Shared Legacy
With no comment, Berlin is stationing German soldiers of the future Lithuanian brigade near the site of the World War II extermination site of Jews – with no effort to commemorate the victims of the Shoah and the German war of extermination.
BERLIN/NEMENČINĖ (Own report) – Berlin is stationing a unit of the future Lithuanian brigade in Nemenčinė just two kilometers away from the site where Germans and Lithuanians massacred a large segment of the town's Jewish population in the fall of 1941. The massacre of Nemenčinė was an aspect of the systematic mass murder carried out by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators ln the extermination of the Jews of the Lithuanian province. Prior to the German invasion, Lithuania had been a supra-regional hub of Jewish culture. A few months later, it was “judenfrei” (free of Jews). Less than five percent of the local Jewish population survived German occupation of Lithuania. Commemorating and acknowledging the shared historical guilt play no role in the German-Lithuanian cooperation that, over the past few years, has again grown stronger. On the contrary: the culprits are still today being publicly honored in Vilnius. Within the framework of the deployment of the Lithuanian brigade, Berlin has made no effort, until now, toward commemorating the systematic slaughter of Lithuanian Jews, for example, on the anniversary of the Nemenčinė Massacre. With its silence, it is helping to conceal the reality of Germany’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
The massacre of Nemenčinė
According to survivors of the Nemenčinė Massacre, on September 20, 1941, Germans broke into the Jewish homes early in the morning and, with “shouting and beating”, forced them into the local synagogue where they were locked up – around 600 people in total. They plundered the Jews, forced them to line up in rows and march to a forest. One survivor recounted that the “excavated graves” could be seen “even at a distance”. Many tried to escape. Many were shot in their attempt. However, around a hundred of them successfully managed to escape. The others were killed by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators at the pits. A total of 500 Jews were murdered that day, 112 were children. The “Jäger Report” compiled by the SS-Standartenführer and Security Police and SD commander in Kaunas, Karl Jäger, recorded 403 victims. Prior to the massacre, Germans and Lithuanians had forced Jews to dance around burning Torah scrolls, beating them and ripping out their beards.[1]
Extermination in the Countryside
At the beginning of 1941, according to government statistics 104,428 Jews were living in the rural regions of Lithuania. Simultaneously with the Wehrmacht's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Germans began an “unimaginable murder campaign” of the Lithuanian Jews, the historian Christoph Dieckmann, who has extensively studied German occupation policy in Lithuania, writes.[2] By the end of the year, assisted by their Lithuanian collaborators, they had killed around 100,000 Jews, thus wiping out all rural Jewish communities in Lithuania within a few months. The mass murderers proceeded with such “extreme speed”, Dieckmann reports, that the Jewish communities were only able to escape or organize resistance “in very isolated cases”. Initially, the systematic murders in the countryside were mainly carried out by the so-called Rollkommando Hamann. The troops, under the command of the then 28-year-old SS-Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann, were equipped with vehicles that allowed them to appear suddenly and unexpectedly throughout Lithuania and carry out massacres. With the establishment of a German civil administration in Lithuania, the assassinations quickly escalated from the initial pogroms and mass shootings to the systematic extermination of entire Jewish communities - such as in Nemenčinė. The Germans commanded the process and enlisted the active support of Lithuanian auxiliaries.
Shared Enemy Stereotype
Vilnius had once been a supra-regional hub of Jewish culture for centuries, not only for Lithuanians, but also for Polish, Belarus and Ukrainian Jews. The SS commander in charge, Karl Jäger, openly declared his intention to make Lithuania “free of Jews.”[3] In his aforementioned “Jäger Report,” he meticulously documented the genocide he had organized, massacre by massacre. More than 95 percent of the total approximately 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered in a division of labor by the Wehrmacht, the SS, German civil administration and the Lithuanian collaborators. Earlier, large sectors of the Lithuanian society had welcomed the German occupiers as their “liberators from the Soviet Union,” they also shared the same stereotype of the enemy – “Jewish Bolshevism”. With their megalomaniacal plans for conquest and annihilation in Eastern Europe, the Germans were facing the considerable problem that conquest and maintaining control over occupied territories is very personnel intensive. Also, for this reason, the Germans intentionally integrated their Lithuanian collaborators into their military structures, thereby, freeing the German soldiers to continue the march eastward.
Blotting out Memory of Crimes
In Lithuania, the culprits of the time, are still today being honored. (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[4]) Criticism is often slandered as “Russian propaganda.” Berlin is also supporting this distortion of history. Over the past few years, Germany has been refusing to vote in favor of a UN resolution condemning the glorification of German fascism and its collaborators. In the justification, the German government is participating in the recasting of the Baltic Nazi collaborators as “participants in national liberation movements” [5] against the Soviet Union. In 2018, a survivor of the annihilation of the Lithuanian Jewish population commented on the Lithuanian culture of commemoration and the honoring of the collaborators saying: “As long as they are against Russia, they are heroes.”[6]
Deafening Silence
Above all, one hears a deafening silence regarding the Nazi crimes in Lithuania from official German authorities in the Bundeswehr, the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Ministry. A good example of this was the Baltic tour by the then German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in April 2022, when she visited a memorial to the “victims of communism” – many of them, Nazi collaborators – but explicitly abstained from commemorating the victims of German mass crimes in the Baltic states. The commemoration of German crimes in the country also plays no role in reporting and press coverage of the establishment of the German brigade in Lithuania. So far, there have been no reports that German authorities or German soldiers have commemorated the victims of the Nemenčinė massacre. Some German military personnel seem to have other priorities in their commemoration culture: Bundeswehr soldiers stationed in Lithuania sang a birthday song for Adolf Hitler in their Lithuanian barracks in 2017.[7] While Russia's warfare in Ukraine is repeatedly referred to as a “war of annihilation”, concealing and relativizing the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union is becoming increasingly apparent in the context of the debate around the Lithuanian brigade in Germany.
[1], [2] Christoph Dieckmann. Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944. Göttingen 2016. See also unsere Rezension.
[3] Wolfram Wette: Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden. Frankfurt am Main 2011.
[4] See Von Tätern, Opfern und Kollaborateuren (III).
[5] See The Commemoration of the "Defenders"
[6] See Von Tätern, Opfern und Kollaborateuren (III).
[7] See In der Negativspirale.
