LGGRTC says it has still not examined the Lübeck judgment behind its “completely acquitted” claim. Lithuania’s antisemitism plan nevertheless gives the Centre new Holocaust-memory authority, while Jewish institutions engaging the plan have yet to show the public their due diligence.

In a letter dated September 29, 2026, and registered on October 2 as No. 55R-951, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre responded to my Gewecke–Bub challenge. The response bears a reference to September 18 and was addressed not only to me but also to Darius Jakavičius, chair of the Seimas Freedom Fights and State Historical Memory Commission. LGGRTC said it had still not examined the 1970 Lübeck judgment. It also said its statement that Ewald Bub had been “completely acquitted” was likely not legally correct.

Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as an independent historical authority for purposes of establishing contested historical fact.

Its institutional authorship supplies no evidentiary presumption of accuracy, reliability, neutrality, or historical authority. Publication by the LGGRTC is not corroboration. It establishes only that the Centre made the assertion.

In my assessment, the Centre’s publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history. The documented record now includes instances in which the Centre made categorical historical or legal claims without first examining the primary records capable of establishing whether those claims were true.

Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a material historical proposition merely because it originates with, is endorsed by, or is repeated by the LGGRTC. Every such proposition must stand or fall on independently verified primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship.

Until that verification is completed, an LGGRTC assertion is treated as an unverified claim by an interested institutional source, not as historical evidence supporting itself. Particular scrutiny is required for omission, selective quotation, exculpatory reframing, changes in legal or procedural characterization, reliance on derivative sources where primary records are available, and factual distortion.

The rule is simple: LGGRTC publication proves that the LGGRTC said something. It does not prove that what the LGGRTC said is true.

The judgment LGGRTC still has not examined

The Centre’s Lithuanian is unambiguous:

“Centras nėra ištyręs 1970 metų Liubeko teismo nuosprendžio, nes jis nėra įskaitmenintas…”

“The Centre has not examined the 1970 Lübeck court judgment because it is not digitized…”

“…todėl tikėtina, kad teiginys ‘E. Bub‘as buvo visiškai išteisintas’ nėra teisiškai korektiškas…”

“…therefore it is likely that the statement ‘E. Bub was completely acquitted’ is not legally correct…”

The same response says the Centre relied on an article based on the recollections of former Šiauliai ghetto prisoner Leiba Lipshitz, who, according to LGGRTC itself, participated in the Gewecke–Bub trial and testified against them, and on Hans Gewecke’s filmed account. A witness may testify about conduct and events. A defendant may give his own version. Neither source is the dispositive text of what the court decided.

The Centre’s “not digitized” explanation does not make the proceeding unknowable. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen identifies the case as Lfd. Nr. 722, Landgericht Lübeck 2 Ks 1/68, judgment of January 27, 1970, published in Band XXXIII. Its case index records Bub’s proceeding as “Verfahren eingestellt” — proceedings discontinued — and Gewecke’s sentence as four and a half years. JuNSV’s decisions index separately identifies the January 26, 1971 Bundesgerichtshof decision as 5 StR 631/70.

The Gewecke proceeding concerned the June 6, 1943 hanging of a Jew caught bringing food into the Šiauliai ghetto. A trial for one murder cannot, by itself, support LGGRTC’s broader generalization that German proceedings exonerated Gewecke and Bub in relation to the Šiauliai ghetto persecution system.

The case identification was also confirmed to me by JuNSV editor Dr. D. W. de Mildt, as I documented in Lithuania Inherited Its Alibi From the Occupier. LGGRTC did not publish “unverified.” It published “completely acquitted.” It published certainty about a judgment it had not examined.

The Centre’s 2019 archive shows the method

LGGRTC’s 2019 news archive preserves more than the Noreika memorandum. In its March 27 account of my court case, the Centre said it had characterized my evidence to the court as “nacių propagandos atkartojimą, kad už Holokaustą Lietuvoje neva atsakingi ne vokiečiai, o lietuviai.” My translation: “a repetition of Nazi propaganda that Lithuanians, not Germans, were supposedly responsible for the Holocaust in Lithuania.”

