June Uprising in Lithuania - Aftermath and Controversies

Aftermath and Controversies

Usurpation of the public life continued after the demise of the Provisional Government. The Lithuanian Activist Front was banned in September 1941 and some of its leaders transported to concentration camps. In December the last legal party of Lithuania, pro-Nazi Lithuanian Nationalist Party, was also banned. Most of the laws adopted by the Provisional Government remained paper declarations. However a couple laws that concerned items of no immediate interest of the Germans, including local administration and education, had somewhat lasting effect. The government left developed local administration, staffed with Lithuanians. That empowered some passive resistance when German orders from top could be blocked by the bottom. For example, Lithuanians resisted recruitment to a Waffen-SS division, quotas for forced labor in Germany, or Germanization of Lithuanian schools.

Despite the failure to establish independence and meager long-term results, the uprising was an important event. As Kazys Škirpa summarized in his memoirs, the uprising demonstrated the determination of the Lithuanian people to have their own independent state and dispelled the myth that Lithuania joined the Soviet Union voluntarily in June 1940. The uprising also contributed to unusually rapid German advances against Russia: Pskov was reached in 17 days. The events of June 1941 also caused some controversies. At the time, Lithuanian diplomats abroad, including former president Antanas Smetona and Stasys Lozoraitis, described the uprising as "Nazi-inspired". These statements might have been in an attempt to persuade United States, Great Britain, and other western powers that Lithuania was not an ally of the Nazis. The Provisional Government is criticized for its antisemitic slogans and decrees. More importantly, it did not protest and did not attempt to stop the Holocaust in Lithuania: its military unit, the Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos Batalionas, was soon employed by the Einsatzkommando and Rollkommando Hamann in the mass executions of Lithuanian Jews in the Seventh Fort of the Kaunas Fortress and in the provinces. Jewish survivors and authors accuse members of the LAF, especially in Kaunas but also in other towns, of indiscriminate and gruesome excesses against Jewish residents, often before the Nazis arrived to take control, most notably characterized by the Kaunas pogrom.