The Lithuanian Activist Front (Lietuvių Aktyvistų Frontas, the LAF) was a Lithuanian nationalist underground organisation founded in Berlin in November 1940 by Kazys Škirpa, the former Lithuanian ambassador to Germany. Its purpose was to organise an uprising against Soviet rule in Lithuania to coincide with the expected German invasion. The uprising began on 22 June 1941, the day the Germans crossed the border. By 25 June 1941, before any German troops had arrived, the LAF and the spontaneous mobs it had encouraged were already conducting pogroms against the Lithuanian Jewish population. The Kaunas pogrom of 25 to 27 June 1941 killed around 3,800 Jews. The German Einsatzgruppen, when they arrived, found a local population already conducting the killings the Germans had come to organise.
The pre-invasion preparation
The LAF leadership in Berlin had drafted, before the invasion, an explicitly antisemitic political programme. The 19 March 1941 LAF Memorandum laid out plans for the post-invasion Lithuanian state. The text called for the removal of Jews from Lithuanian economic and cultural life, the cancellation of Jewish citizenship rights, and, in language that was later cited at war crimes investigations, the solution of the Jewish question
on the German model. The memorandum was distributed in Lithuania through underground channels and reached the local LAF cells before 22 June 1941.
The Kaunas pogrom
The Kaunas (Kovno) pogrom began on 25 June 1941, three days after the German invasion. The local LAF cell, the Lithuanian Activist Front’s Kaunas command, conducted the killings with the encouragement and operational direction of the SS Einsatzkommando 3 under Karl Jäger that had arrived the same day. The most notorious single incident was the Lietūkis garage massacre of 27 June 1941, in which around 50 Jewish men were beaten to death with metal bars in front of a watching crowd in the courtyard of a city garage on Vytauto Prospektas. Photographs of the killing, taken by a German soldier, survive. They show the perpetrators in plain clothes, the bodies on the cobblestones, and the watching crowd, which included Lithuanian women and children. The killing took several hours.
The Kaunas pogrom over its three days killed around 3,800 Jews. The German participation was supervisory; the killing was done by Lithuanians.
The Einsatzkommando partnership
From early July 1941 the LAF formations were absorbed into a more formally organised Lithuanian auxiliary police, the Hilfspolizei, operating under the Einsatzkommando 3. The most important Lithuanian formation was the Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos Batalionas, the National Labour Defence Battalion, later renamed the Schutzmannschaft Bataillon 12. Around 200 men of this battalion conducted the September 1941 killings at the Ninth Fort outside Kaunas, in which around 9,200 Jews were shot in two days. The same battalion was sent to Belorussia in October 1941 and conducted further mass killings at Slutsk and Borisov. By the end of 1941, around 80 per cent of Lithuania’s 220,000 Jews had been killed, the highest national proportion of any country during the war. The killings had been conducted overwhelmingly by Lithuanian formations under German direction.
The Jäger Report
The most important single document on the Lithuanian killings is the Jäger Report, a comprehensive numerical accounting compiled by SS Standartenführer Karl Jäger, the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, dated 1 December 1941. The report records the killing of 137,346 people in Lithuania between 4 July and 25 November 1941, almost all of them Jews. The report names the locations and dates and gives daily totals. The killings were conducted by mixed German-Lithuanian teams, with the Lithuanian auxiliaries providing the bulk of the manpower.
The post-war
Soviet Lithuania conducted some prosecutions of the LAF and Schutzmannschaft personnel after the war, with sentences ranging from execution to long prison terms. Many escaped to the West and lived as Lithuanian émigrés in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The Lithuanian Activist Front leadership, including Škirpa, lived out the post-war period without prosecution. Škirpa died in Washington DC in 1979.
Post-1991 Lithuania has had a complex relationship with the LAF legacy. The Lithuanian state under Soviet occupation persecuted Lithuanians extensively, and Lithuanian national memory has tended to emphasise the suffering under Soviet rule rather than the Lithuanian role in the Holocaust. From the 2000s the Lithuanian government has been forced, by international pressure including from the European Union and the United States, to acknowledge the LAF role more frankly. The 2015 Šimon Wiesenthal Center report on Lithuanian war criminals identified specific individuals who had not been prosecuted; the Lithuanian government has prosecuted some, declined to prosecute others on grounds of advanced age, and continues to debate the question.
What it added up to
The Lithuanian killing operation was the most efficient national contribution to the Holocaust, in terms of percentage of the local Jewish population killed. The LAF and its successor formations did most of the work. Lithuania lost around 195,000 of its 220,000 Jews. The country’s Jewish community, around 700 years old, was effectively destroyed in eighteen months. The German occupation forces had directed the operation; the Lithuanians had carried it out.
Sources
- Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944, Wallstein, 2011
- Saulius Sužiedėlis, The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews, Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, 2006
- The Jäger Report, 1 December 1941
- Bundesarchiv: Schutzmannschaft Bataillon 12 records
- USHMM: Lithuania