Has Lithuania’s Revocation Been Revoked?

The Foreign Ministry invokes Vytautas as the source of Jewish rights and hospitality. The LAF revoked those rights in Vytautas’s name. No specific Lithuanian act repudiating that revocation has been identified.

Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defence began 2025 by again naming Kazys Škirpa among the ten volunteers who raised the Lithuanian tricolor over Gediminas Tower in 1919. Three archival documents from 1941 record an LAF program to force Jews from Lithuania, deprive them of rights and livelihood, and revoke the hospitality associated with Vytautas the Great. That program has no present legal force. Where is Lithuania’s repudiation of the purported revocation?

On March 24, 1941, the Lithuanian Activist Front issued Document LVIII, LCVA f. 648, ap. 2, b. 582, fols. 188–197, Lietuvai išlaisvinti nurodymai — Instructions for the Liberation of Lithuania. Its first page is marked GRIEŽTAI SLAPTA — STRICTLY SECRET — and directs oral transmission to uprising centers through trusted couriers. Translations from Lithuanian and German in this article are the author’s.

Inside the uprising-preparation section, the instruction calls for intensified anti-Communist and anti-Jewish action and states the objective: “Tikslas – priversti visus žydus bėgti iš Lietuvos drauge su raudonaisiais rusais” — “The objective is to force all Jews to flee Lithuania together with the Red Russians.” Folio 197 reduces the policy to a numbered task: “4/ Priversti žydus bėgti iš Lietuvos” — “4/ Force the Jews to flee Lithuania.” The next section identifies the German army crossing the Lithuanian frontier as the signal for the uprising.

The same instructions say Jews should be made unable to imagine even minimal rights or a livelihood in the projected “New Lithuania.” The passage declares: “Savo laiku Vytauto Didžiojo suteiktas Lietuvoje žydams svetingumas atšaukiamas visiems amžiams” — the hospitality granted to Jews in Lithuania by Vytautas the Great is revoked “for all time.”

In 2009, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vygaudas Ušackas used the same historical symbol in the opposite direction. At an international conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem, he said Lithuanian Jews’ “rights and freedoms” had been granted by Vytautas’s privileges and closed by hoping Jews would “enjoy our hospitality” in Lithuania. The 1941 LAF text says that hospitality was revoked for all time. The modern Foreign Ministry invokes it as part of Lithuania’s Jewish inheritance.

Document LXIV, LCVA f. 648, ap. 2, b. 582, fols. 213–215, states the revocation again in the institutional name Lietuvos Aktyvistų Frontas: “Senoji Vytauto Didžiojo laikais suteikta Lietuvoje prieglaudos teisė žydams yra visiškai ir galutinai atšaukiama” — the old right of refuge granted to Jews in Lithuania in the time of Vytautas the Great is “completely and finally revoked.” It orders every Lithuanian Jew without exception to leave, provides for Jewish property to pass into Lithuanian national ownership, and says that in the restored Lithuania no Jew would possess civil rights or the possibility of earning a living.

LCVA fond 648 is the Lithuanian Legation in London fond, not a Škirpa personal fond. Copies of Škirpa’s manuscript and appendices survive there; custody does not prove he authored every appendix. In the manuscript at b. 581, pp. 136–137, Škirpa describes the anti-Jewish appeal and expressly points to “Dokm. LXIV.” The chain runs through Lithuania’s London diplomatic archive, Škirpa’s own cross-reference and the LAF document preserved with it.

The governmental record that followed contains parallel exclusions. On June 30, 1941, Ministerial Cabinet Protocol No. 6 approved establishment of a “Jewish concentration camp” and assigned the work to Vice Minister of Communal Economy Vladas Švipas in contact with Colonel Jurgis Bobelis. An appendix to Protocol No. 31, dated August 1, identified as Žydų padėties nuostatai — Regulations on the Status of Jews, required most Jews to live in designated places (§1), barred departure without special police permission (§2), required liquidation within two weeks and confiscation of property not transferred (§3), and authorized confinement in forced-labor camps for violations of §§2–6 or where a Jewish person was deemed dangerous to public order, peace or security (§7).

The 2001-source reproduction hosted by Šaltiniai.info prints §3’s property to be liquidated within two weeks as “nekilnojamąjį” — real property — while an earlier published documentary reproduction prints “kilnojamąjį” — movable property. I do not make the disputed noun carry the argument. Both versions provide for liquidation within two weeks and confiscation of property not transferred.

The full set of surviving meeting protocols was published in 2001 in Lietuvos laikinoji vyriausybė: posėdžių protokolai, 1941 m. birželio 24 – rugpjūčio 4 d., compiled by Arvydas Anušauskas and issued by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre.

The reliance here is on the reproduced texts, not the Centre’s commentary. They do not prove that the Provisional Government formally enacted LXIV; they do show governmental segregation, confinement, movement restriction and property deprivation after the LAF had announced removal, civic exclusion and expropriation.

A Finnish Foreign Ministry file preserves a July 23, 1941 memorandum transmitted from Berlin under Škirpa’s covering letter. It speaks of a “Schicksals- und Solidaritätsgemeinschaft der freien europäischen Völker” — a community of destiny and solidarity of free European peoples — and calls the German military result the “erste Voraussetzung der europäischen Neuordnung” — the first prerequisite of European reordering. It does not mention LXIV or prove Škirpa drafted it; it independently places him inside the German-aligned political project he was describing.

On May 8, 1990, the Supreme Council adopted “Dėl žydų tautos genocido Lietuvoje hitlerinės okupacijos metu” — “On the Genocide of the Jewish Nation in Lithuania during the Hitlerite Occupation.” Speaking in the name of the Lithuanian nation, it condemned the genocide without reservation and stated that Lithuanian citizens were among the executioners serving the occupiers. It did not name the LAF, the Provisional Government or the Vytautas revocation.

