Germany Investigates at 105. Lithuania Prosecutes a Post
A German court gave Bruno Dey two years, suspended, for helping to murder 5,232 people. Lithuania’s statute exposes a Jewish citizen to up to two years in prison for a Facebook post.
“Justice begins with truth,” Justice Minister Rita Tamašunienė said on September 23, 2026, as the government marked at Paneriai the 85th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide of Lithuania’s Jews. “We cannot keep silent about historical facts or distort the history of the Holocaust” (my translation). Her sentence is a test of the state’s own conduct. Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius and other cabinet members attended. The ceremony was organized by the Culture Ministry, the Department of National Minorities, and the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community.
On September 24, German prosecutors confirmed to AFP that a 105-year-old man was under investigation and is accused of being an accessory to multiple murders through his activities as an alleged guard at Stalag 326 (VI K) Senne. He has not been charged and is presumed innocent.
The camp memorial records that between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war were registered there from July 1941 until liberation in April 1945. Current German law states that murder is not subject to a limitation period.
Germany first had to correct Germany
Germany’s present rule cannot be projected backward. In 1968, the so-called Dreher law changed accessory liability in a way that caused many Nazi-era accessory cases to become time-barred. Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education records that the majority of participants in Nazi murders escaped punishment as a result.
On May 20, 1969, in the Heinrich case (5 StR 658/68), the Federal Court of Justice reviewed a Kiel conviction of a man found to have known that the victims were killed out of racial hatred, and to have obeyed orders he recognized as criminal without sharing that motive himself, and declared the offense time-barred. Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education describes the ruling as a leading judgment for the Reich Security Main Office prosecution series; taz records that it time-barred many of the office’s desk perpetrators. Accessory cases could still survive where qualifying murder characteristics such as insidiousness or cruelty were proved in the principal killings. The Gröning conviction later rested on findings of that kind.
Lithuania later converted German outcomes from this period into exculpation. On February 11, 2020, LGGRTC Director General Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė signed a response that characterized Ewald Bub as fully exonerated and generalized the German dispositions into an assertion that German courts had exonerated the principal builders and commanders of the Šiauliai ghetto and concentration camp. The German record is materially different. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, proceeding No. 722, records Hans Gewecke as sentenced to four and a half years and Bub’s proceeding as “Verfahren eingestellt” (proceedings discontinued). A file held by the Lower Saxony State Archive in Oldenburg shows that on April 27, 1970, the Fourth Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court (Landgericht) Oldenburg ordered Hermann Schleef taken out of prosecution for insufficient evidence; the prosecutor later reported that no appeal was filed. The archive references are NLA OL Best. 140-4 Nr. 650 and NLA OL Best. 140-5 Acc. 38/1997 Nr. 459; copies are on file with the author. A conviction, a discontinued proceeding, and a court-ordered termination for insufficient evidence are not blanket judicial exonerations. Burauskaitė’s response used those supposed German exonerations in its defense of Jonas Noreika. The failure to punish became evidence for innocence.
The modern cases exist in part because German courts later changed how they understood assistance within a system of mass killing. Bruno Dey was 93 when the Hamburg Regional Court convicted him on July 23, 2020, on 5,232 counts of accessory to murder. Because he had been 17 and 18 at the time, the juvenile court imposed a two-year suspended sentence. The judgment became final on August 10 after the defense and three co-plaintiffs withdrew their appeals.
Dey was never imprisoned. Prosecutors did not have to prove that he personally shot a named prisoner or operated a gas chamber. His guard service could constitute assistance if the legal requirements for aid and knowledge were proved.
The foundation had been laid four years earlier. On September 20, 2016, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice rejected Oskar Gröning’s appeal. Its order held that assistance may consist of conduct that objectively promotes or facilitates the principal crime without proof that the assistance caused a particular killing. The same order confronted the court’s own earlier line that not everyone integrated into Auschwitz’s extermination program was thereby a participant in its murders.
