When the Lithuanian Canadian Community (LCC) was formed in Toronto, its founding president was Jonas Matulionis (1952-55).1 As a top, Lithuanian banker before and during WWII, he served as Finance Minister in the pro-Nazi "Provisional Government of Lithuania" (PGL). It was created by the Lithuanian Activist Force, an antisemitic, anticommunist militia funded, armed and trained by Nazi military intelligence, the Abwehr. When the PGL was replaced by another puppet regime, over which the Nazis had even more control, Matulionis remained and was called its "general advisor for finance."2

Throughout the Cold War, VLIK worked with, and was supported by, its close friends and allies in the profascist Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.5

VLIK leadership was also closely linked with the Assembly of Captive European Nations, which received CIA funds through its front, the National Committee for a Free Europe.6 After Lithuania’s 1991 independence, VLIK disbanded. It had outlived its Cold-War value as an instrument of antiSoviet propaganda.

VLIK created a front called the Lithuanian World Community (LWC). Matulionis was its founding chairman (1958-61)7 and thereafter remained on its board. The LWC unites the world’s anticommunist Lithuanian émigré groups. For 40 years, its global congresses alternated between the US and Canada. Since the 1990s, these have been held in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.

Canada has one of the largest concentrations of Lithuanian émigrés. When the Red Army was about to free Lithuania from Nazi rule in the summer of 1944, about 70,000 Lithuanians fled to Germany with the retreating Nazi forces.8 In the Cold War’s first few years, 20,000 of these émigrés were welcomed by the Canadian government.9

Stasys Raštikis  Kazys Škirpa                  Adolph Hitler General Raštikis and Kazys Škirpa helped create and organize the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), a guerrilla army that aided the Nazi invasion of Lithuania in June 1941. LAF was guided, armed and trained by the Nazi military intelligence agency (Abwehr). LAF established the Provisional Government, which -- with Škirpa as prime minister and Matulionis as finance minister -- declared "freedom" on June 23, 1941, when the Nazis invaded and occupied Lithuania. After WWII, Raštikis worked for the Supreme Cttee for the Liberation of Lithuania (1952-53) and was associated with the CIA's AEPOLE project. It aided anti-communist radio broadcasts, mailing operations, émigré groups, and briefed travelers to Lithuania (1949-59).CIA Research Aid

Welcoming the Nazis
as Lithuania's liberators

Many Lithuanians welcomed the Nazis as liberators when they invaded (June 22, 1941) during Operation Barbarossa. The Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) timed its "June Uprising" to support this invasion by murdering Jews and communists before the Nazi occupation. LAF’s Berlin-based commander, Colonel Kazys Škirpa, formed LAF in July 1940. His memoirs show that LAF was guided, supplied and trained by the German military intelligence agency, Abwehr.10

LAFs ideological screed, issued from Berlin on May 10, 1941, asserted that "communism is directly rooted in Judaism."11 Rife with memes about a "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy" by "Jewish bankers and communists,"12 LAF’s vile ethnonationalist diatribes, matched those of the Nazis and their "captive-nations" allies across eastern and central Europe. Bronys Raila, chair of LAF’s Propaganda Commission, was the architect of its vitriolic support for ethnic cleansing. (Later, as an antiCommunist activist in the US, Raila was regularly heard on the CIA’s Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe,13 1975-89.)

LAF also created a Provisional Government of Lithuania (PGL) and, with Škirpa as prime minister, declared "freedom" on June 23, 1941. While LAF continued the killing sprees, its PGL front "allied itself with the Nazis and passed numerous laws depriving Jews of their rights, inciting violence and horrific murders."14

Although the PGL shared the Nazi hatred of "Judeo-Bolshevism," its regime lasted only six weeks. While Germany expected utter subservience, the PGL wanted its ethnically-pure, anticommunist state to be independent. But, despite its brief life, said historian Algimantas Kasparavicius, the PGL’s "devilish machinery bore its fruit."15

By war’s end, very few of Lithuania’s 208,000 Jews remained.16 As US-born, Lithuanian-based scholar Dovid Katz notes:

There are now only 3,000 Jews left in this country of three million.18 Besides killing some 200,000 Lithuanian Jews, the Nazis and their local partners also murdered untold other Soviet citizens. The official indictment of the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals stated in that "mass killings of Soviet citizens" in the Lithuanian SSR amounted to about 286,000.19
 

