Recently I wrote about Lithuanian nationalist leader Remigijus Zemaitaitis’ run in with the ‘Lithuanian jewish community’ as well as international jewry over (correct) assertions about Israel’s war on Gaza but also the claim that ‘jews and Russians’ conducted the massacre at the village of Pirčiupiai in eastern Lithuania on 3rd June 1944, (1) which is Lithuania’s version of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France just days afterwards by the 2nd SS ‘Das Reich’.
This massacre – while routinely cited as a ‘German war crime’ – was in truth a somewhat justifiable reprisal under the Geneva convention of the time – which allowed significant reprisals for partisan attacks aided by the local population – after a senior officer in 2nd SS (SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Helmut Kampfe) had been kidnapped and tortured to death by French communist partisan on the explicit orders of their leader Georges Guingouin with 2nd SS acting on local intelligence but mistaking Oradour-sur-Glane for the similarly named nearby town of Oradour-sur-Vayres.
Indeed, the Germans themselves were in the process of court marshalling the officer responsible for the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane – SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Adolf Diekmann – when he was killed in fighting in Normandy on 29th June 1944, which predictably is left out of nearly all popular presentations concerning the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, because it shows that the action was not approved of by the Third Reich and the only reason that a court martial wasn’t convened was because the officer responsible had been killed in action.
The story is similar albeit a bit different with the massacre at Pirčiupiai with the Germans – and again specifically the SS – being blamed for a massacre that this time they likely didn’t commit but rather was the action of Soviet partisans – who were often jewish in general as well as specifically in the context of Lithuania – (2) who then sloughed off this public relations disaster onto the Germans in much the way as the Soviet Union happily blamed the Third Reich for the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn that occurred in April/May 1940 at the Nuremberg Trials and maintained this as their official historical orthodoxy to around the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-1990 despite knowing that it was the work of Stalin’s NKVD.
The ‘Universal Lithuanian Encyclopaedia’s’ entry on the village of Pirčiupiai is instructive since they state that:
‘During World War II, in September 1943, the Trakai County Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania declared the Rūdninkai Forest with the villages (and Pirčiupiai) there a zone of active Soviet sabotage. In order to protect the Vilnius–Varėna and Vilnius–Eišiškės highways, the Nazi German army set up a support point with a crew in Senieji Pirčiupiai (on the other side of the highway). In April 1944, the 16th SS and Police Regiment (commander W. Titelis) was transferred to Lithuania to fight against Soviet saboteurs and partisans of the Home Army; it was deployed in Vilnius, Trakai (and headquarters), Eišiškės and Rūdninkai.
On the morning of June 3, 1944, 2 trucks with SS men near Pirčiupiai drove over mines laid by saboteurs and were fired upon; most of the Germans died, several escaped. The SS men took revenge on the residents of Pirčiupiai. At about 11 a.m., a column of punishers led by W. Titelis (the 9th and 10th companies of the 3rd battalion of the regiment, 17 trucks, 3 tanks and a self-propelled gun) arrived from Eišiškės near Pirčiupiai. The SS men surrounded Naujojies Pirčiupiai, drove people from their huts into the center of the village, and looted household property. The 15 strongest men were selected and herded into a barn, which was pelted with grenades and set on fire. Those who escaped from the fire were shot at. Another group of stronger men was dealt with in this way, and then the women, children and the remaining men were forced into the barns and burned. All the huts in the village were set on fire. 119 people were burned – 61 women and 58 men (including 45 children under 15, 4 babies). Those residents who were not in the village at the time survived, 9 who accidentally escaped and became witnesses to the crime. The burned village was guarded by soldiers from the support point. In order to hide the crime, the remains of the dead were doused with gasoline and burned. Only on 06 11 did the occupation authorities allow the dead to be buried. The 39 Pirčiupiai residents who accidentally survived rebuilt the village: in 1957 there were 12 houses, in 1972 – 30.’ (3)
Now without going into the detail too much – I will do this separately – the actual facts are briefly these:
A) The Lithuanian Communist Party – which was heavily dominated by jews at this time – (4) declared that the Rūdninkai Forest area – which included the village of Pirčiupiai – was an active partisan/sabotage zone in September 1943 resulting in an attack on a detachment of SS troops near Pirčiupiai on the morning of 3rd June 1944 in which most of the SS troops were killed.
