Einsatzkommando 3 in Lithuania, 1941

[Jonathan Harrison]

One problem with Michael's thesis: the LAF was housed and trained in Berlin during the Spring of 1941 (see Stapo Tilsit trials, Ulm; Browning & Matthaus, "Origins Of The Final Solution", p.270). We also know that Boehme was liaising with Lithuanian nationalists such as Pranas Lukys before the invasion. Lukys was found guilty at Ulm in the Stapo Tilsit trials: http://www1.jur.uva.nl/junsv/brd/brdeng ... eng499.htm

[michael mills]

Although a number of members of the Lithuanian political police fled to Germany after the Soviet take-over in June 1940 and established contacts with the German Sipo, it is not true to suggest that the LAF consisted entirely of exile groups organised within Germany.

The greater part of the LAF consisted of resistance fighters who went underground during the year of Soviet rule. When the Soviet administration began to pull out on 21 June, the men of the LAF and other Lithuanian resistance groups emerged from hiding and instituted an uprising. That uprising included a mutiny by ethnic Lithuanian units within the Red Army. Nationalist activists who had been captured during the period of Soviet rule were also released from prison by insurgents.

It is not true that all Lithuanian nationalist activists were infiltrated across the German-Soviet border, or only arrived with the German Army. Before the German invasion on 22 June, attempts were made to smuggle agents across the border, but they were nearly always caught by Soviet border guards.

If Browning does claim that the LAF consisted entirely of Lithuanian exiles in Germany, then he is making an incorrect extrapolation from a number of individual cases.

[Jonathan Harrison]

Michael, in your OP you wrote:

It seems unlikely that the RSHA officials who planned the tasks and functions of the Einsatzgruppen, including EK 3, in the months leading up to Barbarossa could possibly have known that they would be able to call on the services of thousands of Lithuanians ready, willing and able to carry out the task of eliminating enemies of Germany.

The origins of the LAF show this assumption to be false. It is a fact that the LAF was founded by 17 exiles in Berlin on November 17, 1940. It had branches in Lithuania and undoubtedly had a thriving underground in the country, but its origins were in Berlin. The Germans therefore had an information channel for six months before Barbarossa, and could use this to disseminate antisemitic propaganda throughout Lithuania. Your premise that the Germans were somehow taken by surprise by the LAF's actions after the invasion is therefore fallacious.

[michael mills]

The fact that the LAF was founded in Berlin does not mean that it was simply an agency of the German Government without its own agenda, much less that the LAF underground inside Soviet-dominated Lithuania was receiving its orders from the German Government, and that all its actions were a result of orders received from that government.

If it is claimed that for six months before Barbarossa agencies of the German Government were spreading antisemitic propaganda throughout Lithuania, then far more proof is needed than just the fact that the LAF was founded in Berlin by exiles from Lithuania. There would need to be hard evidence of orders having been sent from Berlin to underground members of the LAF inside Lithuania, and hard evidence about what those orders actually were. By hard evidence, I do not mean post-war reminiscences in which former members of LAF say what they think their questioners want to hear, or what they think will benefit them.

There would also need to be hard evidence of the relationship between the LAF headquarters in Berlin and the German Government. And also of the relationship between the LAF headquarters in Berlin and the underground in Lithuania; it cannot be assumed that the latter was simply acting at the direction of the former.

There would also need to be hard evidence showing that, before Barbarossa, the German Government had received reliable information or assurances from the underground inside Lithuania that the latter would do its bidding.

[michael mills]

Here is something I wrote earlier on this thread:

As is pointed out by Michael MacQueen, research associate at the Office of Special Investigations, United States Department of Justice, whose essay in this book I have previously referred to, there is a "complete lack of documentation" for any pre-Barbarossa plan to use Lithuanians for mass-killing of Jews, and "only a fragmentary documentary basis" for the history of the paramilitary underground in the period of Soviet rule 1940-41.

So it would appear that, even though the LAF was founded in Berlin by exiles from Soviet Lithuania, there is no hard evidence of any pre-Barbarossa planning by it in collusion with the German Government to carry out mass killings of Jews, using the members of its underground network inside Lithuania. Nor is there any hard evidence for the German Government seinding orders or propaganda to the LAF underground network inside Lithuania.

Thus, I think my point that the German Government could not have had prior knowledge of any large-scale willingness on the part of Lithuanians to collaborate in the mass-killing of Jews, is still valid.

