SiPo and SD. It had the authority to sentence suspects up to three years. Larger sentences had to be reviewed and approved by Karl Jäger who always increased the sentences. Wilhelm Fuchs, the new commander of Einsatzkommando 3, wanted to liquidate LSP and incorporate it into the German police, but Stasys Čenkus wrote him a letter defending LSP usefulness and it was left undisturbed. Internal structure The head of the Lithuanian Security and Criminal Police was , an agent of Abwehr. He kept this position until the end of the German occupation. His deputy assistants were head of the Security Police Kazys Matulis and personal secretary Vytenis Stasiškis. Petras Pamataitis headed Criminal Police. LSP had a staff of approximately 400 people, 250 of them in Kaunas and around another 130 in Vilnius. Many of its members came from the fascist Iron Wolf organisation. For comparison, as of December 1943, the German SiPo and SD had 112 employees in Kaunas and 40 employees in Vilnius. The combined Lithuanian Security and Criminal Police had 886 employees in 1943. LSP was headquartered in Kaunas. The headquarters were divided onto several directories: Organization (recruitment and employee selection), Economical and Financial (general administration), and Information (collected reports from other departments and agencies, created registry of state enemies, organized archive). LSP had six regional branches in Kaunas (headed by Albinas Čiuoderis), Vilnius (Aleksandras Lileikis), Šiauliai (Juozas Pakulis), Ukmergė (Aleksandras Braziukaitis), Marijampolė (Petras Banys) and Panevėžys (Antanas Liepa). Regional branches usually had seven commissariats: Guards' Commissariat – guarded buildings and prisons General Commissariat – general administrative functions Information Commissariat – screened applicants to governmental institutions, gathered operative information, created lists of state enemies, gathered information on political attitudes of local population, preparing reports and publications Communist Commissariat – gathered information on communists and Soviet partisans, arrested and interrogated suspects, recruited agents Polish Commissariat – investigated activities of illegal Polish organizations, arrested and interrogated suspects, recruited agents Commissariat of Ethnic Minorities – investigated activities of Russians, Belarusians and other ethnic minorities Reconnaissance Commissariat Regional branches sometimes had different set of commissariats, for example Kaunas's branch had a separate commissariat for right-wing organizations. Activities Persecution of communists and Polish resistance The initial task of LSP was identifying and arresting communists. During the first months of German occupation, the Communist Commissariat of the Vilnius branch, headed by Juozas Bagdonis, was especially active. This commissariat in documents of 1941 is sometimes