The June Uprising in Lithuania

On 22 June 1941, in the first hours of the German–Soviet war, an anti-Soviet uprising broke out in Lithuania. It had been prepared since the autumn of 1940 by the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), an underground movement directed from Berlin by the former Lithuanian envoy to the Reich, Kazys Škirpa. On the morning of 23 June a declaration on the restoration of an independent Lithuania and the composition of a provisional government were read out from the radio station in Kaunas. The insurgents seized Kaunas and part of the provinces before the German troops arrived, and they expected the Germans to respect their state, just as two years earlier they had allowed Slovakia to exist. They miscalculated: Berlin did not recognise the government, and after a few weeks stripped it of all authority. In those same days Kaunas saw, at German instigation and at the hands of Lithuanian armed bands, one of the bloodiest pogroms of the summer of 1941. The first week of the war in Lithuania was thus at once the end of the first Soviet occupation, a brief moment of illusory independence and the beginning of the Holocaust of Lithuania’s Jews.

A year under Soviet rule

Lithuania lost its independence in June 1940, when Joseph Stalin took advantage of the defeat of France and, after a Soviet ultimatum, the Red Army occupied the country; in August it was incorporated into the USSR as the Lithuanian SSR. President Antanas Smetona fled to Germany and from there to the United States. Over the following year the new authorities nationalised land, banks, businesses and houses, dissolved parties and social organisations, closed non-communist newspapers and turned the Lithuanian army into the Red Army’s 29th Territorial Rifle Corps. The NKVD arrested former ministers, army officers, party activists and members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. Living standards fell sharply.

The final blow was the June deportation. From the night of 13–14 June 1941 the NKVD deported whole families into the depths of the Soviet Union: men to the labour camps, women, children and the elderly to “special settlements” in Siberia and Kazakhstan. According to NKVD reports and the findings of Lithuanian historians, about 17,500 people were deported from Lithuania; older studies gave 30,000–35,000. The deportations, halted only by the outbreak of war, strengthened Lithuanians’ conviction that whoever drove out the Soviets would be a deliverer. Many who were threatened with arrest hid in the forests and waited there for 22 June.

The Lithuanian Activist Front was founded in Berlin on 17 November 1940. Škirpa, formerly military attaché and from 1938 envoy in Berlin, gathered around him political émigrés ranging from Christian Democrats to nationalists. The Front’s aim was the restoration of an independent Lithuania, and the expected German–Soviet war was judged the best moment for an uprising. In the country there were two underground centres, in Kaunas and in Wilno (Vilnius), poorly connected with Berlin. The Wilno centre was largely broken up by NKVD arrests at the beginning of June 1941. Some LAF members were trained by German military intelligence and infiltrated into Lithuania; the Front depended on the Reich’s goodwill and made no secret of building on it. In April 1941 the composition of a future provisional government was agreed, with Škirpa as prime minister. On 14 June the German authorities demanded that Škirpa form no government and issue no declaration without their consent. He agreed, but he no longer had any influence over the underground at home.

From the outset the Front was an independence movement, but its propaganda adopted the stereotype of “Judeo-communism”, which identified the Jews with Soviet rule. An LAF leaflet of March 1941 called for preparations for the “hour of liberation” and warned the Jews that their fate was sealed. An appeal of June declared that Lithuania must free itself not only from Bolshevik slavery but also from the “Jewish yoke”. These slogans fell on fertile ground: some Lithuanians held the whole Jewish community responsible for the Soviet terror, although Jews too were among its victims and among those deported in June 1941.

22 and 23 June in Kaunas

At dawn on 22 June troops of two German army groups crossed the Lithuanian border: Army Group North, which occupied western and northern Lithuania, and Army Group Centre, whose left wing advanced on Wilno. The Luftwaffe bombed airfields and towns, among them the Kaunas airfield. The Red Army made no attempt to defend Kaunas. The Soviet authorities and the families of servicemen fled east, and chaos reigned in the city.

