Funhouse Mirrors

Lithuania’s Genocide Centre never examined the judgment it used to defend a Holocaust collaborator. Now it is a European partner teaching source criticism.

Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine by claiming to protect people from genocide. On 16 March 2022 the International Court of Justice ordered Russia to suspend its military operations. Aggression was dressed as protection. Reality entered the carnival mirror and emerged as its opposite. There is nothing entertaining about the people crushed by that inversion.

North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The name advertises the freedom its rulers deny. A title can proclaim virtue while the institution behind it practices the reverse.

Now the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) has entered a European project to combat Holocaust distortion. An institution that used an unread judgment to defend a Holocaust collaborator is joining a program that teaches others to test historical narratives against sources. Putting it in that role is like putting Putin in charge of Lithuanian human rights education.

After decades of experience with LGGRTC and documenting its recurring falsifications, I presume that any output from the Centre contains falsifications of history until independent verification establishes otherwise. That is my working presumption, earned by its record. Its official seal cannot supply the evidence its researchers failed to obtain.

The new carnival funhouse attraction is PRISMA, a European project promising resistance to Holocaust distortion. The Centre’s own description advertises critical assessment of narratives, fact-based alternatives and responsible historical journalism. The partner in Osijek explicitly includes the roles of collaborators. LGGRTC’s treatment of collaboration is therefore central to its fitness for this assignment.

A carnival warns customers that its mirrors distort. A state research institution promises the opposite: readers are meant to trust that its publications describe reality. PRISMA risks giving the Centre’s distorting glass a European frame.

In response No. 55R-951, registered on 2 October 2026, LGGRTC acknowledged that it had not examined the 1970 Lübeck judgment behind its assertion that Ewald Bub had been completely acquitted. It cited non-digitization and conceded that the formulation was probably legally inaccurate. It nevertheless maintained the essential substance of its account.

The claim served the Centre’s defense of Jonas Noreika. Its 17 December 2019 memorandum presented German officials Hans Gewecke and Bub through supposed judicial exoneration. Its 3 February 2020 reply and 11 February 2020 response repeated the argument. The German officials were portrayed as completely exonerated, and that supposed clearance became an alibi for the Lithuanian official beneath Gewecke.

The published judgment draws distinctions the Centre erased. The murder accusation against Bub was not established. The reasons nevertheless found that he intentionally and unlawfully aided a killing classified as Totschlag, conventionally translated as manslaughter. Proceedings on that offense ended because the limitation period had expired. Bub was not convicted. Gewecke was convicted and sentenced to four years and six months.

The man hanged was Bezalel Masowiecki, a Jewish baker with a wife and a three-year-old daughter, Leja. On 6 June 1943, adult ghetto prisoners were compelled to watch his execution. The judgment records Bub directing the hanging. Masowiecki’s sister-in-law approached him with a clemency petition from the prisoner’s mother; Bub rebuffed her with a movement of his foot. He signaled for the execution to proceed, then ordered the body left hanging until noon. That is the conduct the Centre’s mirror shrank into complete exoneration.

My partial historical study sets out all three parts of Bub’s disposition. The murder-charge finding matters. It does not erase the findings on aiding the killing, and expiration of a prosecution deadline does not turn the underlying conduct into innocence.

LGGRTC compressed those different outcomes into exoneration and used the result to defend Noreika. The mirror made culpable conduct shrink until a national hero occupied the space where historical responsibility should have been.

Noreika’s ghettoization instruction is dated August 1941, and his directive for disposing of Jewish property September 1941. The Centre’s own 2015 memorandum records both. Bub arrived in Šiauliai in October 1942. A case concerning a killing in 1943 cannot clear Noreika’s orders from 1941. Even an unqualified acquittal of Bub would not adjudicate another official’s earlier acts.

The International Commission’s Holocaust subcommission challenged the Centre’s Noreika reasoning in April 2019. The conclusions were contested. The judgment was obtainable. The supposed German clearance continued to circulate. In October 2026 the Centre finally acknowledged that it had never examined the primary record capable of testing its categorical assertion.

In 55R-951, LGGRTC identified an article based on the recollections of ghetto survivor Leiba Lipšicas as a source. Yet Lipšicas’s history, published in the 2002 volume Šiaulių getas: kalinių sąrašai, 1942, calls Bub “an atrocious enemy of the Jews” and contains no trial or acquittal account. The Centre must identify the article and explain where its exoneration claim entered the chain. A survivor’s description of persecution cannot become a court clearance merely through institutional repetition.

“Not digitized” is an extraordinary excuse from an institution whose governing statute requires collection and analysis of archival and historical material in Lithuania and abroad and rejects pretexts for halting the pursuit of historical truth. The judgment was published in the JuNSV series and obtainable in print. It is also publicly accessible online now. Its present availability does not establish when it first went online; the printed publication alone defeats the excuse for leaving it unread.

LGGRTC asserted a court outcome before obtaining the decision. It repeated the assertion and later defended its essential meaning while admitting it had left the judgment unread. PRISMA proposes to teach the source criticism the Centre failed to practice.

The Centre’s February 2020 account also said Gewecke and Bub had been released after Allied interrogation in 1945. The judgment records Bub’s Soviet captivity until 1948. Gewecke remained interned until February 1948 and was sentenced that April by the Bielefeld Spruchgericht, whose written reasons weighed his Šiauliai service. That was not a conviction for a specific Šiauliai killing. Bub’s later Category V denazification classification followed an administrative provision for returnees from Soviet captivity. The surviving NRW file concerns a fee waiver. Neither that label nor that file clears his conduct in Šiauliai.

