How Holocaust collaborators remade themselves as anti-Communist refugees, used the Lithuanian émigré community as cover, and walked into the American establishment.

Stasys Žakevičius died peacefully in Los Angeles in 1973. Seven years earlier a federal court in the same city had made him a citizen under the name Zymantas-Zakevicius, and when he was buried beside his wife and father-in-law nothing in that quiet American ending recorded what his name had meant to the Jews of Vilnius in 1941.

Bronys Raila died in Los Angeles too, in 1997. Before the war he ran the propaganda arm of the Lithuanian Activist Front and helped write the political language that readied Lithuania for the destruction of its Jews. In America he became an influential émigré journalist and a Radio Free Europe broadcaster. In 1996, independent Lithuania awarded him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Gediminas.1

The propagandist and the administrator reached the same city. What their two lives share is a postwar arrangement that Lithuania has still not honestly faced.

I write this from Los Angeles, and that is not incidental to why I am writing it. The men in this account helped persecute and destroy Lithuanian Jews of exactly the kind I come from. I came to this particular history late, while studying for my doctorate, and found in it a shape I had only ever seen in fragments. It is harder to study once you understand that men who helped prepare and administer the destruction of Lithuanian Jewish communities like my family’s lived out their last years, comfortably, in your own city.

This account rests principally on Mallory Needleman’s 2019 University of Haifa thesis, American Intelligence, Lithuanian Collaboration, and Holocaust Atrocities in Lithuania: The Case of John F. Mazionis and Stasys Žakevičius, together with the published materials it identifies. Where archival detail appears below, it is reported as Needleman documented it from the CIA name file, the State Department personnel records, and the immigration and naturalization records she examined.2

The administrator

When the Germans took Vilnius in June 1941, Žakevičius became chairman of the Vilnius City Committee. On 28 June he broadcast a radio address calling the Jews “the backbone of the bloody Bolshevik terror” and announcing that they would be eliminated from the political, economic, and cultural life of Lithuania. The speech ran the next day in Naujoji Lietuva.3

The same paper carried an order announcing that 60 Jews and 20 Poles had been seized as hostages and held at Lukiškės prison, with a threat of further arrests if the population did not comply. Six of the 60 Jewish hostages were released on 22 July. The remaining Jewish hostages were murdered at Paneriai. The order was co-signed by the German military commander of Vilnius, and the Germans’ own internal report named Žakevičius as the leader of the Lithuanian city committee.4

On 4 July he issued a further announcement that ordered Jews to wear identifying badges, barred them from the sidewalks, and imposed a night curfew, warning that disobedience would bring the severest punishment. Another order required every resident to register as Aryan or Jew and to name everyone living in the home.5

None of this was private opinion. It was administration, signed and published over his name. Žakevičius was never tried, and his legal responsibility was never adjudicated. But the office he held, the orders he authored, and the persecution those orders imposed are matters of record.

The propagandist

Raila stood at an earlier point in the same machinery. As chairman of LAF propaganda he built the ideological warrant for exclusion. Needleman, citing the historian Saulius Sužiedėlis, records Raila’s claim that “the countless ‘Jewish breed,’ coddled by [President Antanas] Smetona, made Lithuania one of the most Jewish states in Europe,” his demand for a country purified of “Jews, parasites, and traitors,” and his declaration that the LAF “is determined to completely separate the Jews from the Lithuanian state.”6

Propaganda of that kind was not incidental to the killings that followed. It cast the Jews as an alien political threat and dressed their removal as national liberation. It taught Lithuanian society to accept the marking, the robbery, the ghettos, and finally the murder as acts of patriotism. Raila remade himself afterward as a Western anti-Communist intellectual, and his standing as a journalist and broadcaster quietly displaced the content of what he had written before. He died in Los Angeles in 1997.

Lithuania did not flee

The émigré story often tells the westward movement of 1944 as though the whole nation ran from the returning Soviets. It did not. The overwhelming majority of Lithuanians stayed, and they did not stay because Soviet rule was gentle. They stayed and lived through deportation, forced mobilization, imprisonment, the partisan war, and years of repression that fell hardest on people who had never touched a Jew.

