Nazi Germany brought the command to kill. German police shot 201 people at Gargždai on June 24, 1941; five days later Heydrich issued his first numbered operational order. Within weeks eight to ten Germans were directing mass murder through a far larger local apparatus.

Five days

On June 24, 1941, German police murdered 201 people at Gargždai, two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Five days later, Reinhard Heydrich issued Einsatzbefehl Nr. 1, the first of his numbered operational orders to the Einsatzgruppen commanders and the Higher SS and Police Leaders. The interval does not prove that one massacre dictated one order. It establishes that the numbered order followed field experience, and historian Konrad Kwiet supplies the connection the dates alone cannot. He describes the mass shootings in Lithuania as a testing ground in which techniques and practical experience were rapidly converted into a wider extermination policy.

Kwiet goes further. He records that Heydrich’s principal guidelines and operational orders were dispatched only after firsthand experience of murdering Jews in Lithuania. Senior SS and police officials exchanged information about the executions, their progress, their anticipated escalation, and the experience acquired. The killing system was tested in the field and then converted into procedure.

The accusation must remain exact. Nazi Germany did not learn antisemitism from Lithuania. It did not arrive without genocidal purpose, armed formations, directives, or authority to kill. German officials initiated the first border massacres. German units supplied the first firing squads. German commanders determined the targets and controlled the campaign.

Authorship, however, is not capacity. The operations in Lithuania showed how quickly an exterminatory command could become a repeatable system when a small German directing force was joined to prepared political networks, local intelligence, police offices, armed formations, vehicles, prisons, files, and men willing to use them.

Germany brought the command

The German chain is explicit. Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent directives from Berlin on June 23 and 24. Hans-Joachim Böhme, head of the State Police office in Tilsit, issued the first killing orders. German Order Police marksmen carried out the Gargždai shooting. Wehrmacht personnel volunteered at Kretinga. Twenty-two Luftwaffe conscripts reinforced the execution squad at Palanga.

No serious account can reverse that responsibility. The murder program was German from conception through command. The first border executions were German-staffed operations, not examples of a handful of Germans directing a large Lithuanian firing force. That model emerged later.

The concession does not absolve the Lithuanian apparatus. It identifies what changed. In the first days, local collaborators searched for Jews and communists, rounded them up, delivered them to German units, and guarded them at collection points until the German killers arrived. Within days, Germans began incorporating Lithuanians into the execution commandos. Identification, detention, guarding, transport, and shooting were being joined into one process.

The political input

The local component was not improvised after the invasion. Kwiet records prewar exchanges of intelligence between German security agencies and Lithuanian counterparts, including lists of common enemies. Lithuanians who fled to Germany after the Soviet annexation were recruited as agents and informers before Operation Barbarossa. They returned as guides, translators, and liaison officers connecting German units to local collaborators.

The strongest finding concerns Kazys Škirpa and the National Committee of Lithuania, formed in November 1940. Kwiet records that the committee linked restoration of a Lithuanian state to removal of Lithuania’s Jews. In the same account, Kwiet states that such pronouncements encouraged Heydrich and his experts to design the strategy of self-cleansing operations, distributing the work of the so-called Jewish question through indigenous forces.

This is not a theory that Lithuanians taught Germans to murder. It is a peer-reviewed historian’s stated line of influence from Lithuanian nationalist pronouncements into German operational design. The nationalist program presented a constituency for removal. The German security apparatus developed a method for exploiting it: instigate local violence, conceal German direction, and then absorb selected participants into disciplined formations.

Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, documented the mechanism in his own report. In the Nuremberg record, Document L-180, he wrote that it was initially difficult to set an extensive pogrom in motion, that the partisan leader Algirdas Klimaitis (rendered “Klimatis” in the document) succeeded only on advice from a small German advance detachment, and that the Security Police had to initiate and steer such self-cleansing movements while making the population appear to have acted on its own. The International Military Tribunal record preserves the document’s use in the prosecution. Spontaneity was staged, and the staging was written down.