The LAF conspirators met in Kaunas at ten in the morning of 22 June in the Žaliakalnis district. They decided not to seek battle with the retreating units but to secure government buildings, communications and industrial plants and to proclaim independence as quickly as possible. By the evening, according to Lithuanian accounts, the insurgents had taken the presidential palace, the post office, the telephone exchange and the radio station, which the Soviets had damaged before leaving. It was repaired through the night. At 9.28 a.m. on 23 June the Lithuanian national anthem sounded on Kaunas radio, after which the LAF activist Leonas Prapuolenis read the declaration on the restoration of a free Lithuania and the list of members of the provisional government. He called on the population to guard public and private property, and on workers and policemen to protect the factories and keep order. The announcement was repeated several times in Lithuanian, German and French.

That same day the insurgents broke into Soviet arms depots on the outskirts and spread out through the city. They fired on stragglers and on Red Army columns fleeing east through Kaunas; the commander of the Soviet 188th Rifle Division reported fire from concealed positions in which his units allegedly suffered heavy losses. The insurgents saved the bridge over the Neris at Vilijampolė from demolition by cutting the wires to the charges. In Šančiai, the industrial district on the Neman, they fought units trying to cross the river. The Kaunas prison was opened, and out came political prisoners but also common criminals. Polish historiography, Tomasz Szarota in particular, points out that several independent groups were operating in Kaunas at the same time, joined by deserters from the Red Army, people looking to settle scores with the Soviet authorities and the social fringe. The LAF did not control them all.

In Wilno the uprising was much weaker. Lithuanians were a small minority of the city’s inhabitants, and the local LAF underground had been broken up. Only on 23 June did groups of insurgents seize the post office and the radio station and hoist the Lithuanian flag on Gediminas Tower. On the morning of 24 June German tanks entered the city.

A government without power

The provisional government held its first meeting on 24 June. Škirpa, the designated prime minister, could not take part: the Germans kept him under house arrest in Berlin and did not allow him to travel to Kaunas. Rapolas Skipitis, designated foreign minister, was not let out of Berlin either. Four other ministerial candidates had been arrested by the NKVD just before the war, and Major Vytautas Bulvičius, designated minister of defence and leader of the Wilno LAF, had been imprisoned at the beginning of June. The duties of prime minister were taken on by the minister of education, the literary scholar Juozas Ambrazevičius. The defence ministry was taken over by the pre-war commander of the Lithuanian army, General Stasys Raštikis.

The government behaved as if it were running a sovereign state. In six weeks it issued more than a hundred legal acts: it restored the pre-war districts and rural communes, returned nationalised land, houses and businesses to their owners, and created a police force and the nucleus of an army. At the same time, hoping for German recognition, it tried to show loyalty to the Reich. It did not extend its authority to Wilno and the Wilno region, which lay in the rear of a different German army group. A separate Lithuanian city committee was formed there.

The Germans did not recognise the government, but neither did they disperse it, unlike the Ukrainian nationalists who a few days later, on 30 June, proclaimed the restoration of a Ukrainian state in Lwów (Lviv) and soon ended up in German custody. The military command tolerated the Lithuanian ministers as long as they dealt with matters it did not itself want to handle. To the insurgents’ military ambitions, on the other hand, it responded quickly. On 26 June the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, ordered the Lithuanian armed units to be disarmed. In Kaunas the insurgents were disarmed between 26 and 28 June, and the last groups in the north of the country by 29 June. Some of them the Germans drafted into the newly formed battalions of the Lithuanian auxiliary police.

The insurgents, the Red Army and the NKVD

The front passed through Lithuania in less than a week. The only major Soviet counter-attack was the tank battle of Raseiniai on 23–27 June, which the Red Army lost. The first German scouts drove into Kaunas on the evening of 24 June and found the city in the hands of the insurgents. The main forces entered on 25 June. When Soviet tanks from around Jonava tried to return to Kaunas, the insurgents called on the Luftwaffe by radio for help, and it bombed the column.

