Archival Documents in Documentary Cinema: The Public (Re)use of Nazi documents in Soviet Lithuania in the 1960s

This article examines the public use of archival documents that recorded crimes committed during the German occupation of Lithuania. The focus is on the mediation of archival documents originally produced by the Nazi German authorities in the documentary trial film, Why Stones Do Not Keep Silent, released in 1962. The first part discusses how the archives gained political importance in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It shows how the history of World War II, Soviet war crimes prosecution and the (mis)use of archival documents were interrelated. The second part explores how Soviet Lithuanian documentary cinema was employed to mediate archival documents. The paper attempts to explain how, during the ‘second wave’ of Soviet justice in the 1960s, Nazi documents were instrumentalised to (re)shape historical narratives, construct enemy images and raise awareness of the history of the World War II. This study demonstrates that this archival material was mobilised to charge local Lithuanians with war crimes, while simultaneously reducing the creators of these documents – Nazi Germans – to an anonymous and voiceless occupying force that merely functioned as administrators and record-keepers of wartime atrocities.