In this compelling book, Lithuanian author Ruta Vanagaite holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann. His exploration of the causes and consequences of the Holocaust in Lithuania provides the first overview for general readers that considers the perspectives of all the central groups involved-Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Drawing on a rich array of sources in all the key languages-Yiddish, Ivrit, Lithuanian, and German-Dieckmann considers not only the Berlin-based orientation of the German perpetrators but also the space where the Shoah took place-Lithuanian society with its Jewish minority under German occupation. He contends that this "space" of mass crimes is always linked with warfare and occupation. The Holocaust was unprecedented, but he makes a powerful case it cannot be isolated from the other mass crimes that took place at the same time in the same space against thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and forced refugees from the Soviet territories. Dieckmann shows that the Holocaust could not have unfolded throughout German-dominated Europe without the conditional cooperation of non-Germans in each occupied country. Existing antisemitism was radicalized from the 1930s onward, turning Jews, under the enormous stress of unrelenting warfare and often instable conditions of occupation, into what were perceived as deadly enemies. The Holocaust, its history and memory, can only be understood through this broader context. The authors' searching exchanges illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

Listen in on the conversation between exiled Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite and noted historian Christoph Dieckmann as they struggle to understand how the Holocaust happened.

Christoph Dieckmann is a German historian who hdirects a sound-history study, Sounds of Anti-Jewish Persecution, at the University of Bern. His book Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 19411944 (German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 19411944) was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

Rta Vanagait is a Lithuanian writer and journalist. Her books include Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust, coauthored with Efraim Zuroff.

Prologue

Ruta Vanagaite

1 Why This Book?

2 People Had a Choice

3 Germany's Trauma

4 Lithuania's Trauma

5 The Jew Is the Devil

6 Small and Radical

7 Plans for Mass Murder

8 Blitzkrieg: Local Helpers Needed!

9 Lithuania's Dream of Independence

10 An Easy Occupation

11 Controversies of the Uprising

12 Enter the SS

13 Jews in Panic

14 Lithuanian Border Strip: The First Shootings

15 Pogroms

16 The First Mass Shooting of Jews in Kaunas

17 The Road to Ponar

18 Vigilante Lithuanian Courts

19 Ghettoization in the Provinces

20 Robbing the Living

21 Lithuanian Fascists Take Over

22 Kill Them All!

23 The Final Solution in the Provinces

24 The Oral Orders

25 The Lithuanian Road Killers

26 100,000 Trapped City Jews

27 Life in the Ghettos: Hunger, Poetry, Death

28 Choiceless Choices

29 The Accidental Death of European Jews

30 Forgotten Victims: Soviet POWs

31 Forgotten Victims: The Soviet Evacuees

31 Slavery

33 No to the SS Legion

34 To Die as Free Fighters

35 Survival and Terror

36 The End: Vilnius

37 The End: iauliai

38 The End: Kaunas

39 The Murdered Others

40 Burning the Bodies

41 To Save a Jew

42 The Silence of the Church

43 The Brief Story of Lithuanian Resistance

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

About the Authors