The soldiers of the 29th Corps, Lithuanians in Soviet uniform, for the most part had no intention of fighting for the USSR. According to Lithuanian research, 7,000–8,000 of them deserted. Of the 184th Rifle Division, from around Varėna, reportedly only a few hundred men reached the east, and in the 179th Division, withdrawn from the Pabradė area, the Lithuanians mutinied on 27 June, already beyond the Lithuanian border; at least a hundred and twenty were killed trying to escape.

The fleeing Soviet authorities took several thousand prisoners east with them, and some whom they had no time to evacuate they murdered. On the night of 24–25 June NKVD officers, helped by soldiers, murdered 70–80 political prisoners, many of them after torture, in the Rainiai forest near Telšiai. On 26 June at the labour camp at Pravieniškės (PL) near Kaunas prisoners and some of the guards were shot, and in Panevėžys the doctors of the local hospital were killed. More prisoners from Lithuania died during the evacuation into the depths of Belorussia. The bodies of NKVD victims discovered in those days inflamed the desire for revenge.

The number of participants in the uprising has long been disputed. Memoirs and émigré studies spoke of 90,000–113,000 insurgents and several thousand dead. After 1990 Lithuanian historians, working from the archives, put it at 16,000–20,000 active participants and about 600 killed. In Kaunas alone, according to a registration carried out in July, some 6,000 insurgents were active in 26 groups. Soviet losses in the fighting with the insurgents are estimated at several thousand men, but they are hard to separate from the losses inflicted by the Wehrmacht.

The Kaunas pogrom

In June 1941 between 30,000 and 45,000 Jews lived in Kaunas, about a quarter of the city’s population. Several thousand of them managed to flee east in the first days of the war. Even before the Germans arrived, armed “partisans” were arresting Jews in the streets and in their homes, and the first killings probably took place on 24 June. The press and radio controlled by the LAF accused the Jews of shooting at the insurgents and of collaborating with the NKVD. The insurgents’ commandant of the city, Colonel Jurgis Bobelis, threatened to shoot a hundred Jews for every German killed while entering the city.

On the morning of 25 June the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, arrived in Kaunas. His task force was to murder Jews and communists and at the same time, in accordance with the instructions of Reinhard Heydrich, covertly to encourage “self-cleansing actions” by the local population, so that no German involvement would be visible. In a secret report of 15 October 1941 Stahlecker admitted that in Kaunas it had been “surprisingly difficult to set off a pogrom on a larger scale” and that it had been achieved thanks to the group of the journalist Algirdas Klimaitis, acting on the instructions of his unit. According to historians’ findings, the Germans organised Klimaitis’s unit from scratch, out of several hundred radicals, former political prisoners and criminals, and gave it German passes and transport. Members of other “partisan” groups joined in the killing.

On the night of 25–26 June the thugs burst into Vilijampolė, or Slobodka, the traditional Jewish quarter on the right bank of the Neris, and murdered the inhabitants house by house, with axes, knives and firearms. The rabbi of Slobodka, Zalman Osovsky, and his family were killed, as were students of the famous yeshiva, and synagogues and houses were set on fire. The number of victims that night is estimated at 800–1,000 in Slobodka alone; Stahlecker gave 1,500 for the whole city. Thousands of arrested Jews were shut up in the Seventh Fort of the Kaunas fortress, where they were held without water or food, while the guards shot them and raped the women.

On 27 June, in the yard of the Lietūkis cooperative garages on Vytautas Avenue, a massacre took place that became the symbol of the whole pogrom. Lithuanian civilians wearing white armbands brought Jews seized in the streets there, and a few killers clubbed them to death with iron bars before a crowd that included women with children and that applauded each killing. Several dozen people were killed, about sixty according to Polish studies. German soldiers and officers looked on; one of them took photographs, and several gave accounts after the war. A recurring detail in these accounts is that the cruellest of the killers, a young man whose parents had reportedly been murdered by the NKVD, stood on the pile of bodies when it was all over and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German accounts presented the massacre as the work of Lithuanians alone, but witness statements indicate that it began with German soldiers abusing Jews who had been herded in to clean the yard. Some authors identify the “death dealer of Kaunas” as Juozas Surmas, later a member of a Lithuanian auxiliary battalion, but this is not certain.

