page_title: June Uprising in Lithuania
section_title: Aftermath and controversies
hierarchical_section_title: June Uprising in Lithuania / Aftermath and controversies
caption_attribution_description: English: Funeral of the June Uprising casualties in Kaunas, Lithuania. Lietuvių: Sukilimo kovose žuvusiųjų laidotuvės Kauno kapinėse birželio 26 d. popietėje.
context_page_description: The June Uprising was a brief period in the history of Lithuania between the first Soviet occupation and the Nazi occupation in late June 1941. Approximately one year earlier, on June 15, 1940, the Red Army invaded Lithuania and the unpopular Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was soon established. Political repression and terror were used to silence its critics and suppress any resistance. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a diverse segment of the Lithuanian population rose up against the Soviet regime, declared renewed independence, and formed the short-lived Provisional Government. Two large Lithuanian cities, Kaunas and Vilnius, fell into the hands of the rebels before the arrival of the Wehrmacht. Within a week, the German Army took control of the whole of Lithuania. The Lithuanians greeted the Germans as liberators from the repressive Soviet rule and hoped that the Germans would re-establish their independence or at least allow some degree of autonomy. No such support came from the Nazis, who steadily replaced Lithuanian institutions with their own administration. The Reichskommissariat Ostland was established at the end of July 1941.
context_section_description: Usurpation of the public life continued after the demise of the Provisional Government. The Lithuanian Activist Front was banned in September 1941 and some of its leaders transported to concentration camps. In December the last legal party of Lithuania, pro-Nazi Lithuanian Nationalist Party, was also banned. Most of the laws adopted by the Provisional Government remained paper declarations. However a couple laws that concerned items of no immediate interest of the Germans, including local administration and education, had somewhat lasting effect. The government left developed local administration, staffed with Lithuanians. That allowed some passive resistance when German orders from top could be blocked by the bottom. For example, Lithuanians resisted recruitment to a Waffen-SS division, quotas for forced labor in Germany, or Germanization of Lithuanian schools.
  Despite the failure to establish independence and meager long-term results, the uprising was an important event. As Kazys Škirpa summarized in his memoirs, the uprising demonstrated the determination of the Lithuanian people to have their own independent state and dispelled the myth that Lithuania joined the Soviet Union voluntarily in June 1940. The uprising also contributed to unusually rapid German advances against Russia: Pskov was reached in 17 days. The events of June 1941 also caused some controversies. At the time, Lithuanian diplomats abroad, including former president Antanas Smetona and Stasys Lozoraitis, described the uprising as "Nazi-inspired". These statements might have been in an attempt to persuade United States, Great Britain, and other western powers that Lithuania was not an ally of the Nazis. Its military unit, the Tautinio Darbo Apsaugos Batalionas, was soon employed by the Einsatzkommando and Rollkommando Hamann in the mass executions of Lithuanian Jews in the Seventh fort of the Kaunas Fortress and in the provinces. Jewish survivors and authors accuse members of the LAF, especially in Kaunas but also in other towns, of indiscriminate and gruesome excesses against Jewish residents, often before the Nazis arrived to take control, most notably characterized by the Kaunas pogrom.
  In 1973, the Committee of the United States Congress made unambiguous conclusions that there is no Prime Minister Juozas Ambrazevičius' guilty in the Holocaust in Lithuania.  It is also known that in the summer of 1944 Ambrazevičius left for Germany, and in 1948 for the United States, where he edited a Catholic daily, Darbininkas, and continued his work in the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania in exile. He published a number of leaflets illustrating German and Soviet crimes in Lithuania and the Lithuanian resistance, for example, In the Name of the Lithuanian People (1946) and Appeal to the United Nations on Genocide (1951). In 1964 he published a book Alone, all alone about the Lithuanian armed resistance. The Kremlin actively opposed his activities. In the 1970s he became a subject of interest for the Soviet media and American hunters of Nazi colloborators, who accused him of having worked for the Third Reich. In reply, he published an extensive dossier of his World War II activities.
  During the 2012 reburial ceremony of the Juozas Ambrazevičius remains in Kaunas, adviser to Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius also noted that a 1975 investigation by US Immigration found no evidence of Brazaitis being involved in anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi activities.
caption: Funeral of the June Uprising casualties in Kaunas on June 26, 1941
exif: {}