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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The eminent Harvard and Univ. of Chicago educated American-Lithuanian professor and public affairs analyst, Kęstutis Girnius, tried a decade and a half ago to mobilize support for a far-right inspired dry-clean of the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF, Lietuvių aktyvistų frontas, “white armbanders”) which was the 1941 organization that did not shoot a rabbit when the Soviets were in power (1940-1941) but began to murder thousands of innocent Jewish neighbors the moment the Soviet army started its panicked flight eastward, and there was no authority to stop them. Hitler’s local henchmen declared an “independence” that included the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the commitment to rid Lithuania of all its Jews, and the unleashing of barbaric murder before the Germans even arrived or set up their control. Any true friend of Lithuania will understand that this is the kind of pro-fascist revisionism that beautiful, modern, tolerant, democratic Lithuania needs like a hole in the head.
Girnius’s gushing public announcement of the new initiative to whitewash the LAF was announced in an article in Delfi.lt this week, heralding the formation of a group of Conservative (Homeland Union party) members of parliament who are forming a “collegium” for this task. If that’s correct, it would, in one fell swoop, undermine the magnificent contributions of so many great truth-telling Lithuanian ethicists of the past three and a half decades, including Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Saulius Beržinis, Aleksandras Bosas, Valentinas Brandišauskas, Algirdas Brazauskas, Leonidas Donskis, Silvia Foti, Andrius Kulikauskas, Liudas Truska, Rūta Vanagaitė, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Tomas Venclova, Linas Vildžiūnas, and numerous others.
“On 11 March [2025], a group of Conservative Party members set up the June Uprising Collegium with the aim to ‘properly assess and legitimize the uprising as a significant historical event’ which had decisive influence on the subsequent struggle for Lithuanian independence.” — K. Girnius in Delfi.lt. See also the press release on the official website of the Seimas.
Leonidas Donskis answers from the grave with his essay aptly titled: ‘When will the truth finally set us free’? See also his other essays in Defending History. Milan Chersonski, longtime editor of the Lithuanian Jewish community’s newspaper, also answers from the grave…
Girnius’s new “revisionism launch” takes out of context quotes from two of them, Donskis and Venclova, in a lame effort to recruit them to this pathetic cause. But the tragically prematurely departed Leonidas Donskis (1962-2016) answers him today from the grave. It seems the original Delfi.lt link to Donskis’s 2010 essay was taken down (but a version was published by Bernardinai in 2019). Back in 2010, the prescient and brilliant Lithuanian thinker asked Defending History to arrange and publish an English translation of his essay, which he personally edited and approved. Before that year was out, Defending History also arranged for translation and publication of an essay in the debate by philosopher Nida Vasiliauskaitė.
White-armbander “patriotic freedom fighters” surround Jewish women in Kaunas en route to being slaughtered.
If readers who may be far from these issues would like some simple samples of what the LAF was all about, they can check out the eyewitness testimonies from dozens of towns. They can read the LAF leaflets from before June 1941 in which the LAF made crystal clear what they were going to do to the Jews of Lithuania. They can read from a wide array of historians’ accounts. For those who can follow Yiddish, an archive of video excerpts (soon to be enlarged from the main corpus), has eyewitness accounts of the last survivors (among them the Lithuanian Jewish community’s own stalwarts whom we knew so well) recounting exactly what happened to their families at the hands of the LAF before the Germans even came. Many more testimonies are to be found in Yad Vashem and Spielberg project archives. In his epic work on the Holocaust, the late Yitzhak Arad, a former director of Yad Vashem estimated 10,000 pre-German deaths across Lithuania. The late Prof. Dov Levin documented slaughters in at least forty towns.
Historians have long documented Nazi Germany’s plans for Lithuania after its envisaged victory. In short, there would have been no Lithuania to become independent in 1990. It was one thing to be fooled in 1941. Another to continue to be fooled in 2025. Some of Prof. Girnius’s admirers are most shocked by his attempt at comparing the LAF with Pétain and the Vichy government in France, not least because that raises the most salient difference, that he overlooks: the LAF were themselves the actual murderers of thousands of their neighbors, not just facilitators of deportations and informers on those in hiding. Yes, the professor thinks that “legitimizing” the murderers of thousands is a good idea. That is exponentially more inexplicable than some hypothetical effort by a respected French professor to glorify Vichy and Pétain.
“Lithuania has magnificent true heroes from the last week of June 1941: those who risked everything to defy the Hitler-worshipping LAF thugs and the approaching Germans to just do the right thing and save a neighbor from the impending genocide. They are the ones who deserve a new initiative of remembrance and appreciation. Lithuania is a major European nation with inspiring heroes spanning a millennium. Who on earth would want to sully the pantheon with Hitlerist killers whose victims were Lithuanian citizens?”
Last but not least, some will have noticed that some of the major players in the modern debate are philosophers, political scientists, and other scholars from an interdisciplinary mosaic of fields. We might add semiotics, linguistics, and perhaps even common sense in the spirit of critique we have been fortunate to have inherited from George Orwell. You see, friends, an “Uprising” (or “Rebellion”) only occurs against the powers that be. Therefore, there was no uprising or rebellion. As noted at the outset, the LAF did not shoot a rabbit when the Soviets were in power. When the Red Army fled in panic (not from them, but from Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history), the LAF and its white-armbanded comrades took the opportunity to butcher thousands of Jewish citizens of Lithuania (and then to rush to help the Germans kill many more before being disbanded themselves by their “liberators” after which most melted into the thousands of volunteer killers serving the Nazi occupation). It was the LAF that first ended Lithuania’s 600 year run as Eastern Europe’s most tolerant and enlightened country, when they launched the Holocaust locally on 23 June, 1941, the date virtually all Litvak survivors agreed on as start of the Holocaust in their land.
Let us now see which professors, politicians, editors, artists, playwrights, museum directors, and other cultural leaders will speak up in public, proudly and rapidly, for the honor of Lithuania and against this latest attempt to find the nonexistent humanistic face of Nazism.