20. To Save Those Endangered in Europe, Sugihara Began Issuing Japanese Visas in Ever-Greater Numbers
Gathering intelligence about Soviet and German military movements and plans brought Sugihara into contact with anti-German and anti-Soviet elements. They included the Polish underground, whose operations extended beyond German-occupied Poland and into Lithuania. Then, in 1940, the Soviets marched into and occupied Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia, as a preliminary to annexing them into the USSR. The inhabitants were subjected to brutal repression by the NKVD – the Soviet secret police – and waves of arrests, torture, and executions swept the newly-occupied Baltic states.
That was when Sugihara began making creative use of his consular authority to help and save those at risk. He recognized that, with most of Europe engulfed by war, the most practical escape route for refugees in Lithuania was not westwards, but eastwards through the Soviet Union, and thence to Japan. So he started granting visas in ever greater numbers to those seeking to save themselves from impending doom.