The pogrom lasted until 29 June. The Wehrmacht did not intervene; in his report Stahlecker praised his cooperation with Colonel General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4. When the Germans judged that the pogrom had served its purpose, they began disarming the bands. According to Stahlecker’s report, 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas by 28 June and a further 1,200 in the surrounding localities. Some historians regard these figures as exaggerated. The Jäger Report by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, attributes to Lithuanian “partisans” the killing of about 4,000 Jews in the Kaunas pogroms. Throughout Lithuania at least forty pogroms and unauthorised executions took place in those days.

Responsibility for these crimes has been disputed for decades. The initiative and the organisation came from the Germans, but those who did the killing were mainly Lithuanians, often people connected with the uprising. The provisional government did not publicly condemn the murders. According to a surviving record of 27 June, the ministers merely decided that public executions should be avoided, regardless of the measures that had to be taken against the Jews. The Lithuanian municipal authorities took part in confining the Jews to the ghetto in Vilijampolė, and on 1 August the government adopted regulations on the status of the Jews modelled on German legislation. The TDA battalion (Tautinio darbo apsauga, “National Labour Protection”), formed from insurgents at the end of June, was placed under German command and from the beginning of July shot Jews in the Seventh Fort.

27 June: the “official” start of the occupation

Some lists state that on 27 June “the occupation of Lithuania officially began”. No act announcing this was issued on that day. The occupation began on 22 June with the crossing of the border, and its successive stages stretched over the whole summer. At the end of June Lithuania came under German military administration. The disarming of the insurgents on 26–28 June showed who really ruled. On 17 July a decree by Adolf Hitler provided for the creation in the East of Reich commissariats subordinate to the ministry of Alfred Rosenberg, and at noon on 25 July authority in Lithuania passed to the German civil administration of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, headed by Hinrich Lohse. Lithuania became a general district (Generalbezirk) with its seat in Kaunas, under the General Commissioner Theodor Adrian von Renteln. The Wilno region was incorporated into it on 1 August.

The civil administration did not dissolve the Ambrazevičius government by force. It forbade it to print decrees, took over its offices and proposed turning it into an advisory council. The ministers refused to become puppets: on 5 August 1941 they signed a protest against the German seizure of power and ceased their activity. Lithuanian officials remained in the local administration, now as German “general counsellors” and lower-ranking officials.

Its place in the war

The June Uprising showed that the Lithuanians had not accepted Soviet rule voluntarily, as propaganda had claimed in 1940, and it hastened the German advance through the Baltic states. It did not, however, bring independence. In September 1941 the Germans banned the LAF and sent its leader at home, Prapuolenis, to Dachau. Škirpa spent the rest of the war in Germany under surveillance. Many of the Front’s activists joined the anti-German underground; others joined collaborationist formations. The Lithuanian police battalions, drawn partly from the insurgents, took part in the Holocaust in Lithuania and Belorussia.

The June pogroms were a prelude to organised extermination. From July Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3, with Lithuanian auxiliaries, shot Jews in the Kaunas forts and in the provinces, and from mid-August women and children as well. In his report of 1 December 1941 Jäger listed more than 137,000 people murdered, mainly Jews, and stated that there were no longer any Jews in Lithuania apart from those kept for labour in the ghettos. Of some 210,000–250,000 Lithuanian Jews, a few per cent survived the war. It was one of the highest proportions of victims in occupied Europe.

In 1944 the Red Army returned to Lithuania, and the Soviet authorities hunted down the insurgents of 1941 as “bourgeois nationalists” and collaborators. Ambrazevičius died in exile in the United States. The uprising remains a sensitive subject: for many Lithuanians it is a symbol of the will to independence, while for historians of the Holocaust and for the Jewish community it is inseparably linked with the pogroms. An attempt in 2000 to recognise the provisional government as Lithuania’s legitimate government and the ceremonial reburial of Ambrazevičius in Lithuania in 2012 provoked protests from Jewish organisations and from some historians, in Lithuania too.