The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania: Lithuanian Collaboration in the Final Solution, 1941-1944 [Hardcover]

A significant contribution to the history of atrocities committed against Jews during the Second World War. Karen Sutton offers sound arguments to the involvement of Lithuanian people in Hitler's Final Solution. Read at times as a research dissertation, it is none the less interesting and well written.

Ms. Sutton's book is too short; contained one glaring howler - "the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar," on page 23; and offers only an "index of names," an irritatingly elitist style of indexing frustrating for a general reader. But this in no way detracts from this work as a well-argued and sound corrective to post-Communist self-righteousness in eastern Europe. Lithuania isn't the only place in the region seeking rehabilitation of old prejudices while concealing festering crimes, but it is certainly one of the bitterest theaters of revisionism.

The "justification" for Holocaust participation, as she effectively demonstrates, is the myth of "Judeo-Bolshevik" collaboration, a theory of "symmetry" designed to absolve Lithuanian Nazi collaborators of any historic responsibility to their victims. Ms. Sutton analyzes this myth and finds it self-serving, based on a prejudicial interpretation of Jews and Jewry. In titling one chapter "Separate and Unequal History" she inadvertantly makes an obvious comparison, of Baltic states and American Dixiecrats. Paralleling their Baltic counterparts, Southern Americans cherish a mythology of national struggle which was, of course, "not about slavery" or "white supremacy" but only over self-determination; that things were fine between majority and minority if not for the rabble-rousing of "Yankee-Abolitionists." Substitute the following terms - Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Jew-Communists - for those in quotation marks, and the rationalizations should become quite familiar.

Like minorities elsewhere, Jews were attracted to socialist ideas because of the "internationalist humanism" originally associated with them, a reaction to the discrimination and humiliations of daily life in an environment designed to deny them full human participation. Thus it's not surprising for them to look to the "Union" and "Yankee Abolitionists" over the border for deliverance. That the "affirmative action" reality did not match the expectation for the Jews of Lithuania certainly can't be their fault but, somehow, it is made to be. Ms. Sutton states at length how only a bigoted view of "the Jew" made possible the lumping together of Orthodox, Zionists, secular Marxists, and middle-class businessmen in a "vast left-wing conspiracy" against the bleeding innocence of Lithuania.

Lithuanians and other east Europeans do themselves no favors by covering the historic tracks, wrapping the perpetrators of war crimes in their national flags, or relativizing the suffering of others. As the (often fanatic) cries of victimhood furiously pour forth from east European communities, at home and abroad, works like Ms. Sutton's, Bernhard Press' "The Murder of the Jews in Latvia," and Jan Gross' "Neighbors" and "Fear" correct the historical narrative and prevent the perpetrators from getting away - morally, at least - with murder.

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