Matulionis and the Holocaust

Among the Nazi collaborators who fled to Nazi Germany in 1944 and later found refuge in Canada was Jonas Matulionis, a top Lithuanian banker. In the 1920s and again in 1940, he helped lead Lithuania’s Christian Democratic Party,20 which was rabidly antisemitic.21 Matulionis was a top executive with Lietvas Bankas, the Lithuanian member of Switzerland’s Bank for International Settlements, which received gold looted by the Nazis.22 Until his death in 1980, Matulionis continued his antiSoviet activism from Toronto, where he led far-right national and international Lithuanian groups that still venerate and revere Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as WWII heroes.

On June 25, 1941, the PGL resolved to "expand partisan activities in the countryside where" "gangs of Bolsheviks, Communists and Jews still remain." On the next day, the PGL asked Nazi General Robert von Pohl "to step-up ... the cleansing operation" and "allow our partisan units to operate more widely." On June 27, the PGL recorded its "great joy" that the Nazis let them create their first police battalion.23 Over the next five months it killed "26,000 Lithuanian and foreign (German, Austrian and Czech) Jews" held in Kaunas.24 Other Lithuanian units murdered 110,000 Jews and 2,000 communists.25 The Nazis reorganized Lithuania’s battalions into auxiliary police units that killed another 21,000 Lithuanian Jews before the Soviets regained control in 1944. These units also killed 50,000 Jews in neighbouring Belarus, and helped execute the Holocaust in Ukraine, Russia and Poland.

On June 30, the PGL decided to fund its battalion under Kaunas military commander, Colonel Jurgis Bobelis and to "approve the establishment of a Jewish concentration camp" near Kaunas. This task was assigned to Colonel Bobelis and to PGL deputy minister of infrastructure, Juozas Švilpa. The PGL also declared that "Property nationalized from Jews and Russians remains the indisputable property of the Lithuanian state."

Further citing PGL cabinet minutes, Kasparavicius noted that:

In early July, Matulionis met leaders of Kaunas’ Jewish community, such as Jacob Goldberg, chair of the Union of Jewish Soldiers. He asked Matulionis to "try to prevail on his friends in the Lithuanian government to intervene to stop the killings." Matulionis replied: "The wrath of the people is so great that there is no way to stop these acts. When you leave the city for good and confine yourselves in the Ghetto, things will quiet down."27 This was reported in the diary of Avraham Tory, who became secretary of the Kaunas [Kovno] Ghetto’s Jewish council. Matulionis, he said, told them that:

In 1941, when Canada's Jonas Matulionis -- the founding president of the Lithuanian Canadian Community -- was the Finance Minister of the Nazi puppet state in Lithuania, he told representatives of the Kaunas Jewish community that: "the Lithuanians and the Jews must be separated from each other and the sooner the better. For this purpose, the Ghetto is essential. There you will ... no longer [be] able to harm us. This is a Christian’s position." Source: Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, 1990.

according to the most extreme view all the Jews in Lithuania must be exterminated; a more moderate view demands setting up a concentration camp where Jews will atone with blood and sweat for their crimes against the Lithuanian people. As for the third view, I am a practicing Roman Catholic; I ... believe that no person may take the life of another person.... Only God may do this.... [D]uring the period of Soviet rule I and my friends realized that we did not have a common path with the Jews and never will. In our view, the Lithuanians and the Jews must be separated from each other and the sooner the better. For this purpose, the Ghetto is essential. There you will ... no longer [be] able to harm us. This is a Christian’s position.28

After this discussion, said Tory, "those present decided that the state of affairs in the city gave us no option but to leave the city and move into the Ghetto."29 Matulionis’ memoirs, Unquiet Days (Toronto, 1975), are silent on this meeting. In fact, said political scientist Anatol Lieven, Matulionis "skates as quickly as possible over what was happening to the Jews." One reason for this "silence of the exile community," he said, was that "some of its original leaders, as well as a good many ordinary members, had ... been directly involved in the massacres."30

On July 2, as the terror escalated, Matulionis attended a PGL meeting to grant themselves salaries (retroactive to the June-23 invasion) and begin LAF funding. On July 11, in his report to the PGL, he said that the Poles in Vilnius were "supporting the Russian Bolsheviks, as the Jews do."31

