The
Lithuanian Activist Front announced the creation of the provisional government on 22 June 1941, as the
June Uprising in Lithuania began. The Nazi regime envisioned Lithuania as a future part of
Greater Germany, and was not much interested in Lithuanian independence. It did allow the Provisional Government to operate while it was useful. Literary historian
Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis became acting prime minister instead of Škirpa. Lithuanian rebels had liberated Lithuania by the time the
Wehrmacht arrived, and rescued over 300 political prisoners who would have been killed by the NKVD. The June Uprising laid the foundations for
anti-Nazi resistance that later transformed into an
anti-Soviet resistance. Stanislovas Stasiulis pictured the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania as "three layers and periods." The first, he wrote, involves the relationship between Lithuanians and Jews during the Nazi occupation, and the second followed the Soviet re-occupation. The third period of interest covers the historiography since 1990, he wrote, which has attempted new and open discussions of the defensive (emigré) and ideological (Soviet) reactions to the Holocaust. The Soviet refusal to acknowledge the racialism of the Holocaust helped trigger a defensive cultural response known as
double genocide theory, which equated the Holocaust and the Stalinist brutality meted out to Lithuanian by the Soviets. Considered by some a form of Holocaust trivialization, this paradigm has sometimes been taken as far as portraying Nazi pogroms as retaliation. LAF leader
Kazys Škirpa, former Lithuanian
envoy to Germany, was named
prime minister. But he was in Berlin and the Germans put him under house arrest.
Rapolas Skipitis, another minister-to-be in Berlin, was prevented from leaving as well.
Vytautas Bulvičius was to become Minister of Defence but the Soviets arrested him on 2 June and General
Stasys Raštikis replaced him. The Provisional Government dissolved in August 1941 after deciding that it had failed to achieve an autonomous if not independent Lithuania under German patronage. ==Cabinet==