The same archive states that the population of occupied Lithuania did not understand ghettos as part of the Holocaust, and says that in 1975 the U.S. administration removed the head of the Provisional Government and its interior minister from lists of the accused. That claim leads directly into the Brazaitis problem.

The archival page also carries the December 18, 2019 announcement that Noreika organized the rescue of Šiauliai Jews and links the underlying December 17 memorandum.

Three foreign proceedings, three exculpatory conversions

Bub is not an isolated wording problem. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told Representative Brad Sherman on May 12 that the earlier “complete exoneration” formulation concerning Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis was legally imprecise and that administrative discontinuation was not formal judicial exoneration under U.S. law. The documentary chain is preserved in Lithuania’s Genocide Centre: Death Is Not Exoneration.

As of September 13, I had preserved a TOI-hosted capture showing that LGGRTC page 2969 still said Brazaitis had been “rehabilitated” by the United States Department of Justice even after Lithuania’s own Foreign Ministry had acknowledged the legal distinction. The Centre corrected one Brazaitis page on August 26, but not the entire public record. See Lithuania’s Genocide Centre: Death Is Not Exoneration.

Hermann Schleef supplies the German comparator. On February 11, 2020, Director General Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė signed a response calling Schleef “exonerated.” The April 27, 1970 Oldenburg order did not acquit him; it removed him from further prosecution for insufficient evidence. In 2021, the Lower Saxony State Archive transmitted the Schleef scans to the Lithuanian Embassy in Germany. Embassy receipt establishes possession by the Lithuanian state. It does not establish that LGGRTC itself received or read the scans. I documented that custody distinction in Lithuania Had the Schleef File.

Brazaitis: administrative discontinuation became rehabilitation or complete exoneration. Bub: discontinued proceedings became complete acquittal. Schleef: an insufficient-evidence disposition became exoneration. Three foreign proceedings, three exculpatory conversions. A repeated method has to be audited.

Parliament had already been warned about LGGRTC’s quality

On March 19, the Seimas Freedom Fights and State Historical Memory Commission published a blunt account of LGGRTC’s governance problems. The official Seimas release records Council chair Arūnas Streikus saying that the Centre’s leadership was not taking Council proposals into account and was providing no feedback. It said LGGRTC lacked clear strategic direction and leadership, that its publications lacked higher scholarly value, and that Council members warned the Centre risked losing its authority with both the public and the scholarly community.

The commission told in March that LGGRTC’s publications lacked higher scholarly value received, through its chair, the Centre’s later admission that it had still not examined the judgment behind one of its categorical legal claims.

LGGRTC’s September 11 publication identified Arūnas Bubnys as acting director general. Response No. 55R-951 was likewise signed by Bubnys in that acting capacity. Lithuania is expanding the Centre’s Holocaust-memory authority while its governance, source verification and leadership remain under scrutiny.

Lithuania expanded LGGRTC’s authority anyway

Lithuania’s government advertises its 157-measure action plan as a national response to antisemitism, historical distortion, Holocaust denial and trivialization, while promoting Holocaust research, remembrance and Jewish life.

The plan contains useful measures. It also places LGGRTC inside the system meant to protect historical truth.

Measure 3.1 makes LGGRTC a principal implementer, together with municipalities, for decisions concerning public objects that promote totalitarian or authoritarian regimes. The Lithuanian text expressly includes “nacistinį režimą, vykdžiusį Holokaustą” — the Nazi regime that carried out the Holocaust.

Measure 3.27 goes further. The official implementation appendix makes LGGRTC the principal implementer for analyzing Holocaust exhibitions in municipal museums, assessing whether they need updating and issuing recommendations. The indicator is one set of recommendations. Universities, municipalities and the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History participate. Implementation runs from 2027 through 2029.

Lithuania is asking LGGRTC to judge other institutions’ Holocaust history while LGGRTC is conceding defects in the source verification behind its own.

