The 1st (13th) Battalion of the Lithuanian police and the massacre of Jews in 1941
ENOne of the most important topics in the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania is the participation of Lithuanian police battalions in the genocide of the Jewish people. Even though this topic was often used during the Soviet era for propaganda purposes in an effort to compromise the “bourgeois nationalists,” it did not go beyond opinion pieces and pamphlets. In Soviet historiography and opinion journalism, only Jokūbas Vicas’s study, Part 1 of the document collection “Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje,” the pamphlet “Kaltina nužudytieji,” and the document collection “Nacionalistų talka hitlerininkams” can be singled out. However, the activities of the Tautos darbo apsauga (“National Labor Protection;” hereinafter – TDA) Battalion are not systematically examined in Vicas’s study. Isolated facts about Jewish massacres and anti-partisan campaigns are scattered throughout the book and get lost among fragments of other battalions’ activities. The author does not provide any statistical information about the number of Jews that the battalion murdered, and only briefly mentions that the TDA Battalion killed not only in Kaunas, but also in the provinces. To be fair, Lithuanian emigrants basically ignored this topic as well (with the exception of Saulius Sužiedėlis’s work on the subject of the Holocaust).Even though the magazine Karys was being published in the United States and often featured memoir-like articles about the activities of the police battalions, the topic of the Holocaust was largely overlooked. Accounts of battles with Soviet and Polish partisans (Armia Krajowa, the “Home Army”) or units of the Red Army were the most common. The attitude of Lithuanian diaspora authors towards the Holocaust is well reflected in the book by Henry L. Gaidis about the activities of the Lithuanian armed forces during World War II. Gaidis described the formation and activities of the Lithuanian police battalions during the Nazi occupation in detail, but, as per tradition, he kept quiet on the issue of the battalions’ participation in the Holocaust and placed all the blame for the Jewish tragedy on the Nazi occupation authorities. [p. 363].
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