Posted on 05/30/2026 4:37:50 AM PDT by Cronos
As he sat in his restaurant in the Lithuanian capital, Liutauras Ceprackas, a chef, said he was one of the many Lithuanians who worry about a Russian invasion. He is not sure, he said, that his country’s 15,000-soldier army is big enough to stop one. Increasingly, he is not certain an American-led NATO would, either.
That is why, three generations after Nazi Germany brutally occupied his country in World War II, Mr. Ceprackas, 51, is glad that Berlin has permanently stationed thousands of German soldiers in Lithuania.
“This brigade is so strong and so well equipped that it’s like we have a second army in Lithuania,” Laurynas Kasciunas, a Lithuanian former defense minister, said in an interview
For German soldiers, the reception in Lithuania contrasts with the experience many report back home. Since World War II, a desire to avoid a return to the militarism of the Nazi era has fueled a strong anti-military sentiment in Germany. As a result, soldiers in uniform in the country are often the subject of rude gestures or comments.
Businesses have also hopped on the bandwagon, with a coffee chain and a national supermarket chain giving discounts to German personnel showing their military ID. According to Rimvydas Petrauskas, one of Lithuania’s leading historians and the rector of Vilnius University, “The Germans learned from their past; the Russians have ignored the lessons.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Germany’s leadership is clearly sensitive to that history. Last year, Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, laid a wreath at a memorial in Paneriai, a district on the edge of Vilnius. At a killing site in the area, German Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators massacred up to 75,000 people in three years, most of them Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Arm and train every citizen.
Because most of Europe has gone hard left and to them guns in citizen hands are bad.
Switzerland is mountainous. Rather difficult to conquer.
As for Lithuania could be same as Ukraine who saw the Krauts as liberators after what Stalin did to them. I wouldn’t want to choose between the two.
I’m sure most of the Swiss don’t expect to use what they learn in training, give their country’s record for staying out of wars.
Lithuania has an annual mandatory conscription system where around 5,000 citizens are drafted annually for 9 months of compulsory basic military service.
From this article:
https://nupeaceandwarcenter.substack.com/p/the-citizen-soldier-tradition-machiavelli
“The Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—face similar pressures with far smaller populations. They cannot rely on sheer numbers, so they have institutionalized citizen defense through volunteer leagues and territorial forces.[xiii] Estonia’s Kaitseliit, Latvia’s National Guard, and Lithuania’s Riflemen’s Union mobilize civilians alongside professional armies, ensuring that defense is embedded in society. In response to Russian provocations, the Baltics are emphasizing hybrid resilience, cyber defense, counter-propaganda, and decentralized tactics. Recent drone incursions highlight the need for adaptive defense. Finland’s MalletStrike125 initiative—decentralized sensors, mobile strike teams, and civilian spotters—offers a model.[xiv] The Baltics can replicate this by embedding detection nodes in communities, turning forests and villages into aerial denial zones. This approach multiplies defensive capacity while strengthening civil-military cohesion.”
The best way to keep from being invaded is to arm your citizens.
Easier to be Hitler’s banker.
Where the Nazi’s wiped out the Jewish population.
“””””Why don’t the European countries such as this do as Switzerland has done?
Arm and train every citizen.”””””
Personally I love the warrior nation ideal with tough school athletics and true outdoor trained scouting, and then into the reserves and military.
A country has to be able to create that culture and win the politics of it among the voters and face the more enticing opposing politics to it.
For Switzerland it was their culture as a people, a nation founded by mercenaries and people of war, what some historical figure described as not a country with an army but an army that is a country, it was part of their culture of warriors before modern political sensitivities and the female vote, which Switzerland now has.
“in his book La Place de la Concorde Suisse. McPhee describes hidden entrances and doors that open in the sides of otherwise normal looking rock faces, only to reveal hidden fighter jets and artillery, which can be rapidly brought to bear against invaders. He notes the explosives carefully embedded, catalogued, and maintained in bridges over the Rhone River—all for the purpose of destroying the bridges and cutting off access to key segments of Switzerland.”
Where the Nazi’s wiped out the Jewish population.
With a LOT of help from the locals.
I think it’s a fairly unbiased write up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany
In the beginning the Germans were seen as liberators, then occupiers.
The first person I met who I knew was a Jew was also the first Lithuanian I had met, and it was in an internment center in Washington DC where we were both being held, she was attractive and educated.
After Hitler got the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939, his next target was Memel, which was in Lithuania at the time. The Lithuanians quickly gave in, and gave it to Hitler.
After that, it was on to “Danzig”.
Nearly every one of those German soldiers had a relative from that era that did not return from the east and those that did return had “issues”.
They don't want to be occupied by the Russians. I can't blame them.
Neither do the Ukrainians.
Increasingly, he is not certain an American-led NATO would, either.
The New York Times couldn't resist inserting a little anti-Americanism into the article.
What a choice. Russians, Communists, Red Army, NKVD or Germans, Nazis, SS, Gestapo
When a Pole encounters a Russian and a German, which does he shoot first?
The German - Business Before Pleasure
True.
One if the first things it seems that the German commander did was visit the monument to the Jews slain and lay a wreath and bow his head in apology
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