6

Post by Andrius Kulikauskas » 31 Jul 2014, 12:44

Gorque, Thank you very much for helping me get in touch with Michael Mills! I wasn't receiving replies from this forum but I hope to have corrected that and be more responsive.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#7

Post by Andrius Kulikauskas » 31 Jul 2014, 14:17

Wm, thank you for your post.

A week ago, I found some of Kazys Skirpa's original documents at the Mokslu Akademijos Biblioteka, the library of the Academy of Sciences, in Vilnius, Lithuania. In 1942, he sent a letter and a collection of documents to Juozas Ambrazevicius. Skirpa was the founder of Lietuviu aktyvistu frontas and was detained in Berlin under house arrest by the Germans at the start of the war. Ambrazevicius became the acting prime minister in the Provisional Government upon declaration of Lithuania's independence in Kaunas by the local rebels there. Thus Skirpa sent these documents to Ambrazevicius to make him aware of what had been developing in Berlin prior to Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.

Skirpa explains that the Munich agreement made it clear to him that Lithuania's policy of neutrality was senseless, given that neutral Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by England and France. He explained to his government that Lithuania must choose to align itself with one of its neighbors, either Germany, the Soviet Union or Poland, but preferably Germany. President Antanas Smetona decided to maintain neutrality. I think that Smetona understood from personal experience after World War I that Lithuania's fate would be decided less by the fortunes of war and more by its moral position at the peace table after the war. In September, 1939, Germany through Peter Kleist encouraged Kazys Skirpa that Lithuania invade and recover Polish-occupied Vilnius, the historical capital of Lithuania, but Smetona refused. This was considered by Skirpa and the voldemarininkai "men of action" to be a great mistake. Instead, Lithuania received Vilnius from Stalin in October, 1939.

On July 1, 1940, Kazys Skirpa wrote a letter to Lithuania's ambassadors detailing his observations from his recent visit to newly Soviet occupied Lithuania. He noted that as of yet there had been few arrests by Soviet security and that the 300,000 strong (by his count) Soviet army in Lithuania was down right polite. He observed that the only ones who were happy for the coming of the Soviets were the Jews. He empathized with them that most of them were not in any way Communists but simply were afraid of the Reich. Meanwhile, at the request of Georg Leibbrandt and after four meetings with Peter Kleist, he wrote how Lithuania might participate if Nazi Germany were to be at war with the Soviet Union. On July 13, 1940, he submitted to Peter Kleist a three page declaration to be signed by himself, who he envisaged as Lithuania's prime minister, along with his cabinet, in which he accepts President Smetona's entrustment to him (which he, however, never managed to receive) to create Lithuania's legitimate government. He will save Lithuania's independence, base its administration on national socialism, ally itself with the Third Reich, and also to cleanse Lithuania from the alien race, the Jews, and distribute its ill gained wealth to Lithuania's poor. Lithuania would join the New Europe as a morally fit Aryan people.

I think the document confirms that Kazys Skirpa promoted the idea of ethnic cleansing to the Germans rather than the other way around. The Germans were interested in the upcoming war and so Jewish questions were peripheral. Whereas for Skirpa and also for the voldemarininkai, the Jewish question was central because it was the way they thought that they could define Lithuania as an ally of Germany and distinguish the Lithuanian people as an Aryan people.

My point is that Skirpa and the Voldemarininkai did not act out of anti-Jewish sentiment or prejudice. Nor were they sociopaths. They acted out of a burning desire to fit in with the Germans. They believed in "real politik", they wanted to "take action". They believed that their noble patriotic ideas needed to be pursued practically.

There simply isn't evidence that these leaders were anti-Semitic prior to the war. So, for example, H.Flashenberg, a Jewish journalist, worked for Kazys Skirpa in Berlin. Skirpa claims to have stood up for him several times against the Nazis, and when he finally let him go in 1940, he helped him find a job at the ELTA news agency in Kaunas. It's also clear from his report to the ambassadors that he disagreed with the idea that Jews and communism were one and the same. His decision to intend ethnic cleansing, which is consistent in all of his documents, was not personal or ideological but pragmatic.

Jonas Pyragius is one of the rare voldemarininkai who could be said to have been anti-semitic before the war. We know from Zenonas Blynas's diary that by the end of 1941 he was arguing that it was good that Lithuania's Jews were annihilated. And yet later, looking back, in his memoirs, he notes that after the voldemarininkai's failed coup in 1934, when he was defrocked and had to leave Kaunas, none of his friends came to say good bye, but two Jews, Ozinskis and Veisas, who knew him from their work together at the airport and the Air Club, visited him to say they were sad for him. I note also that the aviation magazine Lietuvos sparnai, where many voldemarininkai were active, had advertisements from the Jewish bank and many other Jewish businesses, up until the Soviet occupation.

I can write more separately about the lack of anti-semitism in Lithuania before the war. It's an important point because it goes counter to the assumption that genocide is always based on prejudice and hatred.
http://www.selflearners.net/wiki/Holocaust/Citatos
Here is a link to LIthuanian sources that I've been collected. Google Translate can give a sense of the meaning:
http://translate.google.com

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#8

Post by TruthSeeking » 05 May 2022, 22:58

I am looking for information about Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and then Nazis and Lithuanians during 1939 - 1944. There are reports the Gestapo and SS recruited Jewish informants and collaborators regularly. Are there any documents around this? Did the Nazis or Soviets every keep records of collaborators? I am specifically looking for this in the Vilnius area.

