La réécriture de la Shoah en Lituanie d’après les sources lituaniennes

Abstract

This article aims to describe the attitude adopted by Lithuanians during the annihilation of Lithuanian Jews (both in Lithuania and elsewhere), based mainly on Lithuanian sources. Since 2006, a group of intellectuals has been working in Vilnius in order to minimize Lithuanian collaboration in the mass exterminations, while attributing the Lithuanian people the status of victims of a “Red Holocaust”.This approach of rewriting history is extremely misleading yet accepted in several former Communist East European countries. The genocide of the Jews and the suffering of the Lithuanians under the Communist regime are, without the least compunction, put on the same level. It seems that there were two kinds of “Holocausts” : a “Red Holocaust” and a “Brown Holocaust”. Since 2006, this has been the official policy of the Lithuanian government – a member nation of the European Union and of NATO.Between the end of June 1941 and mid-July 1944, Lithuania significantly collaborated with the Nazis and should be implicated in the genocide. In the summer of 1941, the temporary Lithuanian government did not take any measures to stop the pogroms. Lithuanian newspapers questioned each other’s anti-Semitism and the Catholic Church remained silent on the savage slaughter as thousands of Lithuanians volunteered to serve the Reich not only in Lithuania, but also in Belarus, Ukraine and Poland.The intellectualized deception that applied the political policy of the Soviet regime in Lithuania after 1944 (the deportations that took place in the USSR), with the extermination of an entire nation (the Jewish people), has recently been accepted by European institutions. This approach aimed, among other things, to disguise the role played by many Lithuanians in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, by presenting themselves as victims of a historical disaster of a genocidal type.