On June 24, the German Army High Command (OKH) instructed the Eighteenth Army not to hinder Lithuanian participation in cleansing operations. On June 28, German authorities ordered irregular partisans disarmed while organizing a more disciplined formation from men they considered reliable: the National Labor Protection Battalion (Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas, TDA). Kwiet records pogroms in more than forty cities and villages, a quarter of Lithuania’s Jewish communities, with an estimated five to ten thousand Jews killed. German direction and local violence were not rival explanations. They were parts of the same design.

The apparatus beneath the order

Michael MacQueen reconstructs what he calls the “Revenge of the Iron Wolf.” He writes that the events of July 23-24, 1941, suggest a fascist coup within Lithuanian military and police structures. Officers associated with Iron Wolf ousted Smetonist officials, replaced the Kaunas commandant, and consolidated positions of command in the newly formed Lithuanian police battalions. MacQueen adds that they used Nazi sponsorship as leverage against their Smetonist rivals. A small ideological faction multiplied its power by capturing offices through which weapons, files, personnel, detention, and orders moved.

That seizure did not create the Holocaust in Lithuania. Jews had already been persecuted and murdered, and German agencies remained in command. The capture changed concentration and reach. It placed politically reliable men inside structures capable of translating German directives into arrests and deployments across dozens of towns.

The difference between assistance and apparatus is the difference between one shooting and a national system. An individual collaborator may identify a victim. An apparatus can identify a community, issue a circular, assign a police chief, select an assembly point, guard a road, requisition transport, seize property, deliver families to a pit, and report the numbers afterward.

Eight to ten Germans

The Jäger Report supplies the operational confession. Karl Jäger recorded executions by Lithuanian partisans on his instructions and under his command. He described a mobile killing detachment led by Joachim Hamann with only eight to ten men from Einsatzkommando 3, operating in collaboration with Lithuanian partisans.

The report’s tabulated total was 137,346 victims, overwhelmingly Jews. Its figures contain three small internal inconsistencies: a transposed carry-forward between pages three and four, a one-victim divergence between the Rokiškis narrative and its tabulated entry, and Jäger’s later handwritten revision of the total to 138,272 on February 9, 1942. None disturbs the organizational record. A tiny German cadre could move from district to district because the larger labor force was local.

Jäger’s organizational explanation was explicit. He called the undertaking primarily a question of organization. Rokiškis shows what he meant. Before 3,208 people could be murdered, they had to be moved about 4.5 kilometers. More than sixty of the eighty Lithuanian partisans available were assigned to transport and cordon duty. The remainder, repeatedly relieved, worked with the German men at the killing site.

This was the system in its clearest form. Germans supplied command, the directing cadre, and authority to kill. Lithuanian partisans and local officials supplied scale. They assembled victims, controlled movement, secured routes, guarded sites, and participated in execution. The number of available German shooters no longer determined how many Jews could be murdered.

Arūnas Bubnys identifies the Third Company of the TDA battalion – later designated the 1st (13th) Lithuanian Police Battalion – as the unit that carried out shootings. His research names 104 officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers of that company as shooters and attributes at least 36,000 Jewish deaths to the battalion acting with German Gestapo personnel and auxiliary police. Independently, the Jäger Report records that Hamann’s eight to ten Germans operated with Lithuanian partisans throughout the districts.

The rehearsal was escalation

The word rehearsal does not describe a practice run in which the victims survived. It describes the rapid conversion of lethal experience into a more efficient and expansive policy.

Kwiet traces the progression. Jewish men were killed first. Women followed in July. Children were included from mid-August. The countryside was then cleared district by district while survivors were concentrated in the remaining ghettos. The category of victim widened as the machinery became more mobile and administratively complete.

The same progression appears in the division of labor. The first border shootings relied heavily on German marksmen. Local collaborators initially identified, assembled, and guarded. They were incorporated into execution commandos. German occupation authorities reorganized local armed groups into disciplined battalions. By autumn, the problem was no longer whether a Jewish community could be destroyed. It was how to schedule the operation, locate the pit, marshal guards, move the victims, and complete the district.