The government was offered a different structure. In the official consultation table, LGGRTC proposed that the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History should lead measure 3.27 and that LGGRTC should participate. The government only partly accepted the proposal and answered: “būtent Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras turi šioje srityje daugiau kompetencijos.” My translation: “the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has greater competence in this field.”

The government gave LGGRTC more authority than LGGRTC proposed for itself.

AJC had already identified the oversight problem

American Jewish Committee cannot say this institutional problem appeared after it engaged the plan. In April 2019, AJC said it was “deeply troubled” by a court filing in my own litigation in which LGGRTC defended Noreika. AJC said the defense sought to excuse Noreika’s culpability and disputed well-established facts about the murder of Lithuanian Jews. Rabbi Andrew Baker added: “No one today can claim ignorance about the role of Lithuanian collaborators.”

On February 6, 2026, AJC publicly welcomed Lithuania’s new strategy while flagging the absence of an oversight mechanism. I preserved that public position in Certain Jews: Lithuania’s Own Words. Eight days later, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys presented the plan to AJC CEO Ted Deutch in Munich.

AJC announced that it would host Lithuania’s May 1 presentation of the plan in Los Angeles, as I documented in AJC & B’nai B’rith: The Jewish Community Is Entitled to the Record.

AJC had already identified the missing oversight mechanism. It then continued engaging the plan. What it has not shown the Jewish public is the due diligence that bridged those positions.

If that work exists, publish it: the sources reviewed, the questions put to Lithuania, the answers received and the institutional conclusion.

The New York photographs

On September 23, Budrys met people the Foreign Ministry described in English as representatives of “leading U.S. Jewish organisations” to discuss implementation of the same plan. The Ministry did not publicly name the organizations or participants. I have asked it to do so.

Until those participants are identified, I do not attribute AJC or any other organization to that New York meeting.

The due-diligence question nevertheless remains for every institution that allows Lithuania to use its presence as evidence of responsible Jewish engagement with the plan.

Did the participants ask why Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry had already conceded the Brazaitis exoneration language was legally imprecise? Did they ask why measure 3.27 made LGGRTC the principal reviewer of municipal Holocaust exhibitions without first subjecting LGGRTC’s own historical products to an independent audit?

A photograph is not due diligence. The people whose history is being negotiated are entitled to see enough of the work to judge whether the photographs rest on scrutiny or merely access.

They do not speak for me

Lithuania has also blurred institutional access into representational authority. It decorated Andrew Baker for representing Lithuanian Jews’ interests. An organization’s officers speak for their organization. They did not acquire my consent, or that of any Litvak family whose dead are the subject of Lithuania’s Holocaust diplomacy, by sitting for a photograph.

As a Litvak, I did not authorize any Jewish organization to validate Lithuania’s historical record in my name. I did not authorize anyone to treat LGGRTC as rehabilitated because Lithuanian diplomats arrived with a 157-measure plan. I did not authorize anyone to exchange the unresolved record of Noreika, Brazaitis, Škirpa and LGGRTC — or the prosecution of Artur Fridman — for access, civility or another photograph.

The missing measure is an audit

Lithuania needs an independent audit of LGGRTC.

Every LGGRTC characterization of a foreign criminal, immigration, denazification, war-crimes or administrative proceeding should be entered into a public register beside the controlling record. The register should state what LGGRTC published, what the foreign proceeding actually decided, when the Centre obtained or examined the primary source, whether a correction followed, and which downstream findings relied on the disputed characterization.

The review should be conducted by people who did not produce or defend the disputed findings. It should include independent Holocaust historians, archival specialists and legal historians capable of reading the foreign proceedings LGGRTC has repeatedly converted into exculpatory historical claims.

If LGGRTC’s conclusions are sound, independent scrutiny will confirm them. If they are unsupported, overstated or wrong, Lithuania should correct them.

Measure 3.27 begins in 2027. By then, the institution that says it has still not examined the Lübeck judgment will be telling Lithuanian museums whether their Holocaust history is accurate. Lithuania can withdraw that assignment, or it can explain to every Jewish organization it photographs why it should not.