German-Soviet (Ribbentrop-Molotov) Pact

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, also called the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, was signed by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in two parts. The first part, signed on August 19, 1939, consisted of an economic agreement in which Germany would exchange manufactured goods for Soviet raw materials. The second part was a 10-year nonaggression pact signed on August 23, 1939, which stated that Germany and the USSR would not attack each other. This secret part of the pact set the stage for the eventual division of Poland. Western Poland would be controlled by Germany, while the Soviets would occupy and control eastern Poland. The arrangement also specified Soviet dominance over Latvia and Estonia, areas that were part of the Russian Empire before World War I. A month later, in September 1939, Germany handed Lithuania over to the Soviets, as well.

Lithuania – caught between two powers

For years, Lithuania had been striving to regain the city of Vilna (called Vilnius in Lithuanian) as its historical capital, seeking to wrest control of it from Poland, which ruled it during the interwar period. After the Soviet Union took Vilna, Stalin offered it to Lithuania with the requirement that Lithuania would allow the Soviet army to enter its territory. This was a calculated move to make the Soviet occupation of the country appear to have been undertaken with the agreement of the Lithuanians. Lithuania, caught between the Nazis and the Soviets, saw no alternative but to accept Stalin’s offer. Vilna thus became part of Lithuania – again – in October 1939. Lithuanians rejoiced at having regained their old capital. But, at the same time, an ominous saying spread among them: “Vilnius is ours, and we are the Russians’.”

Lithuanian antisemitism

There were no pogroms in Lithuania up until 1939, even during the Russian Civil War. Pogroms ravaged Jewish communities and civilians in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, but the Lithuanians had a distinctly different perception of Jews than the Poles did, as the main factor in the Lithuanian genocide of Jews was fanatical nationalism, not religious or economic factors.

The Jewish community in Lithuania had flourished under agreements dating back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late 1300s, where privileges were granted to Jews who lived in certain towns. The Lithuanian Jewish community became known for both its secular cultural approach to Jewish life – with extensive cultural production and a thriving publishing industry – as well as its reputation as a hub for religious intellectuals.

Over time, Jews also ended up with an advantage in business, because Jews often lived in urban centers while Lithuanians lived in the countryside and worked in agriculture. Not all city-dwelling Jews were wealthy, but their economic situations fundamentally differed from those of agrarian peasants. While the majority of ethnic Lithuanians were peasants in 1923, 83% of the country’s commercial and retail enterprises were owned by Jews. This gave Lithuanian peasants an easy scapegoat for their economic struggles. In addition, the educated Jews and Lithuanians in the country had different cultural allegiances; while Jewish intellectuals often favored Russian language and culture, the Lithuanian elite preferred Polish culture, with each group expressing very little interest in the other.

There were sporadic outbreaks of antisemitic violence in interwar Lithuania. But by and large, the government cracked down on would-be pogromists. Unlike Poland, the Lithuanian government funded Jewish schools, which offered Lithuanian Jews some measure of reassurance about their place in the nation. However, as the national economy underwent “Lithuanianization” in the 1930s, Lithuanians became more prominent in the economy. In many cases, they directly replaced Jews in various industries. Perceptive Jews may have realized that their future in Lithuania was tenuous, as the industries that had sustained them became increasingly inaccessible.

On October 31, 1939, less than three days after the Soviets handed Vilna over to the Lithuanians, serious rioting broke out in the city. Partly, these disturbances were provoked among local Poles by Lithuanian authorities, who had set an unfavorable exchange rate for the Polish zloty, which was to be withdrawn from circulation. This caused rapid inflation, leading to anti-Jewish violence based on rumors that Jews were hoarding flour. At the same time, disorderly, pro-Soviet groups, which were largely Jewish, assembled to protest the departure of the Soviets.

Both groups found themselves in conflict with the Lithuanian police and army, brought in from Kaunas, who did not know local conditions. Although these conflicts resulted in no deaths, scores of people were injured and Jewish shops were destroyed. The authorities eventually re-established order, arresting 66 rioters. Among them, the police listed 44 Poles and 20 Jews. One man, an ethnic Russian named Boris Filipov, was executed for his part in the rioting. The view that the anti-Jewish violence was initiated by the Lithuanian authorities is not convincing, but there may be some basis to the argument that the Lithuanian forces first attacked Jewish pro-communists, which led to an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence among the local Poles.

The Lithuanian authorities attempted to move the Jewish refugees out of Vilna, where a housing shortage was made worse by the government’s plan to move the capital from Kaunas. This effort was not very successful. In early 1940, only 3,500 refugees had left. Some refugees, with the help of Chiune Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk, the Japanese and Dutch consuls to Lithuania, respectively, were able to proceed to other countries, while other refugees were able to travel to Palestine or to Sweden.

