Lithuanian Activist Front
The LAF planned and executed the June uprising and established the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania, which disbanded after a few weeks.
[1] In the first of the three invasions of Lithuania in the Second World War, the Soviets overthrew the government of Antanas Smetona in 1940 on the basis of a changing list of disparate pretexts.
[2] Many Lithuanians were relieved; newspapers had shut down, "the militia confiscated private property, ejected tenants from their homes, publicly called for liquidation of 'enemies of the people' and terrorized the population", and Smetona had stopped holding elections.
The widespread press coverage blames the local Communists but also Jews, who were stereotyped by the Lithuanian media of the time as closely associated with the Soviets.
The Provisional Government was short-handed when it took office on June 24, intending to exert the autonomy the Lithuanians hoped the Germans brought with them.
"The historic interplay between the growth of anti-Soviet resistance in 1940–1941 and the behavior of many pro-Nazi Lithuanian collaborators during 1941–1944 is a complex story of nationalist idealism, political naivite, ideological contamination, obsequious opportunism and criminal intent,"[16] wrote historian Saulius Sužiedelis.But the Nazis had no interest in an independent Lithuania and General feldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch issued a directive on June 26, 1941 to the commander of Army Group North under which "small armed Lithuanian groups and Lithuanian police" were to be disarmed and sent to concentration camps.
The German authorities did not use brute force, just established their own administrative structure, Reichskommissariat Ostland, and slowly deprived the would-be puppet government of its powers.
It lost all authority in a few weeks, and seeing no more reason to continue, dissolved on August 5, 1941,[citation needed] LAF as an organization remained in existence.
The Lithuanian Activist Front was banned on September 26, its property confiscated, and its leader Leonas Prapuolenis arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp.
The LAF section in Vilnius under Vytautas Bulvičius was dismantled by Soviet arrests just before the German invasion and even before that Lithuanians had only been a small minority of the city's population.
"[23] The LAF's pro-Nazi rhetoric and stridently anti-Semitic propaganda, equating Jews with Bolshevism, was widely disseminated in Lithuania prior to and during the June uprising and likely encouraged the local population to engage in mass violence against Jews that began prior to the arrival of Nazi forces in the country and continued during the Nazi occupation (1941–1945).
The hospitality that Vytautas the Great offered to the Jews in Lithuania has been revoked for all times for the ongoing betrayal of the Lithuanian nation."
]By some calculations, more than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was massacred during the Nazi occupation,[25] a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust.
[26][27] [28] The goal of the June uprising organized by the LAF was to seize control of Lithuania as Soviet forces retreated in the face of Germany's attack.
for example Žydų padėties nuostatai (English: Regulation on the Status of Jews), although according to some authors they were never actually adopted and were only considered by the Provisional Government.
Schutzstaffel General Brigadeführer and Security Police Chief of the Occupied Eastern Territories Franz Walter Stahlecker.
[35][36][37][29] Meanwhile, the LAF-established Provisional Government of Lithuania did little to oppose the anti-Jewish violence and murder carried out by the Nazis and their local collaborators.
[35] According to Lithuanian-American Holocaust historian Saulius Sužiedėlis, "none of this amounted to a public scolding which alone could have persuaded at least some of the Lithuanians who had volunteered or been co-opted into participating in the killings to rethink their behavior.
[42] Later Juozas Ambrazevičius actively participated in the anti-Nazi underground, and four members of the Provisional Government were imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps.
[43] There are allegations by certain journalists that, in 1973, a Committee of the United States Congress made conclusions that Prime Minister of the Provisional Government Juozas Ambrazevičius' and Jonas Šlepetys' were not responsible for the Holocaust in Lithuania.