On June 15, 2021, the Seimas adopted Resolution No. XIV-390, recording that after Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, “the Nazis launched the genocide of Lithuanian Jews.” Neither that resolution nor the 1990 declaration identifies the LAF revocation.

On December 9, 2025, Lithuania’s Supreme Court upheld Algirdas Paleckis’s Article 170² conviction for denying and grossly trivializing what Lithuanian law recognizes as Soviet genocide and crimes against humanity. In paragraph 16 of Case No. 2K-173-1073/2025, the court said denial can operate “panaudojant nutylėjimus, prisidengiant atsargiomis formuluotėmis ar hipotezėmis” — through omissions, cautious formulations, or hypotheses — and that denying proven circumstances such as responsible persons, scale, and consequences may amount to denial. I do not adopt that genocide characterization or argue that failure to repudiate LXIV is a crime. I use the court’s method as a reading rule: Lithuania’s general Holocaust condemnations do not identify or repudiate the LAF revocation.

On September 22, 1994, Prime Minister Adolfas Šleževičius delivered a nationally televised statement. A contemporaneous US diplomatic cable records that he admitted “several hundred Lithuanians” took part in the genocide, apologized to the Jewish nation and said the Government assumed responsibility for prosecution. The State Department’s 1994 report and a contemporaneous published version use the same formulation.

“Several hundred” was the Prime Minister’s state admission, not a historical estimate. A later Minority Rights directory attributes 10,000 to the apology. Joseph A. Melamed’s Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel used another category: its 1999 Lithuania: Crime & Punishment, p. 61, said it had published almost 5,000 names and estimated that “almost 23,000 Lithuanians” participated in the murder of Jews. None is an adjudicated count.

Before the Knesset on March 1, 1995, President Algirdas Brazauskas asked forgiveness for Lithuanians who “ruthlessly killed, shot, deported and robbed Jews”. A Finnish diplomatic report records that he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin antisemitism had not existed as Lithuanian state policy and that the Supreme Court and Prosecutor General had been instructed to review disputed rehabilitations. None of those statements named the LAF revocation.

That same year, on June 16, 1995, Škirpa and his wife were reburied at Petrašiūnai Cemetery in Kaunas. Defence Minister Linas Linkevičius chaired the organizing commission, and Prime Minister Šleževičius spoke for the Government. The apology and official reburial occurred in the same year.

In 2019, Vilnius said “antisemitism has no place in modern Vilnius” and called the 1998 naming of Kazio Škirpos Alley a political mistake. On July 24, the Council voted 21–16, with one abstention to rename it Trispalvės Alley. Mayor Remigijus Šimašius paraphrased the LAF’s “stifling atmosphere” passage, attributed it to Škirpa, and said, “Those are his words, which he never renounced.”

National official commemoration nevertheless continues to honor the 1919 service. The 2025 Ministry of National Defence Flag Day notice again named Škirpa among the ten volunteers who raised the flag. Honoring that act does not ratify the LAF’s 1941 program. If the state intends to celebrate one part of his biography while rejecting another, it can identify what it honors and what it rejects.

Article 29 of the Constitution makes all persons equal before the law and state institutions and bars restrictions of rights or privileges on grounds including nationality and belief. That text is not proof of equal application. In the Times of Israel article The Semeliškės Police Vanish From the Town Page, I document a current comparator: the National Library’s specialist entry names local Lithuanian policemen in the massacre while its general town page omits them. Lithuania is meanwhile prosecuting Artur Fridman, in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Article 170² §1 for historical speech. I regard the prosecution as illegitimate. It is the same provision the Supreme Court applied in Paleckis when it treated omission and responsibility-shifting as legally relevant. The VLE pages have not been adjudicated criminal. The comparison is the legal standard, not a finding of guilt.

Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as a presumptively reliable historical authority. In my assessment, its publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history. Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a historical claim merely because it has been published by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Any material proposition originating with the LGGRTC must be independently verified against primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship before it is relied upon.

Until such verification is obtained, the LGGRTC’s assertion is treated as unverified and presumptively unreliable, with particular scrutiny for omission, selective quotation, exculpatory reframing, or factual distortion.

Letter No. 55R-21 disclosed that favorable considerations omitted from the published 2015 certificate included the supposed U.S. “complete exoneration” of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Letter No. 14R-51 again called Brazaitis completely exonerated while reproducing on the same page the American language that the names had been removed from an active list and the investigations deactivated. The Seimas Ombudsman found a transparency failure. The fuller chain is in The Škirpa Determination Has Been Transmitted to IHRA.

In its May 12, 2026 letter to U.S. Representative Brad Sherman, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry said “complete exoneration” was legally imprecise and that administrative discontinuation is not formal judicial exoneration under U.S. law. That is not a Škirpa merits judgment and does not automatically invalidate Report No. 9R-598. It does mean that a favorable premise LGGRTC says it used in the Škirpa reasoning was legally misstated. I have identified no reissued determination explaining its weight, no post-correction reassessment, and no withdrawal of that premise.

As of September 17, 2026, I have not located in the official public sources reviewed for this article an act naming and repudiating the LAF’s “complete and final” revocation. The 1990 declaration and Resolution XIV-390 are broad condemnations; neither names that proposition. The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, invokes Vytautas as a source of Jewish rights and hospitality.

The archive has supplied the citation for the revocation: LCVA f. 648, ap. 2, b. 582, Document LXIV, fols. 213–215. Škirpa’s manuscript supplies the cross-reference. The Lithuanian Government should now supply the citation for the revocation of that revocation — institution, date and text. If there is no such citation, it should issue one.