[Jonathan Harrison]

No, it's not. You're putting forward a thesis then placing the burden of proof on others to refute it, rather than meeting any burden of proof yourself. You have to explain the presence of the LAF members in Germany for 6 months before Barbarossa. We know that Lukys served the Nazis in Lublin in the Winter of 1940-41 and was then sent to Memel in March 1941 (Ulm transcript). We know that the German police had a command center in Memel that played a key role in the early Barbarossa massacres of Jews in the border areas. This is in the Stapo Tilsit report:

One police officer and 30 men were assigned for the shootings by the Director of Police in Memel.

http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/gar ... eport.html

We know that Lukys crossed the border on the night before the invasion to organise LAF forces. This is acknowledged by MacQueen, your own source (MacQueen, "Nazi Policy Towards the Jews in RK Ostland", pp.96-97).

[Jonathan Harrison]

Michael writes:

Nor is there any hard evidence for the German Government seinding orders or propaganda to the LAF underground network inside Lithuania.

However, Michael's own secondary source, MacQueen, writes this:

German radio propaganda broadcast in Lithuanian likewise incited people to anti-Jewish violence.

MacQueen also writes this in relation to another Lithuanian nationalist:

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940, Lileikis and a large number of other Saugumas functionaries—harboring no illusions about their futures under Soviet power—slipped over the German border just in time. Some of the Saugumas refugees were set to work by the German Security Police in occupied Poland.22 Until approximately the third week of August 1941, Lileikis appears to have been in Berlin, and in June 1941 he applied for German citizenship. In the period June–August 1941, he must have received a detailed briefing on what his duties would be in the now German controlled Saugumas, and on about August 20 he resurfaced in Vilnius as head of the Saugumas for Vilnius city and province, in charge of a force of approximately 130 men.

http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/pu ... /paper.pdf

[michael mills]

The source linked by Jonathan Harris is less interesting for what he has quoted than for what he has not quoted.

For example, this excerpt from a paper in the same source by Jürgen Matthäus:

LOCAL DYNAMICS
Despite postwar statements to the contrary by some of the perpetrators, Stahlecker and top Berlin officials (Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler) were informed about and agreed to these first killings only afterward[my emphasis]; the initiative seems to have come from local German SS and police officers who had been called in by the Wehrmacht to secure the area.21 While they had no knowledge of high-level decisions, these officers anticipated superior approval for “drastic measures” against a potential threat. They decided on these measures based on the perception, firmly embedded in Nazi ideology, of Jews as the archenemy, and also upon the opportunity created by the war of destruction against communist Russia. Their superiors in Berlin were more than willing to sanction the initiatives taken in the field and to point to these new, radical measures as a model for how security matters should be handled along the front line. As a result of the interaction between periphery and center, German policy in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union progressively increased in violence. Working closely with the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht followed
a similarly destructive agenda behind the front line while other agencies―most notably the German civil administration, which was established in summer 1941 in the Reichskommissariat Ostland as a regional institution of Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories―adapted to the general course of anti-
Jewish policy in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and added to its destructive dynamic.22

It would appear that Matthäus accepts that the fiirst wave of killings in Lithuania, in the first days after the Soviet retreat, was not under the control of Stahlecker or ordered by him, contrary to what Stahlecker later claimed.

Just what I have been saying.

[Jonathan Harrison]

Michael, Matthaus writes:

the initiative seems to have come from local German SS and police officers who had been called in by the Wehrmacht to secure the area

And yet you've been claiming on here and on other threads that these Germans were only facilitators of Lithuanian nationalist violence, not active instigators of the pogroms. The only disagreement between Matthaus and other historians is whether the initiative came from Heydrich & Stahlecker or from middle ranking SS such as Boehme. It's a disagreement about center v periphery, or top-down v bottom-up; it's not a disagreement over whether the instigators were Nazis or LAF.

So you are recruiting Matthaus to your cause on a false premise.

Furthermore, you have yet to explain why these middle-ranking SS were confident that their actions would be sanctioned from above. Their actions surely imply that the training and directives given prior to Barbarossa were meant to be interpreted as permission to conduct these massacres. There may not have been a mass killing order before Barbarossa but this would not preclude the deliberate creation of a culture within the SS in which the mass killing of Jews was the intended outcome, to be implemented by local initiatives.

[michael mills]

The opening sentence of the essay by Matthäus refers to the work by Dina Porat that I have referenced myself:

In 1994 historian Dina Porat published an article that highlighted three unique aspects of the Holocaust in Lithuania: the speed and scope of the killings, the involvement of local collaborators, and the perception of the catastrophe by Lithuanian Jews.

