On May 17, the remains of former head of Lithuanian Provisional Government of
June 1941 post Nazi invasion to be reburied in Vilnius.
On Thursday, May 17, the remains of Juozas Ambrazevičius, the head of the Lithuanian
Provisional Government established in the wake of the June 1941
Nazi invasion of the Baltics, will arrive in Vilnius from the United
States where he died in 1974, to be reburied in Kaunas (Kovno),
with full honors.
Besides an official ceremony at Vilnius International
Airport, there will be a religious service at the Church of the
Resurrection in Kaunas and a rich program of cultural events to
mark the occasion. In theory, this Ambrazevičius “festival” is
of no interest to non- Lithuanians, but anyone knowledgeable about
the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania will no doubt be disgusted
and shocked by the decision to honor the wartime political leader
as a Lithuanian hero.
In order to understand why honoring Ambrazevičius
is a national disgrace, the role played by Lithuanian extreme nationalists
during the years 1940-1941 must be explained. On October 17, 1940,
in Berlin, a group of politically right-wing Lithuanians, headed
by Lithuania’s ambassador to Germany Kazys Skirpa, established
the “Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF),” a political and military
framework whose goal was assist Nazi Germany to oust the Soviets
from Lithuania and thereby hopefully achieve at least some degree
of Lithuanian independence.
Needless to say, from the very beginning of its
existence, the LAF fully supported Nazi Germany and its plans for
territorial expansion, as well as its notoriously anti-Semitic
policies. Even before the Nazi invasion, the LAF called for the
cancellation of the Jews’ civil rights in Lithuania and incited
the local population to unleash violence against them.
Thus, for example, in a leaflet issued in Berlin
in June 1941 prior to the Nazi invasion, the LAF declared that:
“1. The old rights of sanctuary granted to the Jews in Lithuania
by Vytautas the Great [in the early 15th century – EZ] are abolished
forever and without reservation. 2. Hereby all Jews, without any
exception, are strictly ordered to immediately leave Lithuania.
3. ...Should it become known that.... Jews guilty of grave crimes,
manage to escape in secret, the duty of all honest Lithuanians
is to take measures on their own initiative to stop such Jews and,
if necessary, punish them....”
The Nazis invaded Lithuania on June 22, 1941,
but Kazys Skirpa was not allowed to return to Lithuania, and when
the Lithuanian Provisional Government was established by the LAF
the next day, it was Ambrazevičius who was called upon to lead
the political body which represented Lithuania’s aspirations for
independence. By this time, even before the Wehrmacht troops had
managed to reach most of the Jewish communities of Lithuania, serious
violence inspired by LAF anti-Semitic incitement had been unleashed
by local LAF supporters and others in some 46 different communities.
Jews were murdered, raped, wounded, robbed and humiliated by Lithuanian
nationalists who did not wait for the arrival of the Nazis to attack
their Jewish neighbors.
INSTEAD OF trying to protect their Jewish fellow
Lithuanian citizens and calling for a halt to the anti- Semitic
violence, the LAF stoked the flames and was a willing and zealous
partner of the Nazis. In fact, during its relatively short (43
days) existence, it managed to issue a myriad of anti-Semitic laws
which implemented the initial stages of the Final Solution of Lithuanian
Jewry. These included definition, Aryanization and concentration,
which paved the way for the annihilation of 96.4 percent of Lithuanian
Jewry, which was carried out with extensive local participation.
In fact, the only aspect of the measures against
the Jews which aroused the concern of the Provisional Government
was that executions were being carried out in public, so they issued
a recommendation that such killings should be avoided, although
all measures against the Jews should definitely be implemented.
Under these circumstances, the decision of the
Lithuanian authorities to honor Juozas Ambrazevičius is a grave
insult to the victims of the Shoah, and especially to those murdered
during the initial wave of violence inspired by the LAF and carried
out by its supporters. But therein lies the heart of the problem
and the motivation for Thursday’s grotesque festivities.
For it is precisely those crimes which the Lithuanian
government is especially trying to hide or deny.
Thus since independence, the Lithuanians have
been extremely reluctant to acknowledge the full, and very extensive,
scope of local participation in Shoa crimes and have tried to deflect
blame almost entirely to the Nazi invaders, but as far as the violence
committed before the Nazis’ arrival, the blame is exclusively Lithuanian
and therefore inexcusable, unless it is erased from the history
books. By honoring the leader of the Provisional Government, the
Lithuanian authorities seek to whitewash its crimes and the active
partnership of its leaders in the initial phase of the Holocaust.
As someone who has followed this issue in Lithuania
since it regained its independence in 1991, I cannot say that Thursday’s
events are very surprising, but what I find absolutely unacceptable
is the total lack of any meaningful protests from the State of
Israel, the United States and the European Union.
Ambrazevičius, it is true, was neither Hitler
nor Himmler but he was a zealous and willing partner, whose complicity
in Holocaust crimes was limited not by his compassion and humanity,
but rather by political circumstances.
To honor such individuals is to falsely rewrite
the history of the Shoa in Lithuania and insult the memory of its
victims, who deserve that at least the truth about their tragic
deaths be recorded for posterity, and those responsible for their
murder be publicly identified and shamed not honored.
jpost.com
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