Old tensions, new contexts: religious violence and collaboration in Lithuania, June-December 1941

• Academia: straipsnio tekstas

EN[...] The German invasion of the Soviet Union inaugurated a blitzkrieg of mass murder. In German-occupied Lithuania, a combination of specially trained German killing units (Einsatzgruppen), together with a cohort of Lithuanian auxiliaries, cut the Jewish population from a prewar estimate of perhaps as many as 170,000 to 33,600 in less than six months. Historians of the Holocaust have long acknowledged the importance of Lithuania as a testing site for the pan-continental implementation of the Nazi ‘final solution’. Especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of East European archives to western historians, scholars have unearthed a veritable treasure trove of previously unexamined documentary evidence. The result is an unprecedented glimpse into the world of the German occupation of Eastern Europe in general and of Lithuania in particular. Historians now have highly nuanced accounts detailing the composition of the German civilian administration in Lithuania; the radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy as considered from both the center and the periphery; the annihilation of Lithuania’s Jewish population; the often-widespread participation of locals in the killing process; as well as the desperate Jewish survival attempts that followed after December 1941. [...].