February 12, BNS–Friday the Lithuanian Jewish Community proposed publishing “information of a general nature” on more than 2,000 people who, according to a study by historians, might have been complicit in the Holocaust during World War II. This proposal was presented Friday in a letter by LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky to the Office of Prosecutor General and the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania. The head of the community proposed announcing which group of people on their list participated directly in mass murder, how many participated indirectly, how many in total were convicted and whether there are people on the list who were honored in some way by the state, and under what agencies they worked. Kukliansky told BNS Friday she thinks it’s important to the public to receive explanations about the list. In her opinion, it is possible to publish the names of those whose cases have been tried.
“The Lithuanian Jewish Community believes refusal to release the List could have negative repercussions at the international as well as national level and could give rise to various theories which would damage the reputation of the Lithuanian state,” her letter said. She also called upon the prosecutor’s office to look into how many people on the list hadn’t been convicted but who are still alive, and if such exist, to begin criminal cases against the,
The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania has prepared a list of about 2,000 people who were complicit in Holocaust crimes. It has been turned over to the Government.
The mass murder of Jews began during the first days of the Soviet-Nazi war at the end of June, 1941. Almost all Jews in the countryside were forced into ghettos and killed by mid-November, 1941. In 1943 the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghettos in larger Lithuanian cities as well. In total about 195,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation and only about 5 to 10 percent survived the war.
The Nazis were successful in drawing a large proportion of Lithuanian administrative agencies and citizens into carrying out the Holocaust. This fact is partially explained by the brutal Soviet occupation which Western and Central European countries never experienced. Murders, deportations to Siberia and other persecutions by the Soviets initially at least made some Lithuanians join the German side, and the Nazi-Soviet war was associated with hopes of restoring the Lithuanian state.
Most Jews, however, feared attack by Nazi Germany and sought safe-haven with the Soviets. Anti-Semitic sentiments and stereotypes became popular in the country, Bolshevism being called “Jewish rule.” According to Holocaust historian Arūnas Bubnys, although the “final solution to the Jewish problem” was organized and initiated by the Nazis, it wouldn’t have been so successfully and swiftly implemented on such a large scale without the active collaboration of part of the Lithuanian administration and population.
