Литвалық белсенді фрон: 1940-1941 жылдарғы қарсылық қозғалысы

Far right resistance organization opposing the 1940 41 Soviet annexation of Lithuania

The Lithuanian Activist Front or LAF was a Lithuanian underground resistance organization established in 1940 after the Soviets occupied Lithuania. Its goal was to free Lithuania and regain its independence. The LAF planned and executed the June uprising and established the short lived Provisional Government of Lithuania, which disbanded after a few weeks. The Nazi authorities banned the LAF in September 1941. Its role in the three World War II invasions of Lithuania and the massacre of 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population remains ambiguous and the topic of conflicting information and opinion.

The LAF anticipated Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union and planned to use it to rebel against the Soviet Union and establish an independent Lithuania. Kazys Škirpa, a former Lithuanian military attaché to Germany, founded the LAF on 17 November 1940. to unite people with a wide spectrum of political beliefs who wanted to see an independent Lithuania that was not part of either the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Škirpa's Berlin unit mainly recruited Lithuanian expatriates and former diplomats, from most of the major pre war Lithuanian factions and parties. The Nationalist Unionists and Christian Democrats were the most influential. Urban LAF units had more liberal political views than those in the countryside. Lack of communication between the Berlin unit and the Lithuanian units prevented ideological discussion though.

The Provisional Government was mainly recruited from the Vilnius and Kaunas sections. Over time, many members of this government and the LAF were arrested, executed, or exiled by the Soviet authorities. The Wehrmacht began disarming LAF activists in Kaunas on June 26 to 28. The last LAF activists were disarmed in Zarasai and Obeliai June 28–29. The German authorities did not use brute force, just established their own administrative structure, Reichskommissariat Ostland, and slowly deprived the would be puppet government of its powers. It lost all authority in a few weeks, and seeing no more reason to continue, dissolved on August 5, 1941., LAF as an organization remained in existence. On September 15, it sent Germany a memorandum, About the status of Lithuania after the German Civil Administration started to operate (Apie Lietuvos būklę, vokiečių civilinei administracijai pradėjus veikti), protesting the occupation of Lithuania and expressing hope that Germany would not extend its territory at the expense of Lithuania. The Lithuanian Activist Front was banned on September 26, its property confiscated, and its leader Leonas Prapuolenis arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp. Other members like Pilypas Žukauskas [lt] and Petras Paulaitis [lt] joined the anti Nazi resistance.

For historic and religious reasons, Vilnius was very important to Lithuanians. In 1900 Jonas Biliūnas called it “the very heart” of the fatherland. Its effect on Lithuanian national consciousness after World War II has been described as "selective memory" which downplayed the religious aspects of the history while stressing its "secular, cultural and linguistic aspects." Lithuania accepted a military presence to regain administrative control of Vilnius. The former capital of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth clearly was part of Lithuania, to the Antanas Smetona government. But since the city had been taken in a false flag operation in October 1920, the city had become more Polish and more Jewish, a situation made even more so by refugees, garrisons and POW camps after the German invasion of Poland. The LAF section in Vilnius under Vytautas Bulvičius was dismantled by Soviet arrests just before the German invasion and even before that Lithuanians had only been a small minority of the city's population. The uprising was therefore smaller there, than elsewhere and only started on June 23. The rebels took the post office and radio station, and hoisted the Lithuanian flag over Gediminas' Tower. It was relatively easy to take Vilnius, as most Red Army units were outside the city and quickly retreated.

The LAF is controversial because of its anti Semitic The LAF's manifesto "What Are the Activists Fighting for?" said: "The Lithuanian Activist Front, by restoring the new Lithuania, is determined to carry out an immediate and fundamental purging of the Lithuanian nation and its land of Jews ". The LAF's pro Nazi rhetoric and stridently anti Semitic propaganda, equating Jews with Bolshevism, was widely disseminated in Lithuania prior to and during the June uprising and likely encouraged the local population to engage in mass violence against Jews that began prior to the arrival of Nazi forces in the country and continued during the Nazi occupation (1941 1945). By some calculations, more than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was massacred during the Nazi occupation, a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust. Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the non Jewish local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still debated. The goal of the June uprising organized by the LAF was to seize control of Lithuania as Soviet forces retreated in the face of Germany's attack. LAF paramilitaries committed many atrocities in the uprising (rapes, murders, pillage). According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, the Germans referred to these "allies" as "organized robbers". On the other hand, a number of laws issued by the LAF instituted Provisional Government of Lithuania discriminated against Jews. for example Žydų padėties nuostatai (English: Regulation on the Status of Jews), although according to some authors they were never actually adopted and were only considered by the Provisional Government. Žydų padėties nuostatai was widely used in the Soviet propaganda. However physical signs that this document initially was not kept with enacted legal texts and was pulled into a set of rulings by the German appointed councillors as if it were a Provisional Government rule, when the Provisional Government had already withdrawn. Žydų padėties nuostatai was not published anywhere at the time and the affairs of Lithuanian Jews were never governed by it. The LAF and its paramilitaries initially proved useful for this. But Stahlecker later complained that it was "not a simple matter" to organize Lithuanians into taking actions against Jews. Lithuanian Minister of National Defence General Stasys Raštikis (former Commander of the Lithuanian Army) met personally with Nazi Germany generals to discuss anti Jewish violence and began narrating about the Lithuanian society and Government dissatisfaction and concern about the persecution and extermination of the Lithuanian Jews started by the Germans and demanded that the campaign against Jews in Kaunas and in the province now be stopped, but the Nazi generals refused and one of them even unexpectedly poured cold water on Raštikis' head when he was leaving. It is known that the Provisional Government attempted to stop Algirdas Klimaitis and later condemned him for his actions during the Kaunas pogrom. The original TDA eventually became the 12th and the 13th Police Battalions. These two units took an active role in mass killings of the Jews in Lithuania and Belarus. Based on the Jäger Report, members of TDA murdered about 26,000 Jews between July and December 1941. Later Juozas Ambrazevičius actively participated in the anti Nazi underground, and four members of the Provisional Government were imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps. There are allegations by certain journalists that, in 1973, a Committee of the United States Congress made conclusions that Prime Minister of the Provisional Government Juozas Ambrazevičius' and Jonas Šlepetys' were not responsible for the Holocaust in Lithuania. However, a subsequent clarification issued in 2019 by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress said the investigation was not conclusive and did not amount to a "rehabilitation" of Ambrazevičius/Brazaitis. The investigation into his wartime activities was discontinued after Ambrazevičius/Brazaitis passed away in 1974.