Unfortunately, he does not quote any of her interesting insights. I will now do so for the benefit of readers.

Page 162 ff:

Such an almost total annihilation, carried out with such speed, was possible not only because the implementation of the Final Solution began in Lithuania immediately following the German invasion. The intense involvement of the local population, in large nunbers, in the murder of the Jews. entailed a fatal combination of Lithuanian motivation and German organisation and thoroughness.

The reports of Einsatzgruppe A testify to the eagerness the Lithuanians demonstrated. This is a significant testimony because the purpose of the reports was to display German, not Lithunanian, determination and devotion to their so-called mission, despite the many 'difficulties' which the Nazi authors emphasised. The reports indicate clearly that groups of 'partisans', civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans upon their entry into Kovno. The German authorities used these 'partisans' to establish a new unit, fomally called the Labour National Guard, that operated all over Lithuania. A German report praises this new unit as having fulfilled its mission 'very well', espacially in the planning and execution of 'the largest Aktionen'. Indeed, this unit, assisted by many other locals, performed the first massive killings of thousands of Jews in a few weeks in Kovno, later in Vilna, and especially in smaller towns and rural settlements. According to German reports groups with no more than one German in charge of Lithuanians numbering from eight to forty-five killed most of the Jews outside the major cities by December 1941, 'in all of Lithuania, systematically, region by region'. A table annexed to the Stahlecker reports lists dozens of small towns, where the Jews were murdered by Germans 'and Lithuanian Partisans', mostly during the summer of 1941, through the same means.

Yet, according to Jewish sources, there was hardly any need for the presence of Germans in the small places. A declaration issued after the war by the Lithuanian Jews in the American zone in Germany regarding 'the guilt of the Lithuanian people in the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry' concudes: 'The small places in the Lithuanian provinces, without any exception, were erased by the Lithuanians'. This declaration actually sums up the events detailed in Lithuanian Jewry, the volume of the Holocaust: the handful of survivors of 220 Shtetles and small towns describe how the Jews in those places were killed. Their descriptions, in which the Germans are hardly mentioned, make it quite clear that Lithuanians perpetrated most of the toture and killing, generally without any German officials on the spot. Recent research confirms Jewish sources to a large extent. The German historian Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, in his research on the Einsatzgruppen, assumes that 'poosibly half or two-thirds' of Lithuanian Jews were killed by local units. It seems, then that the part played by the Lithuanians was greater than the German could afford to admit in their reports to their headquarters.

It appears that Porat, unlike some members of this Forum and its staff, does not take at face value Stahlecker's claim that all anti-Jewish actions by Lithuanians were under his control.

Porat then goes on to describe killing actions at the Ninth Fort, and also in Belorussia, in which Lithuanian units participated, and stood out for their cruelty.

Then, on page 165, she writes:

Second, even the Einsatzgruppen, after being trained for murder, were still murderers only in theory. Once the killings started, they became practical murderers, and the Lithuanians were the first ones to provide them with this transition from theory to practice. The Lithuanians showed them how to murder women and children, and perhaps made them accustomed to it.

Lithuanian conduct must have encouraged the German command to make further use of local units..................

Third, the question of the timetable: the above-mentioned chronology in Lithuania supports the view expressed by the Israeli historian, Yehoshua Büchler, that an order to kill Jewish men in the Soviet areas, as, or along with, Communist activists, saboteurs etc, was issued before the invasion. Indeed, at the onset of the invasion the German units killed mostly men, while the Lithuanians killed unselectively.

page 166:

So, it seems that the conduct of the Lithuanians, though anticipated in principle, encouraged the German command to press on. The scope, thoroughness and methods used by the Lithuanians made the Germans expect such support in other areas as well. Therefore this was an additional milestone towards the decision to kill all the Jews in Europe.

Porat then goes on to discuss the motivation of the Lithuanian perpetrators:

In short, it was a combination of a complex of factors such as national traditions and values, religion (Orthodox Catholic, in this case), severe economic problems and tragically opposed political orientations. Lithuanian Jews supported the Soviet regime in Lithuania during 1940-41, being partly of socialist inclination, and in the full knowledge that 'life imprisonment [Soviet regime] is better than life {sic! death?} sentence [Nazi rule]', as in the Yiddish saying. By contrast, the Lithuanians fostered hopes of regaining, with German support, the national independence that the Soviets extinguished, as a reward for anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik stances. During the Soviet rule of Lithuania these feelings heightened and burst out following the German invasion. One might say that the Germans provided the framework and the legitimation for the killing of Lithuania's Jews, while the national aspirations and the hatred for communism [of the Lithuanians] provided the fuel. Still this is not a full explanation for such brutality, especially as there was no tradition of pogroms in Lithuania. Not all Lithuanians took part in the killings, and one cannot depict all of them as murderers. At least one thousand Lithuanians sheltered Jews, thereby risking their own and their families' lives. A few tens of thousands took active part in the mass murders while the rest were either apathetic or aggravated the misery of the Jews in lesser ways than actual killing.

