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If in your family tree you have Lithuanians who participated in WWII resistance, please add them to this project. It would be great if within the profile description there would be a brief biography added. This should include not only local Lithuania's resistance participants, but also people of various nationalities and citizens of other countries, who's families are descending from Lithuania. Many of them were within USA, or USSR army forces.
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During World War II, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union (1940–1941), Nazi Germany (1941–1944), and the Soviet Union again in 1944. Resistance during this period took many forms. Significant parts of the resistance were formed by Polish and Soviet forces, some of which fought with Lithuanian collaborators. This article presents a summary of the organizations, persons and actions involved.
Continue reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_in_Lithuania_during_World_...
The 16th Rifle Division (Russian: 16-я 'Литовская' стрелковая дивизия, Lithuanian: 16-oji 'Lietuviškoji' divizija) was a formation in the Red Army created during World War II. The division was formed twice, and was given the title 'Lithuanian' during its second formation. It was originally established at Tambov in May 1918. It was wiped out at Mga in July 1941. Reformed and given the title 'Lithuanian', the division participated in several battles against Nazi Germany, including Kursk, Belarus, and the Baltic. The division became a brigade postwar but became a division again in 1950. It was disbanded in 1956.
Continue reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Rifle_Division_(Soviet_Union)
After World War II the victorious United States and Great Britain sought to demobilize their armed forces but soon realized they had too little manpower left not only to do important jobs but also to guard prisoners of war and war criminals. For this reason service units made up of soldiers of Polish descent were formed to carry out precisely these tasks. But soon after the army ran out of Polish-origin soldiers attention turned to refugees from the Baltic States. Former officers of the Lithuanian Army began to command these services; in this way they could apply their professional knowledge, partially rehabilitate themselves for having left their homeland, and improve their own and their men’s material conditions. Service in these units allowed them both to preserve their Lithuanianness and to gain familiarity with Anglo-Saxon
LITHUANIAN OFFICERS IN LABOR AND GUARD SERVICES IN GERMANY FROM 1946 TO 1949culture. This helped them with their social and professional integration when later most of these service members and their commanding officers emigrated to the United States and other English-speaking countries. Although there were plans to reconstitute these units into a Lithuanian army in exile, they never became reality. Still, the Lithuanians who served in them left a favorable impression and thereby contributed to defeating negative stereotypes about the Balts. High-ranking U. S. and British officers described these Lithuanian soldiers in the best of terms; and the trust of the former in the latter is reflected in the fact that the Lithuanians were entrusted with such important duties as guarding Nazi criminals at Nuremberg and serving during the Berlin blockade, a service which earned them the accolade of “a job well done”.
by Simonas Jazavita Continue reading: https://www.academia.edu/34892754/S._Jazavita_-_Lietuvos_karininkai...
Lithuania became an independent country in 1918, after the fall of the Russian Empire. In 1926, following the tensions built up by the signing of the Soviet–Lithuanian Non-Aggression Pact, a coup d'état by the political party Lithuanian Nationalists Union, political party Lithuanian Christian Democrats, and the military installed Antanas Smetona as the President and Augustinas Voldemaras as the Prime Minister. Smetona dissolved the parliament in May 1927, put down an uprising later in the same year, and dismissed Voldemaras in 1929, all acts that would secure his power base, which ultimately helped him remain in power until Jun 1940.
When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, it organized agitators in Lithuania. In 1934, Lithuania arrested and tried about 100 Nazi activists, which led to a German embargo of Lithuanian products, which harmed Lithuania economy and destabilized domestic politics. In Mar 1938, Poland demanded the resumption of diplomatic relations (which had been broken in 1920), threatening with invasion otherwise; Lithuania submitted to Polish demands as its military was weaker and it failed to gather international support. Adolf Hitler, who had wanted to annex Klaipeda region (German: Memelland), which had formerly been a part of Germany, prepared the German Army for its occupation should Poland invade Lithuania, but such an invasion did not take place. Failing to get this opportunity, Germany chose to simply threaten with military force, with Lithuania again submitted; the loss of Klaipeda eroded Smetona's authority, which forced him to form a coalition government.
