What Lithuania Means When It Says Jews “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished” and Lost Herrings examined Lithuania’s vocabulary: Jews “vanished,” “perished,” or were “lost,” as if no one registered them, robbed them, beat them, marched them, shot them, or buried them. In Before Lithuania Prosecuted Fridman, It Warned Me, I described the written warning Lithuania placed before it later prosecuted Artur Fridman. This article supplies the name that vocabulary hides and that warning protects: Pranas Lukys-Jakys.
Lithuania has laws against “distortion,” prosecutors willing to pursue speech, and state institutions that lecture the world about occupation, resistance, and historical dignity. It now seeks to punish Artur Fridman for a Facebook post about Lithuanian nationalist memory. Fridman is presumed innocent. The prosecution itself is the state act at issue.
But there is a problem.
Germany tried Pranas Lukys, alias Jakys. Lithuania did not.
That single fact damages the architecture Lithuania has built around its own collaborators. The full documentary record on Lukys-Jakys is now assembled in a public forensic register.
This is not an exoneration of Germany. Germany initiated, directed, and administered the genocidal project. The narrower point is more damning for Lithuania: even postwar Germany convicted this Lithuanian perpetrator. Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews.
Pranas Lukys-Jakys was the Lithuanian Security Police chief in Kretinga, a Voldemarist nationalist actor, and a hands-on murderer inside the Einsatzkommando Tilsit killing zone. A West German court identified him, tried him, convicted him, and sentenced him. Twice. A senior German Holocaust historian has separately documented him personally shooting prisoners as they ran across a camp yard.
Germany convicted a Lithuanian perpetrator for participation in murder. Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews. Lithuania now seeks to punish a Jew for speech about the same universe of Lithuanian nationalist memory. This is not historical protection. It is state memory laundering.
The Lithuanian Security Police Chief
Lukys-Jakys was born in 1900 in the Raseiniai region. He served in the Lithuanian armed forces after the First World War, entered the criminal police of the Republic of Lithuania in 1923, and became tied to the Voldemarist political current – the radical nationalist milieu that looked to Nazi Germany and supplied personnel to the Lithuanian Activist Front.
After the Soviet occupation in 1940, he fled to Germany. The contemporaneous Stapo Tilsit report of 1 July 1941, signed by Hans-Joachim Böhme, identifies him as an agent of the Tilsit section of the German security forces. When the Wehrmacht entered Lithuania on 22 June 1941, he returned with the German advance and resumed a Saugumas role in the Kretinga district.
He stood where Lithuanian local knowledge, lists, nationalist violence, German police structures, and Jewish vulnerability converged. He supplied lists. He helped identify alleged communists and Jews. He worked through the local apparatus in which German security police, Lithuanian police, and white-armbanded Lithuanian auxiliaries made the killings executable.
On 24 June 1941, men aged fourteen to sixty were ordered to the Kretinga marketplace. Werner Hersmann of the Tilsit SD and Lukys separated alleged communists and Jews from the crowd. Jews were beaten and confined. The next day, according to Böhme’s report, 214 persons were shot at Krottingen/Kretinga. The victims included one woman. The same report records that 201 persons, again including one woman, were shot at Garsden/Gargždai on 24 June.
That detail matters. One central perpetrator defense at the postwar Ulm trial was that Jewish women were killed only later in summer 1941, on Stahlecker’s renewed orders. The primary German police record contradicts that comforting chronology. Women were already among the dead in the first days.
Germany Named Him
In April 1958, the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial opened in West Germany. It concerned the Tilsit killing apparatus, which murdered approximately 5,500 Jewish men, women, and children in the German-Lithuanian border zone in 1941. Lukys-Jakys was the only Lithuanian defendant.
