OPINION | LEGACY OF 23 JUNE 1941 | 2011 ATTEMPTS TO SANITIZE THE LAF | LAF’S INTENTIONS IN WRITING | ŠKIRPA’S PLANS | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | LITHUANIAN JEWISH AFFAIRS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS
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OPINION
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by Dovid Katz
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In the opinion of every Lithuanian Holocaust survivor interviewed, the magnificent six-century record of tolerance and enlightened coexistence, including the years of the successful interwar Lithuanian Republic, were in a single day, June 23rd 1941, replaced by the eruption of barbaric mass murder that is all too well documented. It is “Barbarossa Plus One” (the major killing started one day after Hitler’s invasion was launched, in survivors correct memory: the Monday after the Sunday). The far right’s history department, sometimes rewriting history on an industrial scale with support from certain state agencies (most infamously, the “Genocide Center”), has attempted to “fix” this by ignoring the facts and claiming that this was actually the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) leading an “uprising” which drove out the Soviet army and restored independence.
That is of course utter nonsense. The Soviets fled Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history, not the local white-armbander Jew-killers. As for independence, it was openly Hitlerite rule. Indeed, only a few weeks later the Germans confirmed in placards placed up and down the country that Lithuania was part of the new “Ostland”. Had the Nazis won the war, they would have made good on their plans to resettle the country. There would been no Lithuania to become independent decades later. None of this diminishes the enormity of Soviet crimes of the preceding year, not least the forcible occupation and destruction of the freedom of the Baltic peoples and their citizens of all backgrounds, unconscionable deportations, and imposition of the evils of communism.