When the European War began in Sep 1939, Soviet forces captured Wilno, under Poland rule (Lithuanian: Vilnius), which was a historical Lithuanian city. Lithuania made a successful petition to Moscow requesting for its return into Lithuanian borders, in returning allowing 20,000 Soviet troops to be stationed in the region, not knowing that Germany and the Soviet Union had already made aggression plans against Lithuania.
After a series of increasingly more demanding threats, Lithuania ultimately gave in to the Soviet Union in Jun 1940. The subsequent annexation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union was considered to be illegal by the international community, but condemnations resulted in little. Administered by Justas Paleckis and Vladimir Dekanozov's puppet government, Soviet-occupied Lithuania, 20,000 to 30,000 people who were deemed dangerous to Soviet rule were deported by the Soviet NKVD to labor camps in Central Asia, many of whom would never return. Lithuanian culture, whose rebuilding had made significant gains since the country's restoration in 1918, was systematically destroyed by the Soviets. Meanwhile, the Lithuanian currency was artificially devalued in an effort to create a total dependency on the Soviet Union.
When Germany turned on its former ally the Soviet Union, Soviet troops fell back from Lithuania to more defensible positions, massacring between 1,000 to 1,500 Lithuanians on their way out. As the German troops entered the country, Lithuanians initially regarded them as liberators, but German design on Lithuania was gradually revealed, starting with the lack of support for the Lithuanian provisional government, followed by the establishment of Reichskommissariat Ostland and the banning of Lithuanian political parties. Much like in other German-occupied nations in this period, elements for and against the German occupation both existed. Many minority political parties already established as anti-Semitic, for example, collaborated with the Germans in the atrocities committed against Lithuanian Jews and in the resettlement (and thus Germanization) of Lithuanian lands.
Prior to the European War, Lithuania was home to about 155,000 Lithuanian Jews; after the fall of Poland in 1939, the number grew to over 200,000 with the influx of Polish Jews. During the German occupation, between 130,000 and 143,000 Lithuanian Jews were lost (some estimates ran as high as 195,000), making Lithuania one of the greatest victims of the Holocaust both in terms of number of deaths and percentage of Jewish population lost.
Resistance movements generally picked up momentum in between 1942 and 1943; they were generally Soviet-backed and operated in eastern Lithuania. The Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) resistance force also operated in eastern Lithuania, under the notion that Wilno was illegally taken by the Soviet Union from Poland and it would be returned to Poland after the war. In the summer of 1944, Soviet troops reached eastern Lithuania. As Soviet troops drove across the country, Lithuania saw a great amount of destruction in the bitter fighting.
The Soviet re-conquest of Lithuania was complete in early 1945, and mass deportations would resume shortly after. Between 1944 and 1953, nearly 120,000 people, or about 5% of the population, would be deported. Little different than what the Germans had done during its occupation, the Soviet Union resettled non-Lithuanians (mostly Russians) from elsewhere in the Soviet Union in an attempt to integrate Lithuania into the Soviet Union. The Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which had never been recognized by the West (as the annexation of 1940 was considered illegal), was dissolved at the end of the Cold War in 1990, and the Republic of Lithuania was restored.
Events Taken Place in Lithuania
- Annexation of Klaipeda 22 Mar 1939
- Annexation of the Baltic States 15 Jun 1940 - 9 Aug 1940
- Operation Barbarossa 22 Jun 1941 - 30 Sep 1941
- Discovery of Concentration Camps and the Holocaust 24 Jul 1944 - 29 Apr 1945
Jeigu Jūsų šeimos medyje yra lietuvių, kurie dalyvavo Antrojo pasaulinio karo pasipriešinime, prašome juos pridėti prie šio projekto. Būtų puiku, jeigu asmens profilyje parašytumėte jo trumpą biografiją. Šis projektas yra skirtas ne tik Lietuvos pasipriešinimo dalyviams, bet ir kitų šalių tautybių ir pilietybių asmenims, kurių šaknys siekia Lietuvą. Daugelis jų buvo iš JAV ar TSRS ginkluotojų pajėgų.
Pastaba: tik vieši profiliai gali būti šio projekto dalimi
VLE: Šešioliktoji lietuviškoji šaulių divizija - SSRS kariuomenės struktūrinis vienetas.