Black Earth(71)

The politics of mass killing was a joint creation, a meeting of Lithuanian experiences and Nazi expectations. Lithuanians had been involved with Soviet rule, and so Nazi Judeobolshevism offered them an opportunity that the Germans themselves did not fully grasp. Members of all national groups in Lithuania, not just Lithuanians and Jews but also Poles and Russians, collaborated with the Soviet regime. Jews were somewhat more likely to do so than Lithuanians, but since Lithuanians were far more numerous, their role in the Soviet regime was much more important. Lithuanians quickly grasped that the Judeobolshevik myth amounted to a mass political amnesty for prior collaboration with the Soviets, as well as the general possibility to claim all of the businesses that the Soviets had taken from the Jews.

Actual political experience yielded to remorseless racial logic, not only in side switching but also in the accompanying violent actions. Lithuanian activists told known Soviet collaborators that a bloody absolution of their political sin was possible. In killing Jews, Lithuanians who had worked for the Soviet order could get a new start in politics in the eyes of other Lithuanians—the ones with German connections, the ones who now seemed to matter. The one group that had certainly supported the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, members of the Lithuanian Communist Party, were actually allowed to join the Lithuanian Activist Front—provided that they were not Jews. Non-Jewish communists were thus free to switch sides and thereby obliviate their Soviet collaboration. Lithuanian communist youth held in prison were told that the price of freedom was a certain demonstration of loyalty to their country: They had to kill one Jew. Jewish communists, like Jews in general, could not join the Lithuanian Activist Front. No matter how patriotic or loyal to Lithuania a Jew might have been, he was now excluded from Lithuanian politics. In summer and fall 1941, large numbers of Jews who had little to do with the Soviet occupation were murdered by large numbers of Lithuanians who had participated in it.

Where the Soviets had annihilated a nation-state, the Judeobolshevik myth functioned better than the Germans expected. For Nazis, Judeobolshevism was a description of the world, and Lithuanians who could be motivated to kill Jews were minor assistants in the healing of the planet. Any political promises were, of course, meant in bad faith. The German suggestion that killing Jews was part of a political transaction was mendacious. By the end of 1941, the Germans had banned all Lithuanian organizations. The political resource had been consumed. At that point, almost all of the Jews of Lithuania were dead.

For the Lithuanians themselves there was, of course, a deeper politics, invisible to the Germans. If the Jews were to blame for communism, then the Lithuanians could not have been. Individual Lithuanians who killed Jews were undoing their individual past under the Soviet regime. Lithuanians as a collectivity were erasing the humiliating, shameful past in which they had allowed their own sovereignty to be destroyed by the Soviet Union. The killing created a psychological plausibility with which it was difficult to negotiate: Since Jews had been killed they must have been guilty, and since Lithuanians had killed they must have had a righteous cause.

Double collaboration in Lithuania was the rule rather than the exception. The Germans were encountering a Sovietized population that they did not meaningfully alter before some of its members began killing Jews. The Lithuanian soldiers who answered the call from the Lithuanian Activist Front to rebel were deserting from their Red Army units. The Lithuanian policemen who melted into the woods as anti-Soviet partisans had just been serving the Soviets and carrying out Soviet policies of repression. The Germans had neither the will nor the personnel to purge all of the hundreds of local administrations that had just been serving the Soviets—and certainly could not have done so in the brief time between their own arrival and the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence. The whole point of anti-Jewish violence, from a Lithuanian perspective, was to demonstrate loyalty before the Germans had time to figure out who had actually collaborated with the Soviets.

The Germans never did much alter the local administration; in general, the same people who enacted Soviet policy now enacted German policy. The Germans were concerned with removing top-level Soviet collaborators, but here they were rather hapless. Jonas Dainauskas, an officer of the prewar Lithuanian security police, had worked for the Soviet NKVD. When the Germans arrived he met with Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, to arrange the participation of his men in the killing of Jews. Juozas Knyrimas, who had worked to help the Soviets deport Lithuanian citizens, now joined the Lithuanian police and killed Jews. Jonas Baranauskas, who had worked for the Soviet police, joined the Lithuanian partisans and killed Jews.