Germany brought a genocidal objective to Lithuania. Kwiet’s account shows that experience there demonstrated feasibility. Lithuanian nationalist pronouncements supplied a program of exclusion that German planners could exploit. Agents supplied intelligence and liaison. Police and partisans supplied reach. Administrative offices supplied continuity. The result was not merely assistance with isolated German crimes. It was participation in the construction of a repeatable extermination process.

Selective compliance

Silvia Foti’s The Nazi’s Granddaughter does not establish the German command chain. Its useful contribution is narrower. Foti places Jonas Noreika’s signed orders concerning Jewish ghettoization and property beside the record invoked by his defenders to portray him as capable of resisting German demands when Lithuanian interests were at stake. Her separate claim that Plungė was the first European city in which Jews were killed on a massive scale is not adopted here; Kwiet’s chronology records earlier shootings in occupied Poland and at Gargždai.

On the Lithuanian Genocide Centre’s own account, Noreika helped frustrate formation of a Lithuanian SS legion. His defenders also credit him with interventions against German seizures affecting Lithuanian farmers. Yet the signed orders preserved in the Noreika archive place his office within the persecution and dispossession of Jews. The contrast supports a straightforward inference from disclosed conduct: he resisted where he chose to resist and complied where the victims were Jews.

That inference follows from selective conduct documented in the record. It does not depend on mind-reading. Men who could obstruct German demands on other matters administered measures marking, confining, and dispossessing Jewish citizens. Refusal existed. Choice existed. The defense’s own examples establish both.

No collective guilt

Kwiet expressly records that participation was not universal. Lithuanians condemned the violence, turned away from it, and defended Jewish lives. Their conduct does not weaken the indictment. It proves agency. The apparatus was built by identifiable movements, offices, commanders, police units, partisans, and officials. Other Lithuanians chose differently.

The target is not a people. It is the documentary chain: Škirpa’s political program as Kwiet describes it; German security planning; local agents and lists; staged pogroms; disciplined battalions; captured police structures; Hamann’s small German cadre; Lithuanian partisans at collection points and pits; and perpetrator reports that converted murdered communities into totals.

The familiar defense that Nazi Germany planned the Holocaust answers a charge no serious historian makes. Germany designed and commanded it. The question is how that command became capable of destroying Lithuanian Jewry almost entirely, and at such speed. Kwiet records 220,000 Jews in Lithuania when Germany attacked and roughly 8,000 survivors. MacQueen places the Jewish population resident on what was Lithuanian territory as of October 1939 at 210,000 to 220,000 and states that more than 200,000 did not live to see the end of the war.

The sources answer. German power joined prepared local networks. Field experience circulated. Numbered orders followed. The victim category expanded. Eight to ten Germans could direct district operations because named Lithuanian units and local offices performed much of the identification, assembly, transport, guarding, administration, and killing.

What Lithuania demonstrated

Lithuania did not invent the Holocaust. Lithuanian perpetrators did not teach Nazi Germany to hate Jews or introduce Germans to mass shooting. Those claims are unsupported and unnecessary.

The supported accusation is more exact. Kwiet states that pronouncements from Škirpa’s National Committee encouraged Heydrich and his experts to design the self-cleansing strategy. Kwiet also records that operations in Lithuania supplied firsthand experience, practical lessons, and evidence of feasibility before Heydrich completed the numbered operational orders and working guidelines. The Jäger Report then demonstrates how German command could scale murder far beyond the number of Germans available to perform it.

That is what was rehearsed in Lithuania: not the desire to murder Jews, but a system that made total murder administratively repeatable.

Germany supplied the command. Named Lithuanian movements, units, officials, and partisans supplied much of the local machinery. The perpetrator records establish what their cooperation made possible.

Source note: The chronology and testing-ground analysis are attributed to Konrad Kwiet; the institutional-capture analysis to Michael MacQueen; the figures, organizational descriptions, and quoted admissions to the Jäger and Stahlecker perpetrator records; the TDA findings to Arūnas Bubnys; and the Noreika documents and selective-compliance evidence to the cited archive and Silvia Foti. The conclusion that these facts establish a repeatable killing system, and the stated inference concerning selective compliance, are the author’s analysis of the disclosed record. English wording follows the cited published translations.