The 1958 judgment convicted him in 315 cases and sentenced him to seven years’ Zuchthaus and five years’ loss of civil rights. The Federal Court of Justice set aside that conviction as to Lukys and Werner Schmidt-Hammer in February 1960 and ordered a new hearing. On 3 November 1960, after a retrial heard 57 witnesses, the Schwurgericht Ulm convicted Lukys again, this time in 103 cases of gemeinschaftliche Beihilfe zum gemeinschaftlichen Mord, accessory participation in communal murder, and sentenced him to five years’ Zuchthaus and two years’ loss of civil rights.
The reduction from 315 to 103 cases was not an acquittal of the killing system. It reflected narrowed proof on retrial under the Gehilfen doctrine. The operative fact remains: West Germany convicted Pranas Lukys-Jakys for participation in murder.
The findings were devastating. At Krottingen, the court found that he had been brought in before prisoners were transported to the killing site, carried a name list, and supplied information on which Hersmann relied. When Hersmann was inclined to release detainees, Lukys objected. At least two men were not released and were shot. The court rejected his attempt to cast himself as a rescuer. For the later Kretinga and Palanga killings, it found that he knowingly assisted extermination measures and understood the unlawfulness and criminal purpose of the orders.
Then came the phrase that should follow Lithuania into every diplomatic room where it pretends this history is ambiguous: the court described Lukys as “ein nur allzu williger Henkersknecht” – an all-too-willing hangman’s servant. That was a German court’s description of a Lithuanian Security Police chief.
Saturdays at Dimitravas
The Ulm court did not have the full picture. Christoph Dieckmann is the senior German Holocaust historian for Lithuania. In How Did It Happen?: Understanding the Holocaust, co-authored with Rūta Vanagaitė, he sets out the record of the Dimitravas camp in the Kretinga district.
At the end of July 1941, about five hundred Jewish women and children from Skuodas were marched on foot to the Dimitravas camp over two days. Sources differ on the precise distance: the original Dieckmann-Vanagaitė wording gives one figure, while a public memorial source gives a substantially longer route. The distance is not the point. The route, the two-day forced march, and the killings along the way are the point. Those who could not keep pace were shot. In the middle of August, prisoners at Dimitravas were shot by Lithuanian police from Skuodas and local participants. The Soviet Extraordinary Commission later opened four pits and found more than five hundred bodies, including children, teenagers, and women. Children were found without gunshot wounds.
And then this: “Kretinga police chief Pranas Lukys used to go to Dimitravas every Saturday to force people to run across the yard and then he shot them while they ran.”
Every Saturday. That is not the language of an accessory. It is the conduct of a man who scheduled his murders, made an appointment with the prisoners of Dimitravas, and arrived each week to shoot Jews and others as they ran.
Had the Dimitravas evidence been before the Ulm court, the accessory frame would have been materially harder to sustain. The Dieckmann-Vanagaitė record supports treating Lukys not merely as an accessory, but as a hands-on perpetrator. The two facts sit in the same documentary district: children buried alive, and the Kretinga police chief making weekly visits to shoot prisoners across the yard.
Lithuania Did Not Punish Him
Lithuania did not punish Pranas Lukys-Jakys for the murder of Jews. This is the center of the article.
In December 1941, German occupation authorities permitted a Lithuanian criminal complaint against Lukys, Gediminas Bražinskas, and Vincas Smilgys for killings, torture of detainees, sexual abuse of women, theft of the property of murdered Jews, and forgery of documents. Lukys was removed as Kretinga Saugumas chief. Secondary sources report that the German occupation apparatus later imprisoned him for unlawful appropriation of Jewish property and misuse of authority, not for the murder system itself. The precise date and file still require archival confirmation.
Even in cautious form, the point is revealing. The occupation system could police corruption inside the murder apparatus while treating the murder of Jews as policy. Theft of Jewish property could become punishable corruption. The killing of Jews remained the sanctioned project.
By the time Lithuania reconstituted its sovereignty, Lukys was almost certainly beyond the reach of prosecution. But independent Lithuania inherited the archives, the memory field, and the duty to reckon. It produced no comparable domestic legal or historical reckoning for him, and no Lithuanian punishment for crimes against Jews.