Thanks in advance.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#9

Post by wm » 05 May 2022, 23:18

There are some relevant eyewitness testimonies here:
Accounts from the Borderlands, 1939-1941.png
Accounts from the Borderlands, 1939-1941.png (368.32 KiB) Viewed 764 times
The Jews greeted the arrival of the Bolsheviks with great joy - henceforth they felt proud and safe, almost as masters of the situation, and they were condescending and arrogant towards the Poles, often reminding them of their impotence and taunting them with it.
...
Many Jews ... took every opportunity to remind the Poles with satisfaction that the times when they had something to say were over, and they needed to obey the Soviet power.
Accounts from the Borderlands, 1939-1941

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#10

Post by historygeek2021 » 06 May 2022, 00:19

TruthSeeking wrote:
05 May 2022, 22:58
I am looking for information about Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and then Nazis and Lithuanians during 1939 - 1944. There are reports the Gestapo and SS recruited Jewish informants and collaborators regularly. Are there any documents around this? Did the Nazis or Soviets every keep records of collaborators? I am specifically looking for this in the Vilnius area.

Thanks in advance.
No, that's an anti-Semitic lie. The Nazis did not collaborate with Jews. The Nazis only murdered Jews.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#11

Post by Totenkomf » 06 May 2022, 07:16

historygeek2021 wrote:
06 May 2022, 00:19
TruthSeeking wrote:
05 May 2022, 22:58
I am looking for information about Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and then Nazis and Lithuanians during 1939 - 1944. There are reports the Gestapo and SS recruited Jewish informants and collaborators regularly. Are there any documents around this? Did the Nazis or Soviets every keep records of collaborators? I am specifically looking for this in the Vilnius area.

Thanks in advance.
No, that's an anti-Semitic lie. The Nazis did not collaborate with Jews. The Nazis only murdered Jews.
Not quite; As an example of Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis; there was Jewish Ghetto Polizei (Police) in Vilnius.
(Also in Warsaw, plus in other Ghettos around the General-Government.)
Attachments
Ghetto Polizei.jpg
Last edited by Totenkomf on 06 May 2022, 12:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#12

Post by Andrius Kulikauskas » 06 May 2022, 09:11

Dear "Truth Seeking",
May I inquire, Who are you? What is the purpose of your question? Why are you interested in Vilnius?
The Holocaust in Lithuania was a shocking catastrophe that hurts us to this day. The loss of life, of kindness, of dignity, of humanity, of civilization is so troubling. On the face of it, without further explanation, your investigation suggests that you yourself are a victim of this calamity, a deeply damaged person. So please write more about who you are so that I can see your human heart. Otherwise, you seem like a dog digging for bones in a cemetery. Most recently, Russian Federation President Vladmir Putin, in a show of humanity, apologized for his Foreign Minister's antisemitic comments. Perhaps you are likewise a human being, or perhaps you are a troll in the service of a demon.
I look forward to getting to know you.
Andrius

TruthSeeking wrote:
05 May 2022, 22:58
I am looking for information about Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and then Nazis and Lithuanians during 1939 - 1944. There are reports the Gestapo and SS recruited Jewish informants and collaborators regularly. Are there any documents around this? Did the Nazis or Soviets every keep records of collaborators? I am specifically looking for this in the Vilnius area.

Thanks in advance.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#13

Post by wm » 06 May 2022, 09:26

The definition of the word "collaboration"
1. the action of working with someone to produce something.
2. traitorous cooperation with an enemy.
(and the other one - anti-semitism) is so broad it can mean basically anything or nothing.
Any writer who doesn't provide his own definition (and doesn't strictly adhere to it in his works) should be viewed with suspicion.
Because the word has two meanings: an innocent one and "hanging offense."

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#14

Post by historygeek2021 » 06 May 2022, 17:58

Totenkomf wrote:
06 May 2022, 07:16

Not quite; As an example of Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis; there was Jewish Ghetto Polizei (Police) in Vilnius.
(Also in Warsaw, plus in other Ghettos around the General-Government.)
Not a surprise that a user named "Totenkomf" would blame the victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish Police were rounded up and murdered with everyone else when the ghettos were liquidated.

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Re: Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

#15

Post by Totenkomf » 06 May 2022, 18:29

historygeek2021 wrote:
06 May 2022, 17:58
Totenkomf wrote:
06 May 2022, 07:16

Not quite; As an example of Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis; there was Jewish Ghetto Polizei (Police) in Vilnius.
(Also in Warsaw, plus in other Ghettos around the General-Government.)
Not a surprise that a user named "Totenkomf" would blame the victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish Police were rounded up and murdered with everyone else when the ghettos were liquidated.
How did I blame the victims of the holocaust?, give me an example 'historygeek2021'. The fact was that there was Jewish Police in Ghettos, although you said that the Nazis only killed Jews and never used Jews as 'Collaborators' or as Kapos and Jewish Polizei. As these people were also victims, regardless that they 'collaborated'/were forced to do so with the Nazis. Altough they became also perpetrators.


What's wrong with my handle?, does it make me a nazi, and look!; there is also Totenkopf Emblem as his avatar: "this must mean that he is a NAZI'".. :o 8O

Like what does you username tell me: an 'historygeek' who is not very learned on history as he denies the facts.

Yes, some of Jewish Police were killed during the liquidation of ghettoes and some later, like the Head of the Ghetto Polizei/Police in Vilnius; Jacob Gens who was shot by the head of Vilnius Gestapo SS-Hauptsturmführer Rolf Neugebauer in September 1943.

Why is this such a topic for you that you don't agree with the facts?

So do you accuse me of being an nazi or blaming the Jewish Victims of the Shoah/Holocaust?. Quit writing nonsense.

Ps. Just because someone doesn't agree with you they automatically are not either: Holocaust Deniers, revisionists, Nazis, anti-semites, W-SS/Nazi fanbois, Or people who only read the books written by the court ruled Holocaust Denier David Irving.

Geez...

:roll:
Last edited by Totenkomf on 06 May 2022, 22:55, edited 5 times in total.
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