Jews, Lithuanians, and Communism

The Soviet occupation had vastly different consequences for ethnic Lithuanians and Jews. While relationships between Lithuanians and Jews had been marked by antagonism for decades (see the previous context box, “Lithuanian antisemitism” for more information), they turned increasingly violent when the Soviets arrived. For many Vilnius inhabitants, including many Jews, the Soviet occupation represented a complete tragedy: repressions, confiscation of property, terror, and mass deportations to Siberian labor camps. Even Jews who had been known supporters of communism – like Zalman Reyzen of the Vilner Tog, or Yosif Chernikhov, a prominent attorney who had defended communists in Polish courts – could not escape the tightening net. Reyzen was murdered by the Soviets, while Chernikhov likely died in Siberia, alongside numerous other Jewish businessmen, political organizers, and Bundist leaders. In total, more than 17,000 innocent people were forcibly deported to Siberian labor camps, including 5,000 children. Around 13.5% of the deportees were Jewish.

Soviet occupation also meant the end of a short-lived period of Lithuanian independence.  However, for many Eastern European Jews like Rudashevski, the Soviet occupation did not pose an existential threat in the same way that Nazi fascism did. On the contrary, despite the hardships, it meant the possibility of survival. Jews who witnessed the early Nazi occupation of European nations saw how great powers like France had been unable to withstand the onslaught. If even France could not stand up to them, what power could protect Jews from Nazi persecution? The answer was the Soviet Union.

As a result, many Jews in Vilnius, especially those on the political Left, welcomed the Soviet government in 1940. At the time, most Lithuanian Jews regarded the Soviets as a lesser evil than the Nazis. They were well aware of the character of Nazi rule. The Soviet occupation was certainly greeted by many Jews with some relief. Yet these expressions of joy were largely confined to the younger and more radical parts of the community, like Rudashevski. In fact, Rudashevski wrote enthusiastically about the activities of the Soviet youth group called the Young Pioneers, including its meetings and outings in the green forests around Vilnius in the summer of 1941. There were also those within the Lithuanian Jewish community – concentrated, as it was, in small towns and, for the most part, conservative and religious – who opposed a Bolshevik takeover. There were certainly Jews who strongly opposed the new communist regime. One of them was the Yiddish poet Chaim Grade. In his autobiographical My Mother’s Sabbath Days, he expresses his sympathy for the Poles in Vilna who mourn the loss of their country in the Cathedral and the Bernadine church, and contrasts their behavior favorably with that of the crowd around a Soviet tank who listen with “gleeful laughter” to the stories recounted by the tank’s commander. His reservations were shared, for more pragmatic reasons, by the better-off section of Lithuanian Jewry who suffered from the socialization of the economy. Of 1,593 firms nationalized in Soviet Lithuania, 1,320 had belonged to Jews; of 986 workshops taken over by the state, 560 had been in Jewish hands.

At the same time, Jews working for the Soviet Union in visible roles exacerbated Lithuanian resentment and antisemitism. Under prior Lithuanian laws, Jews could not be employed by local or state governments. The Soviets lifted this and many other antisemitic regulations on work. As the Soviet Union confiscated private property and small businesses, and nationalized Lithuanian and Jewish industries, they frequently hired educated Jews to serve low-level administrative roles in these companies, bringing back old economic resentments between urban Jews and Lithuanian peasants. Even the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, hired Jews. While the top positions in local Soviet administration were reserved for non-Jews and people from the Soviet Union, the propagandistic myth that Jews were agents of communism – and that they benefitted heavily from the Soviet occupation – was impossible to dispel. This is probably because Jews had constituted a significant proportion of the very-small Communist Party of Lithuania. According to the State Security Department (VSD), 346 (35%) of 1,120 party members at the end of 1939 were Jews. 670 were Lithuanians, while the remaining members were Poles, Russians, and Germans. Another 287 Communists, including 145 Jews, were in jail. It is important to note, however, that the Jewish population in Vilna numbered 225,000 people. As much as Jews were a big part of the local communist party, they represented only a very small percentage of the total number of Jews in the city.

Right-wing groups in favor of ethnic purity and Lithuanian independence adopted Nazi rhetoric and embraced their nationalist policies. The Jews of Vilnius, as had historically often been the case, were an easy group to scapegoat onto when projecting national tensions. The “Jewish problem” had first been framed as one of Jewish capitalists exploiting their Lithuanian neighbors. Now, Jews were framed as communists. In both cases, hateful stereotypes were being applied to an entire population with the age-old argument that “all Jews” were like this or that. Jewish participation in the Soviet occupation was not nearly as high as was depicted, and many Jews were not communists. Still the use of projecting guilt through stereotyping was a key Nazi tactic. In this case, deploying stereotypes to cast all Jews as guilty of communist sympathies. This created conditions in which Lithuanians started attacking Jews in Kovno even prior to any orders from the Germans. Eventually, nationalist Lithuanians – many of whom associated with the Lithuanian Activist Front that was formed in Berlin 1940 – collaborated with Nazis to carry out the genocide of the Jews.