The Holocaust resulted in the near total eradication of Lithuanian (Litvaks) and Polish Jews[a] in Generalbezirk Litauen of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Nazi-controlled Lithuania.

Of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews at the time of the Nazi invasion, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were killed before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941.

More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered over the three-year German occupation,[1] a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust.

[4] The events in the western regions of the USSR occupied by Nazi Germany in the first weeks after the German invasion, including Lithuania, marked a sharp intensification of the Holocaust.

[5][6][b] The occupying Nazi German administration fanned antisemitism by blaming the Soviet regime's annexation of Lithuania in June 1940, on the Jewish community.

Franz Walter Stahlecker, the SS commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe A, told Berlin that by 28 June 1941 3,800 people had been killed in Kaunas and a further 1,200 in the surrounding towns.

[6] The first recorded action of the Einsatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppe A) unit took place on June 22, 1941, in the border town of Gargždai (called Gorzdt in Yiddish and Garsden in German), one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the country and only 18 kilometres (11 mi) from Germany's recovered Memel.

[1][3][19] Nazi SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker arrived in Kaunas on 25 June 1941 and gave agitation speeches in the city to instigate the murder of Jews.

In an October 15 report, Stahlecker wrote that they had succeeded in covering up their vanguard unit (Vorkommando) actions, and made them look like initiatives of the local population.

[20][failed verification] Groups of partisans, civil units of nationalist-rightist anti-Soviet affiliation, initiated contact with the Germans as soon as they entered the Lithuanian territories.

[1] A rogue unit of insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis and encouraged by Germans from the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, started anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas (Kovno) on the night of 25–26 June 1941.

[12] The most notorious Lithuanian unit participating in the Holocaust was the Ypatingasis būrys (a subdivision of German SD) from the Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) area which[citation needed] killed tens of thousands of Jews, Poles and others in the Ponary massacre.

[3][19] The involvement of the local population and institutions, in relatively high numbers, in the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry became a defining factor of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

[6][7]^ Other scholars say the Holocaust started in September 1939 with the onset of the Second World War,[31] or even earlier, on Kristallnacht in 1938,[32] or with Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

The post-Soviet Lithuanian government has on a number of occasions commemorated the Holocaust, made attempts to combat antisemitism, and brought some Nazi-era war criminals to justice.

[26] The National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry have said "Lithuania has made slow but significant progress in the prosecution of suspected Lithuanian collaborators in the Nazi genocide".

[26] In 1995, president of Lithuania Algirdas Brazauskas, speaking before the Israeli Knesset, offered a public apology to the Jewish people for Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust.

In 2002 the Center declared its dissatisfaction with the Lithuanian government's efforts and launched Operation Last Chance, offering monetary rewards for evidence leading to the prosecution of war criminals.

"[39] In January 2020 Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis announced he would lead a committee to draft legislation declaring that neither Lithuania nor its leaders participated in the Holocaust.

The Lithuanian government-backed Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, which had previously been criticized for its whitewashing of the Holocaust,[citation needed] alleged that the plan to rename the streets was a plot by foreigners (mainly British and American).

[42] Landsbergis said the poem was an attempt to show the ignorance of Lithuanian antisemites and requested support from "at least one smart and brave Jew ... who does not agree with Simasius.

[6] Konrad Kwiet: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [...] The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signalling the beginning of the "Final Solution.

Published under the same title but expanded in Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A Moses, ed.

A LAF pamphlet read: "For the ideological maturation of the Lithuanian nation it is essential that anticommunist and anti-Jewish action be strengthened [...] It is very important that this opportunity be used to get rid of the Jews as well.

[...] The hospitality extended to the Jews by Vytautas the Great is hereby revoked for all time because of their repeated betrayals of the Lithuanian nation to its oppressors."

An extreme faction of the supporters of Augustinas Voldemaras, a group which also worked within the LAF, actually envisioned a racially exclusive "Aryan" Lithuanian state.

With the start of German occupation, one of Kaunas' newspapers – Į Laisvę (Towards Freedom), commenced a spirited antisemitic crusade, reinforcing the identity of the Jew with communism in popular consciousness: "Jewry and Bolshevism are one, parts of an indivisible entity.