Lithuania’s comparator is Artur Fridman
Artur Fridman is innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. He is a Jewish citizen of Vilnius who went to Antakalnis Cemetery on May 9, 2024, to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Red Army soldier who fought Nazi Germany, and then wrote about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas on Facebook; that post became Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24.
Prosecutor Kristina Minko charges Fridman under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2, the latter concerning defamation of a deceased person. Article 170² §1 carries a statutory maximum of two years’ imprisonment. After the August 26 hearing, Fridman reported that the next hearing was set for October 26; the latest published procedural account records the case as pending on August 28. No disposition had been announced as of September 24.
Germany’s court imposed two years, suspended, for accessory to murder in 5,232 cases. Lithuania’s Article 170² exposes Fridman to up to two years in prison for a Facebook post; Germany uses criminal law to investigate alleged participation in killing, while Lithuania uses it against historical speech.
The Red Army is present on both sides of that contrast. Germany is investigating alleged complicity in murder at a camp whose principal victims were Soviet prisoners of war. Lithuania is prosecuting the Jewish grandson of a Red Army soldier for what he wrote after standing at that soldier’s grave. I reject Russian historical falsification for the same reason I reject Lithuanian historical falsification: neither acquires legitimacy by serving a state.
Lithuania charged the speech. It has not produced the history.
A letter from the state’s own Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC), No. 13R-645 of September 2, 2025, appears in the prosecution file. It records a January 1945 Soviet security-service recruitment contact concerning Ramanauskas under the codename Džūkija, which I published with its limits. That published letter does not prove Fridman’s broader claim that Ramanauskas became a sustained Soviet collaborator.
The Centre’s public biography creates a separate 1941 question. It says that from June 23 to July 7, 1941, Ramanauskas commanded a unit guarding state property in Druskininkai. That statement does not establish participation in crimes against Jews. It establishes a period, place and command role that can be tested against surviving documents; the 1941 documentary question remains unresolved.
In 2017 the Centre, as LRT reported, answered suspicions about Ramanauskas in 1941 by citing his own statements in the Soviet security investigation and the fact that Soviet investigators did not charge him with acts connected to the Jewish genocide. The state reads Soviet security files when they clear him. It prosecutes a Jewish citizen for what he wrote about him.
After “Show the File” called on the Centre to identify its sources and methodology, I asked the Lithuanian Central State Archives on September 16 for archival search, access and digital copies concerning Ramanauskas in Druskininkai in 1941 and related 1941–1943 material. On September 21, the archive said that because of its volume of requests it was not currently performing thematic searches and directed me to its digital reading room and inventories. The Central State Archives declined to search. It did not say the records do not exist.
The prosecutor needed no thematic inventory search to make Ramanauskas’s memory part of a criminal case. If a historical claim becomes part of the state’s case, the documents and methodology supporting that claim must remain testable.
Punishment is the dividing line
The documentary Getting Away With Murder(s) puts the failure beyond Germany in starker terms. By the film’s estimate, almost one million people in 22 countries took part in the murders, and “99% of those responsible were never prosecuted; most were never even questioned.” Director David Nicholas Wilkinson filmed in the killing fields of Lithuania as part of that wider inquiry.
In the Algimantas Dailidė case, a Lithuanian court found that he had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians, then released him from criminal responsibility. In 2008 the Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish; that record is documented in “No Punishment for Dailidė. Up to Two Years for Fridman.” Germany is now investigating an alleged guard at 105. Lithuania has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.
Germany’s late prosecutions do not erase its earlier failures. They exist because Germany eventually changed course. Decades after the Dreher-law failure, the Demjanjuk, Gröning and Dey line opened a different route to accessory liability within mass-killing systems. Lithuania has built no comparable route to punishment for its own perpetrators. It has built a criminal statute for historical speech.
Lithuania has made a Facebook post a criminal case. It has not made its own historical premise answer to the same evidence.
Justice begins with truth. A state that invokes that sentence at Paneriai cannot make truth untestable in court.
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Author’s note: I am not a lawyer. This is a documentary and comparative analysis of published legal records, official statements and archival correspondence, not legal advice.
