![]() ![]() Three days before the invasion, Skirpa-in constant contact with the Nazi Gestapo (secret police) and Wehrmacht (army)-issued Leaflet No. According to Lithuanian sources, the number of members in these clandestine groups and anti-Soviet units reached 100,000. They penetrated the universities, the civil service, the professions, even the high schools. But there were many other factions, such as the Iron Wolf, the Lithuanian Freedom Army, the Falcons, and the Lithuanian Restoration Front. These cells of Lithuanian fascists, Nazi sympathizers, and Lithuanian nationalists were important constituents of the LAF, Lietuvos Aktyvistu Frontas (Lithuanian Activist Front), the largest and best organized of the nationalist groups. Greenbaum writes in The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community 1316-1945: In advance of the German invasion, Skirpa directed a substantial network of Lithuanian fascists. Among its leading figures was the Lithuanian ambassador to Berlin, Colonel Kazys Skirpa, who was widely known to be an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler. The entry of the Nazis into Lithuania, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, was enthusiastically welcomed by the nationalist, anticommunist and violently antisemitic forces. Historian Masha Greenbaum has provided a searing account of the murderous rampage that swept through the country in the days preceding and immediately following the Nazi invasion. The most horrifying feature of the Holocaust in Lithuania was the open and unashamed participation of substantial sections of the population in the hunting down, torture and murder of Jews. The overwhelming majority were dead by the end of 1941. Of the approximately 210,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania prior to the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941, 195,000 had been murdered by the end of the war in 1945. Within less than three years, an 800-year-old community, which played a central role in the development of Jewish and world culture, was almost completely annihilated. Following the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, far-right nationalists and generals fled to Germany, where they founded, in direct collaboration with the Nazi regime, the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF).Īlmost contemporaneous with the pogroms that were now launched by the Nazis and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in West Ukraine, the LAF and the German occupiers began an orgy of mass slaughter in Lithuania. Much like its Ukrainian counterparts, the Lithuanian bourgeoisie historically combined a tradition of bitter anticommunism with vile antisemitism. Lithuanian Security Police members burning a Lithuanian synagogue in 1941 Lithuanian nationalists were among the principal perpetrators of this historic crime. With 95 percent of its prewar Jewish population of about 210,000 murdered, Lithuania recorded a higher death rate than almost any other country in Europe. What will not be spoken about is the history of the city where they are meeting: Vilnius, once known as the “Jerusalem of Europe,” was the site of some of the largest and most barbaric massacres in the history of the Nazi-led destruction of European Jewry. ![]() Olaf Scholz, whose government is engaged in the largest rearmament since Hitler and is about to station 4,000 German troops in Lithuania, will return to the scene of some of the worst crimes of German imperialism, spouting well-prepared war propaganda. Joe Biden, who just approved the delivery of cluster bombs to Ukraine, one of the most brutal and criminal weapons of modern-day warfare, will decry the inhumanity of Vladimir Putin. No doubt, the Lithuanian government, in particular, will be thanked for its efforts in spearheading the NATO war, or, as the obedient lackeys in the media call it, the fight to defend “democracy.” There will be no shortage of denunciations of Russian brutality. Today, NATO leaders will convene in Vilnius, Lithuania, only a few hundred miles away from the battlefield of the war in Ukraine, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. ![]()
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