Flight was the option of a smaller, more mobile, often educated minority. Many within it were ordinary refugees: forced laborers, conscripts, clergy, professionals, whole families, opponents of Soviet rule with nothing to answer for. But it also carried a second sort of passenger — occupation officials, security policemen, battalion men, political organizers, and propagandists whose wartime records gave them a sharper and more particular reason to leave. The general population feared Soviet power. This narrower class feared being recognized.

The ratline

The Lithuanian route was not the Italian or South American ratline of popular memory, run from a single office that arranged each crossing. It was looser than that, and more respectable. Men made their way to Germany, entered the displaced-person system, and presented themselves as anti-Communist refugees, as professionals or farmers or workers or intellectuals. Lithuanian parishes, cultural bodies, political committees, and private sponsors helped move them into the United States and the rest of the West.

They used the émigré community as their shield. They did not simply hide among innocent refugees; they borrowed the refugees’ moral standing. Parish sponsorship, community loyalty, and anti-Soviet politics let a man trade the dangerous question, what did you do under the German occupation, for the safe one, how did you resist the Communists. That substitution was the whole mechanism. The refugee’s identity supplied the cover and anti-Communism supplied the credential, while the innocence of the ordinary émigré became the wall the guilty could stand behind.

The American conversion

Žakevičius did not vanish into an émigré neighborhood. He made himself useful. Needleman, drawing on the CIA name file, describes his work with British and American operations aimed at the Soviet-held Baltic states, conducted under a cryptonym and tied into networks that ran clandestine infiltration and intelligence collection.

In 1955 he asked John Mazionis to help him reach the United States. Mazionis had spent years inside the American government and had worked in a joint State Department and CIA reporting program. He passed the request up through the CIA and called Žakevičius “extremely valuable” for planning psychological-warfare operations behind the Iron Curtain. Žakevičius flew in by chartered plane in October 1959 and settled in Los Angeles.7

The record Needleman assembles does not show that American officials had his 1941 orders in front of them when they recruited him, backed his admission, or approved his citizenship. It shows something almost worse. The wartime record and the Cold War value sat in one biography, and only the second one counted. Intelligence writers shrank his occupation role to that of an “advisor” to the German administration, and the historian Stephen Dorril concluded that the intelligence world dismissed or excused what he had done under the Nazis. The euphemism did the work of an acquittal.

The Lileikis proof

The institutional pattern is clearest in Aleksandras Lileikis, wartime commander of the Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius and a close associate of Žakevičius. Lileikis, too, went on to work for the CIA and to become an American citizen. Needleman reports that when Congress examined the relationship, the CIA claimed it had not known of Lileikis’s wartime activities when it recruited him. The record she cites showed otherwise: the agency knew enough to confront the question and chose to set it aside. Lileikis shuts off the excuse of innocent oversight: American intelligence did not always fail to find the past, and in his case it found the past and decided that usefulness against Moscow mattered more. The United States eventually stripped him of his citizenship, by which time the machinery that had admitted and sheltered such men had been running for decades.8

The Los Angeles endpoint

Žakevičius took American citizenship in Los Angeles in 1966. Needleman records that he died in 1973, at sixty-five, and was buried in the city beside his wife and father-in-law, never charged and never tried for what he had done to the Jews of Vilnius.9

Raila built the last decades of his life in the same city. The two men held different places in one chain. Raila supplied the language that marked the Jews for removal; Žakevičius turned that language into signed orders and administered the persecution. Neither answered for it. Both refashioned themselves as Western anti-Communists and settled into an émigré world that made resistance to Moscow the test of legitimacy while pushing conduct under Berlin out of view. The innocence of the ordinary refugees gave that world its moral standing, and men who were not innocent spent it.

That was the bargain. The West took the intelligence, the languages, the networks, and the anti-Soviet propaganda it wanted. The men who benefited took respectability and protection. The murdered Jews of Lithuania were given no hearing at all.

