There are essentially three trajectories
in the historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania that characterize the
writing about the topic over the past seventy years: the transition from
intentionalism to functionalism; the increasing availability of archival
documents; and the issue of Lithuanian guilt. Our understanding of the
Holocaust at large is one that has been more shaped by functionalism than
intentionalism at least since the 1990s when, not coincidentally, archival
materials from the former Soviet Union first became broadly available. In
addition, while Soviet control of postwar Lithuania discouraged an honest
discussion of the Holocaust there, the last twenty-five years have been
characterized by vociferous debate.
The intentionalist point of view,
expressing the idea that the Nazis came to power with the intention of
exterminating the Jews of Europe, was predominant in the historiography of the
Holocaust until 1961. The functionalist viewpoint, which states that
extermination was a decision reached gradually and in the summer of 1941 at the
earliest, began to emerge in the literature when Raul Hilberg published The
Destruction of the European Jews in 1961.[1]
Hilberg theorized that the far-flung bureaucracy of Nazi Germany and
competition among various ministries, the party, and the SS resulted in a
gradual movement toward genocide. Martin Broszat's Der Staat Hitlers,[2] published in
1969, while not limited to the Holocaust, nevertheless argued that Nazi
Germany, rather than being an autocratic state, was a polycracy that pushed
forward and concretized vague agendas.
The debate between intentionalism and
functionalism raged mostly during the 1970s and 1980s, with the assumptions of
moderate functionalists beginning to receive confirmation with increased access
to Soviet archives. Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners,[3] published in
1996, was likely the final gasp of radical intentionalism. Goldhagen's thesis
of an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" lying at the heart of the
National Socialist project, was greeted mostly by derision. The prevailing
functionalist viewpoint on the origins of the Holocaust is most succinctly
stated in Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution,[4] published in
2006. Browning sees key roles for independent initiative and "cumulative
radicalization" in the evolution of Nazi genocide.
As noted, the increasing availability of
sources was essential to the shift from intentionalism to functionalism. Some
of these documents became available before 1991 and the disintegration of the
USSR; e.g., the so-called Jäger Report, which describes in painstaking detail
the course of the Holocaust in Lithuania through December 1, 1941, was only
provided by Soviet authorities in 1963 – four years after Karl Jäger's suicide
while awaiting trial. Given the extent to which the document corroborates the
notion of cumulative radicalization, it is not surprising that Browning's
theory could only be truly supported documentarily with access to Soviet
archives.
In addition, Gerald Fleming's Hitler
and the Final Solution, published in 1984,[5]
was among the first works by a western historian to incorporate Russian
archival material. Although Fleming tended to take an intentionalist view of
the Holocaust, his work nevertheless presaged the watershed of Soviet documents
that entered the research a decade later. Fleming's own work was not focused
specifically on Lithuania but rather on Latvia; however, given the related
policies implemented in these bordering countries, Fleming's research boded
well for the future of knowledge about the Holocaust in the Baltic States.
There are obviously numerous reasons for
the desire of the Soviets to limit access to archival documents. The reasons
that are relevant to the Holocaust in Lithuania are essentially two: first, a
desire to suppress the specifically Jewish nature of the vast majority of the
victims of the Nazis in the Baltics so that a mythos of fascist aggression and
the Soviet peoples at large could be promoted; and second and more important to
this analysis, an impulse to suppress nationalism across the Soviet Union but
especially in the Baltic States, the incorporation of which into the USSR was
highly contested by both the countries themselves and the outside world.
The Soviets' offensive against Lithuanian
nationalism was largely accomplished through the painting of all Lithuanian
nationalists as collaborators with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity.
For instance, while it presents a collection of extremely important documents
for understanding the Holocaust in Lithuania, the volume Documents Accuse,[6] published in
1970 under the auspices of the government of the Lithuanian SSR, offers
virtually no nuance in distinguishing blameless elements of the Lithuanian
nationalist movement from those who committed war crimes. Conversely, the
roughly contemporaneous book published in 1968 by the Lithuanian-American
historian Algirdas Budreckis, The Lithuanian National Revolt of 1941,[7] which
specifically treats the period during which spontaneous violence by Lithuanian
committed against Jews was most common, glosses over this violence in fewer
than ten pages and essentially ascribes it to a few bad apples.
This
tension in the historiography was of course reflective of that between
Lithuania and the USSR itself; it is little wonder, therefore, that Lithuania
was among the first republics to declare its separation from the Soviet Union.
As noted, the dissolution of the USSR resulted in an abundance of newly
available documents, but this watershed of evidence has not abated the
intensity of the debate over Lithuanian collaboration. While many Lithuanian
historians have undertaken honest attempts to investigate the issue of
Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust, others have espoused a theory of
"double genocide," which alleges that the Soviet occupations of
1940-41 and 1944-1991 were as bloody and genocidal as that of the Nazis.
Related to this dispute is the issue of
Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation in 1940-41, which remains
contentious due to its connection to anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s and
1940s. Perhaps the most controversial development regarding this aspect of the
debate was the suggestion that the Lithuanian-born Israeli Holocaust historian
Yitzhak Arad be prosecuted by the Lithuanian government for war crimes on the
basis of his membership in a Soviet partisan group during the war.[8] Also central
among the disputes today is the extent to which violence committed by
Lithuanians against Jews, particularly the street violence and pogroms of the
first few weeks of the Nazi occupation, was spontaneous or was directed behind
the scenes by the German occupation authorities. This dispute is similarly
unresolved.
In conclusion, the complexity of the
historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania has not decreased with time. The
contributions to this complexity of the intentionalist/functionalist debate and
of geopolitical changes in eastern Europe should not be underestimated.
However, the key factor complicating a fuller understanding of this difficult
topic is the issue of Lithuanian guilt via collaboration, which has erupted in
the last quarter century after being assumed, if not assured, by heavily biased
Soviet historians. There is still much to learn about this subject, but the
ferocity of the current debate has at least generated an impressive amount of
source material, aiding significantly our attempts to attain a better
understanding of this history.
[1] Raul Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1961).
[2] Martin Broszat, Der
Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1969).
[3] Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf, 1996).
[4] Christopher
Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska
Press, 2006).
[5] Gerald Fleming, Hitler
and the Final Solution (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1984).
[6] Documents
Accuse, edited by B. Baranauskas, K. Ruksenas, and E. Rozauskas (Vilnius:
Gintaras, 1970).
[7] Algirdas Martin
Budreckis, The Lithuanian National Revolt of 1941 (Boston: Lithuanian
Encyclopedia Press, 1968).
[8] See, e.g., “Yitzhak
Arad: Lithuania wants to grill top Israeli historian over war crimes,” History
News Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/42750, accessed May 15,
2017.
