Neighbors, rivals, enemies, victims Lithuanian perceptions of Jews in crisis and war

ENThe subsequent destruction of the legal restraints and publicly recognized norms of the First Republic allowed the festering antisemitism of the 1930s to fully unfold in destructive, indeed lethal, ways. Once the organized killing operations of the Einsatzgruppen, police battalions, and the local constabulary gained momentum in August 1941, ordinary Lithuanians and even society’s elite may have lacked the power to halt the Holocaust. Attitudes still mattered, nevertheless. The constant trumpeting of Jewish treachery in the official press provided a legitimizing rationale for many shooters in the killing fields, a major factor in motivating criminal collaboration in the destruction of the Jews. For at least a few thousand people, perceptions were in fact a matter of life and death - the survival of Jews hiding in the cities, former shtetls, and villages depended almost entirely on how their non-Jewish neighbors perceived them. [Extract, p. 211]