B) The Germans responded by sending a large detachment from 16th SS Police Regiment – which had only been transferred to the SS in early 1943 having originally been a German army police unit – under Walter Titel (who died a month and a half later in mid July 1944) who was a World War I veteran; (5) who it is claimed carried out the mass murder of most of the population of Pirčiupiai by burning them alive.
C) There were no survivors from the village who saw what happened and the ‘survivors’ who are apparently the origin of the ‘German atrocity’ claim were not in the village at the time of the atrocity. They appear to have come back later to find the Germans there and put two and two together.
Now it should obvious that when we break down this claim down to the actual facts, we are left with two possible scenarios.
A) The Germans carried out the atrocity at Pirčiupiai as the direct result of the deadly Soviet partisan attack on SS troops near the village a few hours earlier assuming (probably based on local intelligence) that the villagers had been complicit in the attack in a similar way that 2nd SS did with Oradour-sur-Vayres which they mistook Oradour-sur-Glane for.
B) Soviet partisans carried out the atrocity at Pirčiupiai before or after their attack on SS troops near the village that morning assuming the villagers were collaborating with the Lithuanian government and their German allies (similar to how North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops did with pro-government villages in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War), while the German reaction force merely found the carnage and was blamed for it by the remaining villagers of Pirčiupiai because they found the Germans there when they came back.
We should note that the second scenario isn’t even considered and I have not been able to find an Einsatzgruppen operation report for the alleged German atrocity at Pirčiupiai as of yet, which is odd because the Germans were pretty keen on documentation although it may have been lost due to Operation Bagration beginning two to three weeks later.
What makes me think that this was a Soviet atrocity that has been simply mythologized as a German atrocity is the fact that we have no real evidence that the Germans had anything to do with it and the 16th SS Police Regiment rolling in force into a small forest village from their base circa 15 kilometres away in the town of Trakai – remember they had three tanks and a self-propelled gun so they aren’t exactly breaking the speed limit (German tanks tended to travel between 5-15 miles an hour off road as even the main roads would have been simple dirt tracks not autobahn) – but more like 20 kilometres if we assume the Germans would be using main roads a mere two-to-three hours after the deadly Soviet partisan attack of that morning then they might just about get there around the 11 o’clock mark as is recorded by ‘Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia’s’ entry, but the problem remains of how the SS survivors of the attack got word to Trakai about what had happened so quickly.
It isn’t like there were lots of telephones around in rural Lithuania at the time and the SS detachment’s radio set would have likely been in the two trucks at the Soviet partisans destroyed. So, this then blows a rather large hole in the orthodox narrative that the ‘Germans were responsible for the atrocity at Pirčiupiai’ and while it is still possible the Germans could have done it (the Germans were prone to shooting hostages/locals who intelligence indicated had been involved or were suspected of being pro-Stalin) (6) if we accept such we have to significantly revise the timeline.
As such the alternative perpetrators – in the form of the Soviet partisan movement in Lithuania – is obviously a lot stronger than not now because the timeline puts the Germans arriving much later and in force suggesting that the Germans only found the massacre of Pirčiupiai and were documenting it (probably primarily for propaganda purposes as well as for documenting what had happened for future war crimes trials of their own), (7) which the returning villagers mistakenly interpreted as ‘the Germans were responsible’ when in fact the Germans were clearing the village of mines/booby traps/partisans (remember the partisans used mines to ambush the SS unit hours earlier) having set up a military perimeter around it before they began to document what had happened for their files/reports.
This then became the Soviet claim that the Germans had committed the atrocity at Pirčiupiai rather than Soviet partisans and this claim became part of the accepted history of the Second World War in Lithuania rather than the truth that the atrocity at Pirčiupiai was likely conducted by Soviet partisans – who were frequently jewish or Russian in origin rather than Lithuanian – and not by the Germans and was one of many jewish atrocities against the Lithuanian people before, during and after the Second World War.
References
(1) My article covering this is here: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-remigijus-zemaitaitis
(2) Yehuda Bauer, 1989, ‘Jewish Resistance and Passivity in the Face of the Holocaust’, pp. 242-245 in Francois Furet (Ed.), 1989, ‘Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews’, 1st Edition, Schocken: New York
(3) https://www.vle.lt/straipsnis/pirciupiai/
(4) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-communism-in-lithuania-1918
(5) https://www.tracesofwar.com/persons/14033/Titel-Walter.htm
(6) Cf. Philip Blood, 2006, ‘Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe’, 1st Edition, Potomac: Sterling
(7) Cf. Alfed-Maurice de Zayas, 1989, ‘The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945’, 1st Edition, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, esp. pp. 73-75
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