Historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania

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.

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[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.