Read more about how this vile ideology was embraced by:   • Nazi Germany       • Mackenzie King        • Yaroslav Stetsko

On Aug. 1, the PGL passed "Regulations on the Status of the Jews" which said

This new law, it said, would "stop...harmful activities of the Jews and ... protect the Lithuanian[s] ... from their harmful influence."32

On August 5, the PGL disbanded and the Nazis got new puppets. Although replacing "ministers" and "ministries" with "general advisors" and "boards," some faces remained identical. Matulionis, the PGL finance minister became the Nazi’s "general advisor for Finance."33 He later said he was "in favor of active cooperation with the Germans, because, by taking this path, I thought it the best way to serve my country."34

Although Lithuania’s new regime opposed some Nazi policies and a few of its leaders were arrested, it actively supported the Holocaust. As historian Arunas Bubnys put it, "the most obvious fact of the collaboration of the Lithuanian local government with the Nazi invaders was its participation in the genocide of Lithuania’s Jews."35

The LAF and PGL laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Matulionis’ "Christian" solution, the ghetto, became a concentration camp. Most of its inmates were sent to death camps like Auschwitz and killed before the Red Army liberated it. By the time the Soviets liberated Lithuania in 1944, almost all the Kovno Ghetto’s 29,000 Jews were dead. On one day, October 29, 1941, there was what Nazi SS-Standartenfuehrer Karl Jäger called the "cleansing" of 9200 "superfluous Jews from the [Kovno] ghetto," including "2920 Jewesses" and "4273 Jewish children."36

The German SS man in charge, Helmut Rauca, who had ordered the execution of 2379 Jews there in August and September, escaped the Soviets by fleeing to safety in Nazi Germany. In 1950, Rauca was given safe haven by the Canadian government.

Canada’s abysmal record of not prosecuting war criminals

After living more than three decades in Ontario, Rauca became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from Canada. As David Matas, legal counsel for B’nai Brith said in 1986, the:

But Rauca never made it to trial. He died of cancer on October 29, 1983, 42 years to the day after the Kovno massacre.

In 1985, after decades of pressure led by Jewish groups, Brian Mulroney’s Tory government created the Deschênes Commission on Nazi War Criminals in Canada. In response, émigré groups whose founders and leaders included Nazi collaborators, war criminals and their apologists, started a legal action to thwart its ability to proceed. This effort, led by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, included the Baltic Federation of Canada, Lithuanian Canadian Community, Latvian National Federation in Canada and the Estonian Central Council in Canada.

These organizations "first priority," said Matas, was to reject "out of hand ... as fundamentally tainted," all the evidence amassed by the USSR about Nazi war crimes.38 This included testimony by Soviet survivors who witnessed the atrocities, as well as thousands of documents recovered by the Soviets when they liberated Eastern Europe. All "evidence obtained from Soviet sources," these émigrés argued, "could not be trusted" because "it would be falsified as part of a disinformation campaign" to "foment discord" among anticommunist émigrés, and to "denigrate" them. Not mentioning that 27 million Soviets had died because of the Nazi invasion, these groups argued that "Moscow was more interested in smearing them, creating dissent, and gaining a propaganda victory than in seeing that justice was served."39

These émigré groups went on the offensive. Launching a media war to smear Soviet evidence and malign the USSR, they portrayed themselves as the real victims. Their 1985 Globe-and-Mail ad, claimed that "Moscow" had a "vested interest in discrediting refugees ... forced to flee from Eastern Europe" and that "the memory and the history of our homelands are being defiled by Soviet allegations of [Nazi] war crimes."40

This Sep.28-1985 ad in the Globe and Mail -- which ironically asks "How do we explain to our children?" -- deflects blame from Nazi collaborators living in Canada by denigrating Soviet efforts to expose and prosecute East European war criminals. This ad was paid for by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Lithuanian Canadian Community, the Latvian National Federation in Canada, the Estonian Central Council in Canada and the Slovenian National Council. Source: Reprint in The Ukrainian Weekly, Oct. 20, 1985, p.6.

