Roger Boyes meets one of those on a list of 32 suspected war criminals submitted to the country's prosecutor IT IS hot in Kaunas; the before-the-storm stickiness that overcame Lithuania in June 1941, the season of massacres.

So hot, that Alfonsas Zaldokas is wearing only a vest and shorts when he opens the door of his top-floor flat on the edge of this Lithuanian town.
Visible under his vest are two scars. The Times knows -but he has not yet been told -that his name is on a list of suspected war criminals submitted to the country's prosecutor-general. The 82-year-old man talks enthusiastically about his heroic past. His frail bespectacled wife senses trouble and disappears inside the flat; through a closed door we hear her sob.

According to the Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, this bony man with thick, wavy, grey hair is reported to have been on the spot during a frenzied killing of Jews.

"Information on Lithuanian war crimes has been coming to us as part of Operation Last Chance," says Dr Zuroff. "We have been offering rewards for tips. " He has submitted the names of 32 suspects to the chief prosecutor, including that of Mr Zaldokas. "You know, war is war," says Mr Zaldokas.

"There was chaos, there were small groups which robbed the Jews, but there was no organised plan to take action against them." The veteran speaks in Russian but his grasp of military German is strong. "A lot happened in the confusion of those six to eight days and I cannot exclude the possibility that something happened; but, I tell you, it was nothing organised.

" But there are discrepancies in what he says. He describes himself as a partisan, then as a Gefreiter -a junior German rank -but later reconstructs his adventures as if he were giving commands.

There is a constant confusion of "we" and "they" as he describes how the Police Support Battalions cordoned off areas while German soldiers or SS units carried out killings. First "they" surrounded the killing fields; later “we" tried to dissuade the Germans from ommitting massacres.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, reached in August 1939, allowed Stalin to grab the independent Baltic States, a big prize for a navy seeking warm water ports and command of northern Europe. The Red Army and the NKVD security police units moved in on June 15, 1940, arresting and deporting more than 18,000 Lithuanians, including 5,000 children. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union a year later his troops were decked with flowers from grateful Lithuanians.

Before the Germans arrived, the Lithuanian Activists' Front mounted the June 1941 rebellion against the retreating Soviet forces to establish an independent state before the arrival of the Germans. Mr Zaldokas was in the group, which was steered by exiles in Berlin whose rhetoric, plainly influenced by their Nazi hosts, was purely anti-Semitic. Dr Zuroff believes that it has blood on its hands. More than 96 per cent of the 220,000 Jewish people who were living in Lithuania when the Nazi occupation began were murdered during the Holocaust, many of them by Lithuanians. Indeed, Lithuanian police battalions, working with the Germans, slaughtered thousands of Jews across Eastern Europe. Even Lithuanian historians now admit that the murder of the country's Jews was not the responsibility of the Germans alone. It was a horrified German army photographer who witnessed the killing of 45 Jewish people in a garage in Kaunas on June 25, 1941. A young Lithuanian struck each of the group with a crowbar until they were dead. The photographer records: "After the entire group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem." Civilian bystanders applauded.

Lithuanian historians now admit that the scope of the national resistance movement has been grossly exaggerated. Original accounts spoke of the killing of up to 6,000 rebels and a total number of rebels of up to 131,000. The respected historian Valentinas Brandisauskas has produced a more realistic estimate of 650 dead insurgents and a resistance movement of up to 20,000.

Some Lithuanians did save Jews; some were openly hostile; most were indifferent.

The evidence against Mr Zaldokas is unclear but he is certainly not shy about mouthing the reductionist myths of the Lithuanian resistance. Jewish officers were among the NKVD units that had deported Lithuanians to Siberia. What could be more natural, he says, than seeking revenge when the Red Army cleared out?

A Lithuanian student asks us: "Why do you want to stir up the old ghosts?"

"For starters," Dr Zuroff retorts, "we could expect an explicit admission of guilt, a sincere apology, a serious attempt to bring murderers to justice and a determination to teach the truth about what happened."

As long as the Baltic republics find it hard to face their history they will have uncertain national identities. Now that they are about to form the northeastern frontier of the EU, that matters a great deal. Countries that persist in seeing the Nazis as liberators and are reluctant to admit that their national heroes may have been involved in terrible crimes are likely to have a troubled relationship with their Russian and Polish neighbours.

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