The Centre also called Bub Gewecke’s deputy. The judgment identifies the deputy as Kurt Schriever. A mistaken job title would be minor in isolation; repeated alongside an unverified complete acquittal, it exposes how little the supposed judicial authority was checked.

In the public USHMM transcript of Gewecke’s interview with Claude Lanzmann, pages 58–59, Gewecke reads a 1966 letter from his former chief interpreter, Otto Leppert. It offers Lithuanian witnesses to supposedly humane treatment of Jews in Šiauliai. Among them is Antonina Noreikienė, spelled “Noraika” in the transcript. The letter identifies her as the widow of the Šiauliai district chief killed by the Communists. Jonas Noreika held that office and was executed by the Soviets in 1947. Noreikienė is the Lithuanian married-woman form of Noreika: the same family surname. The description identifies Jonas Noreika’s widow.

She was a proposed witness for Gewecke. The document does not establish that she testified, and it is not testimony for Bub. It does establish a defense connection to the Noreika family. In 55R-951, the Centre named Gewecke’s filmed account in the Spielberg archive as one of its two sources. This is that USHMM interview. Gewecke, convicted in Lübeck, corrected the word “acquittal.” The Centre, citing his interview, published the exoneration narrative anyway.

The home behind the family legend belonged to Jewish victims. Johnathan Orlianski, a descendant of its owners, describes Noreika’s family moving into the Orliansky home in Plungė in July 1941. Rachel Orliansky and six other members of that household were murdered at Kaušėnai. The family’s chess table remained and passed into the Noreika family’s possession. Silvia Foti recounts that Noreika and his wife entertained senior Nazis in that stolen home while he participated in the persecution and murder of Jews. Later, Noreika’s widow appeared on the list offered to vouch for Gewecke’s humane treatment of Jews. A household occupying murdered Jews’ home enters the defense story of the occupation official as a source of humanity. The obscenity is almost beyond words.

Father Jonas Borevičius belonged to this family circle. Noreika’s granddaughter Silvia Foti describes him from personal knowledge as a close friend of her grandmother and mother who attended family celebrations and provided spiritual support. Her family photograph, published with her account, records Borevičius at a family celebration. He was also Noreika’s friend in Šiauliai. In 1986, Borevičius testified in the American proceedings against former prison warden Antanas Virkutis. His recollections about Noreika emerged in that other man’s case. They were not a judicial finding that Noreika had led a rescue network.

I reject the Noreika rescue alibi built from those recollections as false. The priest’s friendship with the family demanded scrutiny, not automatic belief. A genuine rescue by Borevičius himself would not establish Noreika’s rescue activity, much less erase Noreika’s signed orders. A family friend supports Noreika; Noreika’s widow appears on a list offered to support Gewecke; the Centre uses supposed German exoneration to defend Noreika. These are connected defenses, not independent corroboration. They cannot become independent merely by citing one another.

I presume such mutually reinforcing exculpatory accounts unreliable until independently corroborated. LGGRTC’s method reverses that discipline: favorable recollections become historical authority while signed persecution orders are explained away. This is ideological scholarship in the mold of a Soviet or North Korean party university, with the required conclusion determining what counts as evidence. The task becomes glorifying the national story. Truth is admitted only when it serves that task.

My family came from Šiauliai, where these officials operated. The records concern the persecution of actual families and the seizure of their homes and property. When official history converts a procedural ending into innocence, the reputations of perpetrators are restored at the expense of the people they persecuted. That injury is intensely personal to me.

I conclude that the Centre’s repeated exculpatory assertions, its failure to examine the controlling primary record and its persistence after acknowledging the defect constitute historical fraud. I accuse LGGRTC of deliberately rewriting Holocaust history. That conclusion concerns documented institutional conduct; it is not a claim that a criminal court has convicted its employees.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community’s rejection of the Centre’s 2024 Škirpa report supplies another challenge to its exculpatory method. The documented Bub court-outcome alibi concerns Noreika; the comparison with Škirpa concerns how the Centre constructs exoneration.

I have put the evidence before LGGRTC in a signed interim submission with the historical study attached, seeking corrections and reconsideration of the Noreika findings insofar as they rely on the Gewecke–Bub court outcome. My submission concerning SPR-87 asks what officials verified before judging my criticism insufficiently supported. The institutions must now account for their source acquisition and reasoning.

My formal request to PRISMA’s coordinator seeks LGGRTC’s removal and interim safeguards. The consortium should disclose its due diligence, the Centre’s assigned work and the arrangements for independent historical verification. Disputed narratives should not become European educational products under the Centre’s authority pending review. The Lithuanian Jewish Community’s participation must not be used to imply its endorsement of that content.

PRISMA’s partners now have the evidence to examine. Their response will show whether resistance to Holocaust distortion governs the project’s work or merely decorates its entrance.

Germany still lives with the permanent legacy of the Nazi era. Lithuania will likewise carry the record of what its institutions choose to do with Holocaust history. Every state-backed falsification adds to that legacy. LGGRTC cannot protect Lithuania’s reputation by rewriting the persecution of its Jews; it makes the distortion itself part of the state’s enduring historical record.

Remove LGGRTC from the role it has failed to earn. Require public correction of the false exoneration narrative. European Holocaust education must not become the carnival’s next mirror.

Disclosure: I applied to lead LGGRTC in February 2026 and reapplied in July.

Author’s note: My friend Dr. Melody Ziff always wanted me to write an article titled “Funhouse Mirrors.” This is the first time I believe that exact title has fully applied. Melody has been gone for almost a year. Losing my writing and research partner has left an enormous absence in my life and in this work. I wrote about her in my Times of Israel tribute to her. Naming her here again affirms that she remains an integral part of this quest for truth. Her influence continues in the work. Keeping her name in it keeps her memory alive.