Papers also spread alarm by quoting the LCC’s Vida Zalnieriunas. She said the US had allowed Soviet evidence "to the detriment of American citizens" and that "Soviet witnesses whose credibility is doubtful ... and falsified evidence could seriously impair fair legal proceedings" in Canada.41 She defended Lithuanian collaborators by arguing that many "joined the Nazi auxiliary-police battalion[s] ... to establish an independent Lithuanian army that could resist further Soviet incursions." Omitting mention that these Lithuanians killed tens of thousands of Jews and communists, this LCC leader warned that in the "headlong rush ... to ease our collective Western conscience, we could unwittingly create a new set of victims."42

Joining the fray to protect fellow Lithuanian Canadians from alleged victimization by the Soviets was Trent professor Ron Vastokas. He wrote in the Toronto Star of "a hysterical Naziphobia" aimed at Baltic and Ukrainian émigrés. Having a special unit seeking Nazi criminals in Canada, he said, "would only aggravate the emotions and conflicts already engendered."43 The LCC’s Zalnieriunas even questioned "the morality of accepting [Soviet] evidence" because "handing an Eastern European over to the Soviets would be tantamount to entrusting the care of a Jew to the Nazis."44 Canada’s largest, Jewish groups disagreed. They, said Matas, urged the commission to "look at all the evidence, wherever it might be found."45

In the end, the Deschênes Commission sided with the Nazi-linked émigré groups and refused to examine any evidence from the USSR, where the Nazi’s crimes had been committed. Saying this was a victory, Jaroslav Petryshyn, a Ukrainian-Canadian history teacher who became a crime-fiction author, wrote that the "commission’s Final Report (without Soviet input) was received favourably by all ethnic groups when it was tabled in March 1987."46 (Emphasis added.)
 

LCC rallied behind Canada’s
support for US-led wars

During the Cold War, the Lithuanian community of Canada helped cheer on Canadian support for brutal US-led wars against their communist enemies. For example, in August 1950 "the Lithuanian community of Canada" issued a hyperbolic "declaration" promoting the Korean war. It stated that:

In the weeks before they issued this ringing endorsement for the Korean War, many Canadian papers had run stories about napalm, a hot, new weapon in the antiCommunist arsenal. Front page stories in two BC papers on July 10 were headlined: "Korean Flashes: Jelly-Like Explosive Burns Reds" and "Flaming Spray Hits Reds."48

As US General Curtis LeMay said: "we ... burned down every town in North Korea ... and some in South Korea too .... we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of Korea."49 About three million died during this US-led, UN war.50 Napalm was the West’s weapon of choice. Over 32,000 tons of it were used to ignite Korean cities during the 37-month war (1950-53). This was twice the napalm used by the US in its WWII firebombing of Japan.51

In the midst of daily news on the UN bombing of Korea, Canada’s Lithuanian community said it was "with great satisfaction that we are hopeful of the resistance of the United Nations against the aggression in Korea." They urged citizens to back Canada’s role in the war, saying: "We are calling on all our countrymen and all Canadian inhabitants to support with all their might and means the Canadian government."52 Making their anticommunist goals crystal clear, they urged Louis St. Laurent’s Liberal government to use the war as a pretext for a domestic crack down and "declare all progressive-Communist organizations in Canada as illegal and to suspend their activities."53

Rightwing Lithuanian Canadians were incensed by the peace movement. The Canadian Peace Congress was targeted as a traitorous enemy. Its crimes included leading a mass petition drive that gathered 300,000 signatures to oppose NATO’s first-strike, nuclear-weapons policy. "We protest most vigorously," said the Lithuanian community of Canada, against

At that time, Foreign Minister Lester Pearson was also publicly accusing the Peace Congress of treason and sedition.

Years later, in 1965, the LCC defended then-Prime Minister Pearson when "peaceniks" criticised Canada’s support for yet another US war against communism. With Canadian assistance, this war in southeast Asia eventually killed 2.5 to 3.5 million.

To aid Canada’s pro-war support, LCC-Alberta joined six other East-European émigré groups to gather 500 names on a petition to "urge" Pearson’s "continued opposition" to what they called "communist aggression in Viet Nam."55 (The signatories were "representatives and members" of right-wing émigré groups representing Croats, Estonians, Hungarians, Latvians and Lithuanians). Three news stories covered these anticommunist groups’ "[s]upport for the Canadian government in favoring the United States Viet Nam policy."56

Behind this show of loyalty for Canada’s aid to this US war, was the profascist Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Its secretary, Algimantas Dudaravicius, was the only person quoted in any of these articles. Not only was he "very active in the Lithuanian community of Edmonton,"57 he was vice president of the Baltic Federation of Canada (Alberta).58