I live in the city where that bargain came to rest. My own people, Lithuanian Jews of the kind these men set out to erase, include relatives murdered in the Šiauliai region while chairmen signed the orders and propagandists wrote the slogans. Los Angeles is not only where this history is now recalled. It is one of the places where men who helped build the machinery that destroyed Lithuanian Jews finished their lives as respected anti-Communist émigrés, in peace, a few miles from the home I would one day make here.

Notes

“Bronys Raila,” Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija (VLE), https://www.vle.lt/straipsnis/bronys-raila/ (LAF antisemitic record; career at Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe; 1996 Commander’s Cross of the Order of Gediminas; death in Los Angeles, 1997; reburial in Kaunas, 2015).
Mallory Needleman, American Intelligence, Lithuanian Collaboration, and Holocaust Atrocities in Lithuania: The Case of John F. Mazionis and Stasys Žakevičius (MA thesis, University of Haifa, Weiss-Livnat International MA Program, 2019); supervised by David Silberklang and Hagit Lavsky.
Stasys Žakevičius, radio address of 28 June 1941, published in Naujoji Lietuva (Vilnius), 29 June 1941; Lietuvos Ypatingasis Archyvas (LYA), f. K-1, ap. 58, b. 38353/3 — as documented by Needleman.
Order on the seizure of 60 Jewish and 20 Polish hostages, Naujoji Lietuva (Vilnius), 29 June 1941; Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames, pp. 47–58 — as documented by Needleman.
Orders of 4 and 12 July 1941 (identifying badges, sidewalk ban, night curfew, and registration as Aryan or Jew), Naujoji Lietuva (Vilnius), 12 July 1941; Lietuvos centrinis valstybės archyvas (LCVA), f. 677, ap. 6, b. 1; Joseph Levinson, ed., The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania — as documented by Needleman.
Saulius Sužiedėlis, quoted in Needleman, on Bronys Raila’s LAF propaganda; see also the LAF “Directives for the Liberation of Lithuania,” 24 March 1941.
“Zymantas-Zakevicius, Stasys,” CIA name file, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Record Group 263, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) — as documented by Needleman. Mazionis’s intelligence service and his recommendation of Žakevičius as “extremely valuable” derive from the same file and the associated State Department personnel records.
U.S. Department of Justice, “Alleged Nazi Criminal Flees the United States and Returns to Lithuania,” Release No. 96-289, 19 June 1996, justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/1996/Jun96/289crm.htm. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns (Boston, 24 May 1996) ruled that Lileikis’s activities as head of the Lithuanian Security Police “clearly constitute” personal participation in persecution, and ordered his denaturalization. The separate claim that the CIA knew his wartime record when it recruited him is attributed in the text to Needleman.
Stasys Zymantas [sic] Naturalization Index Card (1966), U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, Los Angeles; Petition no. 273237; Naturalization Certificate no. 8884822 — as documented by Needleman.

Grant Arthur Gochin is a diplomat, journalist, and wealth advisor focused on historical accountability, Jewish continuity, and recognition doctrine. He serves as Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo and is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs of the African Union, representing all fifty-five AU member states. He is also Emeritus Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps.

Gochin is Advisor on Recognition Doctrine and Sovereignty to the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Office of the President, providing advisory guidance on international recognition, sovereignty theory, and comparative precedent relating to remedial self-determination.

His philanthropic work in Togo led to his investiture as Chief of the Village of Babade. Over several decades, Gochin has documented and restored Jewish heritage in Lithuania, including leading the Maceva Project, which mapped and preserved dozens of abandoned and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. His work exposed state-sponsored Holocaust revisionism and contributed to international recognition of systematic manipulation of historical memory.

Gochin is the author of *Malice, Murder and Manipulation* (2013), which traces the destruction of his family in Lithuania and examines postwar historical distortion. A consistent advocate against antisemitism, antizionism, and other forms of bigotry, he writes and speaks internationally on the political uses of history and the necessity of historical integrity for Jewish survival. His journalism confronts governmental misinformation and disinformation campaigns and maintains a firm position on Israel’s legitimacy and security grounded in historical evidence and collective survival.

Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner™ and wealth advisor based in California. He holds an MBA earned with academic distinction and leads Grant Arthur & Associates Wealth Services. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, son, and dog, Kelev.
https://www.grantgochin.com