Germany convicted him imperfectly, under a doctrine that under-punished the killers. The Ulm sentence was only five years on retrial. Germany was not morally clean. But even that limited German record is more than Lithuania produced.
The Word “Partisan” Is Not Holy
Lukys-Jakys belonged to the 1941 Lithuanian nationalist, security-police, Voldemarist, armed “partisan,” and white-armbander-aligned milieu that Lithuanian memory politics has spent decades sanitizing under the broader language of resistance.
Lithuania uses categories as shields. “Partisan” becomes sacred. “Resistance” becomes untouchable. “Anti-Soviet” becomes exculpatory. “Nationalist” becomes patriotic. But in 1941, some men who claimed national restoration participated in the isolation, humiliation, robbery, selection, and murder of Jews. Some, like Pranas Lukys-Jakys, went to a camp every Saturday and shot prisoners as they ran.
Lukys-Jakys forces the question Lithuania does not want asked: when the Lithuanian state criminalizes speech about Lithuanian “partisans,” whom exactly is it protecting? The murdered? Or the memory of the men who helped murder them?
The Fridman Inversion
Artur Fridman is being prosecuted in Lithuania under Article 170² §1 in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24. The indictment runs to 220 pages. The charge concerns speech – a Facebook post about Lithuanian nationalist memory. He is presumed innocent. The prosecution remains the state conduct now on trial before the public record.
This indictment is not a historical reckoning. It is the inversion of reckoning. Lithuania did not build its post-1990 legal identity around confronting Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators. Lithuania did not say: a German court convicted one of ours; a German historian places one of ours at a camp shooting Jews every Saturday; we must confront the national structures that produced him.
Instead, Lithuania built a memory regime in which Jewish speech can become the punishable act. The Jewish dead were not protected. The Jewish survivors were not given justice. The perpetrators were not punished by Lithuania. But a Jewish defendant can be placed in criminal jeopardy for speech about the memory field in which those perpetrators are still protected by euphemism, category, silence, and state sensitivity.
This is not the rule of law. It is memory enforcement.
Eugene J. Levin’s The S-424 Boomerang explains why Lithuania’s own public-person ruling makes this entire field public discourse, not private grievance. Lukys belongs in that same documentary universe.
The State’s Real Injury
Lithuania’s injury is not that Artur Fridman harmed history. Lithuania’s injury is that he spoke into a protected zone.
That protected zone contains the men Lithuania prefers to render as patriots, victims, anti-Soviet fighters, national activists, or complicated figures. The zone is guarded by prosecutors, memory institutions, diplomatic language, and criminal law. It does not function to protect truth. It functions to protect the Lithuanian state from the consequences of truth.
Lukys-Jakys breaks the zone. He shows that the category of Lithuanian nationalist armed actor cannot be presumed innocent. He shows that “anti-Soviet” does not cleanse participation in murder. He shows that the archive is stronger than the myth.
Germany’s Record Is an Indictment of Lithuania
The Lukys-Jakys file should be placed beside the Fridman prosecution and read as one documentary sentence: a German court convicted a Lithuanian perpetrator for participation in murder; a German historian documented him personally shooting prisoners every Saturday; Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews; Lithuania now seeks to punish a Jew for speech about Lithuanian nationalist memory.
That is Lithuania in its worst light because it is Lithuania in documentary light. No exaggeration is needed. The record is enough.
Pranas Lukys-Jakys was tried in Germany. The court found that he used a name list in a murder process, objected when men might have been released, understood the criminal purpose of the extermination measures, and acted as an all-too-willing hangman’s servant. Christoph Dieckmann documents him at Dimitravas every Saturday, forcing prisoners to run across the yard and shooting them as they ran.
Lithuania did not punish him for crimes against Jews. Lithuania now seeks to punish speech. That is the moral order Lithuania has chosen to defend.
The Lukys-Jakys record is not merely a document about one perpetrator. It is a test of the entire Lithuanian historical-memory system.
Germany convicted the hangman’s servant.
Lithuania prosecutes the Jew who points toward the gallows.