Lithuania in the Second World War

Reasons for the Programme.The public presentation of a research programme is not commonplace in the scholarly life of Lithuania, and therefore that alone means crossing a certain barrier.Furthermore, there is one more barrier, which is still more difficult and more significant, i.e., the start of a complex comparative study of Lithuania's situation in the Second World War.The latter barrier presupposes the former -the presentation for the public consideration of things, which should be done, simultaneously explaining why they have not yet been done.It is a historical cynicism that people take their greatest interest in those periods of time which are related to the utmost tensions and pressures of all human endeavours, i.e., wars, revolutions, coups d'état, etc.These are periods which result in massive losses of lives and tragedies.In the history of Lithuania such a period would be the Second World War, which has been researched clearly inadequately so far.The point is not an insufficient attention to this theme; on the contrary, sometimes there was too much of it.When that attention assumed the form of historical studies, they often tended to be superficial, biased or stereotypical.What concerns Lithuanian historians, whose task now is an objective presentation of the historical scholarship of Lithuania, three major factors, conditioning their moral and methodological difficulties, can be indicated.Firstly, in World War II, more precisely, during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, the Jewish community of Lithuania was actually entirely exterminated as a historical ethno-cultural part of Lithuanian society, and Lithuanians took part in that extermination as well.If, in addition to the tragedy of the Holocaust, the elimination of the Poles and the Germansalso historical Lithuanian ethno-cultures -is added, one is confronted with a phenomenon, or to put it differently, a presupposition that during the Second World War one more war was waged in Lithuania -a war among its fellow citizens as different nations.Secondly, despite the fact that such an assumption is not at all pleasant to the Lithuanians, it is related to the second circumstance.Although the Second World War greatly reduced the country's population, it also enlarged its national territory, thus making Lithuania a unique country (possibly with the exception of Russia) among the nations involved in the war.And thirdly, the Second World War did not bring statehood to Lithuania, in contrast to many other nations

Political science · World War II · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law