Germany is deploying a portion of its future “Lithuanian Brigade” to Nemenčinė, a location just two kilometers from where Germans and Lithuanians massacred a large part of the Jewish population in the autumn of 1941.

The Nemenčinė massacre was part of the systematic mass killings carried out by Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators to eradicate Jews in Lithuania. Before the German occupation, Lithuania was a center of Jewish culture that extended beyond the region. A few months later, it became a “Jew-free” place. Less than 5% of the local Jewish population survived the Nazi occupation of Lithuania.

It is notable that Germany, which consistently articulates its “responsibility” toward Israel, has not addressed this massacre in the renewed German-Lithuanian cooperation of recent years. Conversely, in Vilnius, the perpetrators are still honored publicly today. Berlin has made no effort to commemorate the systematic extermination of Lithuanian Jews on the occasion of the Nemenčinė massacre in the context of the Lithuanian Brigade’s deployment.

The Nemenčinė massacre

According to German Foreign Policy, which quotes survivors of the Nemenčinė massacre, early on the morning of September 20, 1941, Germans entered Jewish homes and rounded up approximately 600 people in the local synagogue “amidst screams and beatings,” where they were imprisoned. The Nazis stripped the Jews, lined them up, and forced them to walk toward the forest. A survivor of the massacre recounted that excavated graves could be seen from a distance. Many who attempted to escape were shot during their efforts. Nevertheless, about 100 people managed to flee. The others were murdered in pits by Germans and collaborating Lithuanians.

Based on collected data, a total of 500 Jews were killed that day, 112 of whom were children. The “Jäger Report,” prepared by SS Standartenführer Karl Jäger, Commander of the Security Police and SD in Kaunas, recorded 403 victims. Before the massacre, Germans and Lithuanians forced Jews to dance around burning Torah scrolls, beat them, and tore off the beards of the men.

“De-Jewification” of the Lithuanian countryside

At the beginning of 1941, according to state statistics, 104,428 Jews lived in the rural areas of Lithuania. Historian Christoph Dieckmann, in a comprehensive study examining German occupation policy in Lithuania, writes that simultaneously with the Wehrmacht’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Germans launched “a campaign of extermination against Lithuanian Jews that exceeded all imagination.” By the end of the year, the Nazis, with the support of Lithuanian collaborators, had killed approximately 100,000 Jews, thereby destroying the entire rural Jewish community in Lithuania within a few months. Dieckmann reports that the killers acted “extremely quickly” in their actions, making escape or organized resistance for Jewish communities “only very rarely” possible.

Systematic murders in the countryside were first carried out by a group called “Rollkommando Hamann.” This group, commanded by SS Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann, then 28 years old, was equipped with vehicles that allowed them to arrive suddenly and unexpectedly throughout Lithuania and carry out massacres. With the establishment of Nazi rule in Lithuania, the murders, initially in the form of pogroms and mass executions, quickly turned into the systematic extermination of entire Jewish communities, as in Nemenčinė. The Germans took on the command role in this process and benefited from the active support of Lithuanian collaborators.

The Jewish cultural center of Vilnius is no more

As reported by German Foreign Policy, Vilnius was previously a Jewish cultural center extending beyond the region for centuries, serving not only Lithuania but also Jews in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. The responsible SS commander, Karl Jäger, openly stated his intention to “de-Jewify” Lithuania. In the aforementioned “Jäger Report,” he meticulously recorded the genocide and massacres he organized. The Wehrmacht, SS, German civilian administration, and Lithuanian collaborators “division of labor” killed more than 95% of approximately 200,000 Lithuanian Jews.

Earlier, a large part of Lithuanian society had welcomed the German occupiers as “liberators from the Soviet Union;” they also shared the animosity toward “Jewish Bolshevism.” The Germans faced a significant problem with their plans for conquest and destruction in Eastern Europe: the conquest and control of occupied territories required too much manpower. In this context, the Germans deliberately integrated their Lithuanian collaborators into their own troop structures, thereby freeing up German soldiers to advance eastward.

Lithuanian Nazi collaborators are honored today

However, in post-Soviet Lithuania, the Lithuanian Nazi collaborators of that period are still publicly honored today. Criticisms of this situation are often dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” Support for the honoring of Nazi collaborators and historical revisionism in Lithuania also comes from Berlin. In recent years, Germany has refused to approve the UN resolution praising German fascism and its collaborators. The German government, in its justification, concurred with the reinterpretation of Nazi collaborators in the Baltics as “national liberation fighters” against the Soviet Union. A survivor of the massacre of Jews in Lithuania commented on Lithuania’s memory culture and the honoring of collaborators in 2018: “As long as they are against Russia, they are heroes.”

German army back on the eastern front

According to the report, there is a “loud silence” from official German authorities, such as the Federal German Army, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, regarding Nazi crimes in Lithuania. An example of this is the visit of then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to the Baltic states in April 2022, where she visited a memorial for “victims of communism” but had no program to commemorate the victims of mass crimes committed by Germans in the Baltic states.

Reports and media coverage regarding the establishment of the German brigade in Lithuania also omit any mention of German crimes in the country. To date, there is no news of German authorities or German soldiers commemorating the victims of the Nemenčinė massacre. Moreover, some German soldiers appear to have set different priorities in their “culture of remembrance”: soldiers of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) stationed in Lithuania sang a birthday song for Adolf Hitler in their barracks in Lithuania in 2017.