In this compelling book, Lithuanian author Ruta Vanagaite holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann. His exploration of the causes and consequences of the

Holocaust in Lithuania provides the first overview for general readers that considers the perspectives of all the central groups involvedJews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Drawing on a rich array of sources in all the key languagesYiddish, Ivrit, Lithuanian, and GermanDieckmann considers not only the Berlin-based orientation of the German perpetrators but also the space where the Shoah took placeLithuanian society with its Jewish minority under German occupation. He contends that this space of mass crimes is always linked with warfare and occupation. The Holocaust was unprecedented, but he makes a powerful case it cannot be isolated from the other mass crimes that took place at the same time in the same space against thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and forced refugees from the Soviet territories.

Dieckmann shows that the Holocaust could not have unfolded throughout German-dominated Europe without the conditional cooperation of non-Germans in each occupied country. Existing antisemitism was radicalized from the 1930s onward, turning Jews, under the enormous stress of unrelenting warfare and often instable conditions of occupation, into what were perceived as deadly enemies. The Holocaust, its history and memory, can only be understood through this broader context. The authors searching exchanges illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

Christoph Dieckmann is a German historian who hdirects a sound-history study, Sounds of Anti-Jewish Persecution, at the University of Bern. His bookDeutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 19411944 (German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 19411944) was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

Rta Vanagaitis a Lithuanian writer and journalist. Her books includeOur People: Discovering Lithuanias Hidden Holocaust, coauthored with Efraim Zuroff.

Prologue

Ruta Vanagaite

1Why This Book?

2People Had a Choice

3Germanys Trauma

4Lithuanias Trauma

5The Jew Is the Devil

6Small and Radical

7Plans for Mass Murder

8Blitzkrieg: Local Helpers Needed!

9Lithuanias Dream of Independence

10An Easy Occupation

11Controversies of the Uprising

12Enter the SS

13Jews in Panic

14Lithuanian Border Strip: The First Shootings

15Pogroms

16The First Mass Shooting of Jews in Kaunas

17The Road to Ponar

18Vigilante Lithuanian Courts

19Ghettoization in the Provinces

20Robbing the Living

21Lithuanian Fascists Take Over

22Kill Them All!

23The Final Solution in the Provinces

24The Oral Orders

25The Lithuanian Road Killers

26100,000 Trapped City Jews

27Life in the Ghettos: Hunger, Poetry, Death

28Choiceless Choices

29The Accidental Death of European Jews

30Forgotten Victims: Soviet POWs

31Forgotten Victims: The Soviet Evacuees

31Slavery

33No to the SS Legion

34To Die as Free Fighters

35Survival and Terror

36The End: Vilnius

37The End: ¦iauliai

38The End: Kaunas

39The Murdered Others

40Burning the Bodies

41To Save a Jew

42The Silence of the Church

43The Brief Story of Lithuanian Resistance

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

About the Authors