On this date in 1957, Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas (Lithuanian link) was shot in Vilnius.

Ramanauskas-Vargas himself was born in the U.S., but his Lithuanian family soon returned to the motherland, where Adolfas grew up and supposedly just taught seminary during the war years. (Code for, he collaborated in the Holocaust.)

When the USSR finally broke the Siege of Leningrad and sent the Wehrmacht running west in 1944, it (re-)occupied the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. And the Soviets didn’t plan to leave.

Bands of anti-Soviet partisans formed in these anti-Soviet states, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe — the evocatively named Forest Brothers. Ramanauskas-Vanagas joined up.

Absent western support which was not forthcoming, these nationalist guerrillas were overmatched against the Red Army — but the movements held out in their secret wilderness fastnesses for years, and in the case of at least a few intransigent individuals, decades.

The Soviets answered with ruthless suppression to quell resistance, coupled (after Stalin’s death in 1953) with an amnesty offer that largely emptied the forests.

Ramanauskas-Vanagas, the South Lithuania commander, wasn’t captured until late in 1956. He enjoyed the customary favors of his KGB captors, and after torture, the Lithuanian SSR Supreme Court sentenced him to execution. (His wife got a trip to the gulag.)

There’s a Lithuanian biography of him here, and a few good photos in this forum thread.

On this day..

• 1881: Percy Lefroy Mapleton, police sketch milestone
• 1937: Vincenzo Baccala
• 1343: A dozen Breton nobles
• 1740: Edward Shuel, for a Catholic-Protestant marriage
• 1986: The Moiwana Massacre
• 1793: Antoine Barnave, constitutional monarchist
• 1284: Alice Bowe and her friends
• 1938: Branislaw Tarashkyevich, Belarusian linguist
• 1330: Roger Mortimer, usurper
• 1781: The slaves of the Zong, for the insurance
• 1517: Torben Oxe
• 1941: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
• Themed Set: Women Against Fascism