[/b]

[Jonathan Harrison]

Third, the question of the timetable: the above-mentioned chronology in Lithuania supports the view expressed by the Israeli historian, Yehoshua Büchler, that an order to kill Jewish men in the Soviet areas, as, or along with, Communist activists, saboteurs etc, was issued before the invasion. Indeed, at the onset of the invasion the German units killed mostly men, while the Lithuanians killed unselectively.

What did the Nazis think would happen to the women and children when all the men were dead? An "order to kill Jewish men" [leaving aside the fact that the Jaeger Report listed 737 Jewish women shot by mid-August] was still clearly a genocidal order. A community consisting entirely of women & children was clearly not intended to live very long.

[michael mills]

What did the Nazis think would happen to the women and children when all the men were dead?

Read this sentence from Dina Porat again:

The Lithuanians showed them how to murder women and children, and perhaps made them accustomed to it.

[David Thompson]

What did the Nazis think would happen to the women and children when all the men were dead?

Read this sentence from Dina Porat again:

The Lithuanians showed them how to murder women and children, and perhaps made them accustomed to it.

The quote from Dina Porat is bombastic rubbish. The Nazis had been murdering women and children since the war began in September 1939 -- 22 months earlier than Operation Barbarossa and the events she's describing. From your posts, I know you're familiar with Aktion T-4, even if Dina Porat is not. There's also the matter of the resettlement of German-annexed Poland in the winter of 1939-1940, graphically recounted in Himmler's speech at Metz:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 817#587817

and let's not forget the ghettos of Poland either.

[Frankfurter]

This is a very interesting thread about a horrible topic. What made it so easy to recruit thousands, likely tens of thousands of locals for mass-murder so quickly? Was the involvement of a certain number of Jews into the cruel Soviet occupation before so strong it can serve as one main explanation?

Joining the forum about war crimes in Lithunia I would like to mention that Erich Wolff is my former father-in-law and still alive and kicking. What he was doing in Wilna as part of the SD and Sicherheitspolizei I found out when reading the magazine zeitschrift fuer genozidforschung number 1 in 2006 a coupe of weeks ago. Now I am trying to find out what Wolff did exactly from July to October 1941 when he was on duty there. To me he mumbled only "SS" and "the East" but denied anything during investigations in the early sixties saying he was only witnessing executions but did not take part in anything.
Wolf Thieme

"Witnessing executions", that most likely is "Supervising" in this case. He wasnt imprisoned as one of the main subordinates of Jäger?

Frightening prospect to have had such a father-in-law.

Anyway, I want to post these pictures, SD crooks going out to hunt. Poland, September 1939 in this case. One officer, two NCOs and a driver. And some SD at "work" in romantic evening, or morning light. The NCO to the right could be the same as in the car, right side in the back.
That Untersturmführer in the car really seems to have a lot of fun, whatever that means in his case.

[David Thompson]

Frankfurter -- You wrote:

What made it so easy to recruit thousands, likely tens of thousands of locals for mass-murder so quickly?

I don't think the Germans were able to recruit locals in large ("thousands, likely tens of thousands") numbers for mass-murder operations. All of the source material I've seen suggests that the killings were done by relatively small gangs or units of locals, with the same perpetrators being involved over and over. Several of the Einsatzgruppen reports have complaints about how difficult it was to recruit local "talent" for pogroms in the Baltic states and in the Ukraine. See, for example, these threads:

Crimes by certain Jews against Poles at Jedwabne, 1940
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=74763
German documents on anti-semitism in the Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=79590
What really happened at the Lietukis garage, 25 June 1941?
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=75091
The "Woldemaras Supporters" of Lithuania
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61404
Einsatzgruppe A comprehensive report 22 Jun-15 Oct 1941
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=60197
Draft Report on Einsatzgruppe A operations through Dec 1941
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61055
Einsatzkommando operations in Lithuania 1941-1942
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=76928