Germany has initiated its first permanent military presence in Lithuania since World War II.

The ceremony was attended by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė, and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz described this as “the beginning of a new era.”

At the foot of Gediminas Hill in Vilnius’s Old Town, accompanied by a military band and hundreds of soldiers lined up in formation, the message “Berlin is back in the Baltics and here to stay” was conveyed.

“We are taking the defense of NATO’s eastern flank into our own hands,” Merz declared in his opening remarks alongside Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda on Thursday.

The Chancellor, announcing “the dawn of a new era,” characterized this address as a “shared commitment by Berlin and Vilnius to safeguard Europe’s freedom against any aggressor.”

Merz asserted, “Lithuania’s security is our security. The defense of Vilnius is the defense of Berlin. Our common peace knows no geographical boundaries; it ends where we cease to defend it.”

Nausėda stated that the brigade’s deployment marked an “extraordinary event” in the country’s history.

The President added, “Their arrival reflects the shared values of Lithuania and Germany, our time-tested friendship, and ultimately the remarkable progress our strategic partnership has made in recent years.”

Nausėda then addressed the German soldiers in German, expressing gratitude for their presence in Lithuania.

The visit to Lithuania follows Merz’s pledge to transform the German army into Europe’s most powerful military force.

The 5,000-strong Lithuanian Brigade has established its headquarters in Rūdninkai, just 30 km south of Vilnius, with support elements deployed in Rokantiškės and Nemenčinė.

According to information provided to Euractiv, up to 10,000 German soldiers and their family members could eventually be stationed in Lithuania.

The brigade is anticipated to achieve full operational capability by 2027.

The brigade will be deployed in the Suwalki Gap, the narrow corridor between Kaliningrad and Belarus, which is regarded as a critical point in a potential conflict between NATO and Russia.

Germany’s move mirrors commitments made by France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, who respectively lead NATO battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

The deployment of the German army is also reshaping Vilnius: German language schools and housing projects are already underway, and discussions are ongoing regarding the establishment of a German radio station in the country.

Germany’s renewed focus on the Baltics, after two wars, coincides with the deepening of industrial ties between Berlin and Vilnius.

German defense giant Rheinmetall, a key supplier of Leopard tanks and artillery shells, is expanding its presence in Eastern Europe by opening new factories in Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary.

A major 155 mm artillery shell factory is under construction in Lithuania’s Radviliškis region.

Meanwhile, Lithuania is doubling its investment in German equipment and technology, ranging from Leopard 2 tanks to Boxer armored vehicles.

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.

Romania’s Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal by George Simion, leader of the right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), to annul the results of the second round of the presidential elections.

According to a statement from the court, the election results, which saw Nicușor Dan, Mayor of Bucharest and founder of the Save Romania Union (USR), win with 54.33% of the votes, remain valid.

Simion had secured 45.67% of the votes in the second round.

The statement read, “Following deliberations, the Constitutional Court unanimously rejected the request for the annulment of the elections on the grounds that it was unfounded. The decision is final and will be communicated to the Central Electoral Bureau.”

Nicușor Dan, the election winner, based his campaign on combating corruption.

Dan proposed judicial system reforms and harsher penalties for abuse of power. His platform also included promises such as the complete digitalization of public services, tax reductions for small businesses, and attracting foreign investments.

In foreign policy, Dan advocates for deeper integration with the European Union (EU) and continued support for Ukraine.

Regarding the elections, on May 18, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, stated that a Western European government had approached him with a request concerning the elections in Romania.

Durov added a baguette emoji, symbolizing France, asking his followers to guess which country was attempting to influence the situation. However, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied these claims.

At the time, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitriy Peskov commented that the interference of European countries in the internal affairs of other states was not a new situation for him.