As a result of Stalin/Hitler pact of 1939, Europe was divided between Hitler and Stalin. The Nazis invaded Poland and areas to the west of Poland, and the Soviets invaded the Baltics, and brought the Soviet border to the areas controlled by Germans.
The atrocities committed by the Soviets were great, in 1940-41 Stalin's NKVD troops rounded up people, executed them and deported them - tens of thousands of them at a time in the three tiny countries that are known as the Baltic states. The last wave of atrocities against the civil population took place just before the Nazis invaded the areas controlled by the Soviet Union.
When on June 22, 1941 Hitler's armies invaded Lithuania and the other areas controlled by the Soviets, a lot of people thought they were being liberated. What a mistake that was! One evil regime just replaced another one, and the Nazis - upon failing to form Lithuanian SS troops and gain significant support - started sending people to forced labor and concentration camps.
When the Soviets returned in 1944-45, they resumed what they have started in 1940. Which is: getting rid of cultural, economical, religious, intellectual elites and anybody who publicly expressed their own opinion; confiscating any private property; and continuing in their attempts to create the Orwellian utopia that the Soviet Union was. They eventually were swept away by the Singing Revolution, mass protests and the first free election in Lithuania in 1990.
It is hard to comprehend the atrocities of WWII from todays perspective, and here is one video that tries to shed some light to this time period:
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