01.08.2019, Moscow.
A document describing atrocities committed by Lithuanian nationalists during the Great Patriotic War has been published by the Russian Ministry of Defense on July 31 on a website dedicated to the battles for Kaunas during the Great Patriotic War.
Reportedly, as early as in the first days of the occupation of Lithuania, a number of local residents joined the punitive squads, which had killed about 6,000 people over several days in June 1941, including elderly people, women, and infants. Thousands of people were removed to Germany to work as slaves.
A total of 40 thousand people were kept in the Jewish ghetto in Kaunas. After the Red Army liberated Kaunas, only 634 Jews were left in the city.
The document is titled “Special report of the head of the ‘Smersh’ counterintelligence service of August 27, 1944, to the head of the Political Directorate of the 3rd Belorussian Front on the violent extermination of the Jewish population of Kaunas over the period of the occupation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic by Hitler’s army.”
In 2017, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the contemporary independent Lithuania declared the Soviet period of the republic’s history equivalent to Hitler’s occupation. “Any parallels between the genocide of the Jews and the anti-Soviet opposition in Lithuania in this context are absolutely unacceptable, as they are used to falsify the country’s history,” the Ministry’s statement says. On October 11, 2018, a memorial to the Soviet Soldier was demolished in Lithuania.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
