How Lithuania Converts Holocaust Evidence into State Innocence
The strongest evidence against Lithuania’s Holocaust-memory regime is not what its critics allege. It is what Lithuania’s own institutions have already admitted — and then refused to let matter.
The record is not hidden. It is acknowledged, absorbed, neutralized, and converted into exoneration.
What Lithuania Has Already Admitted
Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania is not wholly silent on Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. In 2019, the Commission’s own Sub-commission issued a statement on Jonas Noreika that directly contradicted the official state narrative.
Noreika issued orders for the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai District, the Commission acknowledged. Nazi authority over occupied Lithuania, the Commission further stated, did not diminish the responsibility of native collaborators. The Commission’s own language placed Noreika’s documented actions inside the machinery of Holocaust persecution.
That should have ended the matter. Instead, it revealed something more damaging than silence. The problem is not that the evidence is unavailable to Lithuanian institutions. The problem is that the evidence is admitted episodically, then neutralized institutionally. Evidence enters the system as documentation. It exits as exoneration.
How the LGGRTC Neutralized the Evidence
The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, or LGGRTC, carries the state mandate to research genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, occupation, and resistance. Its conduct in the Noreika matter was so extreme that, in April 2019, it provoked a cascade of formal condemnations from the international Holocaust-accountability community.
The World Jewish Congress called the LGGRTC document “nothing short of Holocaust revisionism.” The American Jewish Committee criticized the Centre’s legal effort to distort the Holocaust. The Lithuanian Jewish Community issued its own response repudiating the LGGRTC’s March 27, 2019 statement on Noreika. IHRA chair-holders, including Ambassador Georges Santer and Professor Yehuda Bauer, invoked the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion directly against the Centre. The European Jewish Congress later described the burden Lithuania faced in celebrating the Year of the Vilna Gaon and Litvak History while refusing to confront its own record.
Lithuania responded not by correcting the findings, but by preserving the machinery that produced them. In 2020, the European Jewish Congress reported concern over Vidmantas Valiušaitis’s appointment as adviser to the Genocide Center. In 2021, Lithuania confirmed Arūnas Bubnys as LGGRTC Director General. Defending History documented his June 23, 2020 appearance at an ultranationalist event beneath images of Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa; when the photograph was challenged, Defending History responded that the image was not manipulated.
The pattern continued past the Bubnys confirmation. In November 2024, the Lithuanian Seimas established an external expert council to oversee the LGGRTC, chaired by Vilnius University historian Professor Arūnas Streikus. On March 22, 2026, the council formally informed the Seimas Speaker, the Seimas National Security and Defense Committee, the Seimas Human Rights Committee, and the Seimas Freedom Fights and State Historical Memory Commission that it could not work with LGGRTC leadership. The council reported that LGGRTC leadership ignores its recommendations, withholds documents or delivers them too late for meaningful review, and avoids providing information. Streikus’s recorded statement: “Our key message is that we have no feedback from the institution’s leadership.” Council member Algis Vyšniūnas: “De jure it is a research center, de facto it is a bureaucratic institution.” Lithuania’s own statutory oversight body, examining the LGGRTC from the inside, has reached the same conclusion the international Holocaust-accountability community reached seven years earlier. The institution’s outputs have not been corrected. The institution’s leadership cannot be reached. The institution continues.
The LGGRTC held in its own archive Fund R-1099: Noreika’s signed orders of August 22 and September 10, 1941, establishing the Šiauliai ghetto and authorizing the liquidation of Jewish property. Yet the Centre issued a finding that it “was not able to determine whether Jonas Noreika really did sign” them.
Consider what this requires. The documents are official administrative orders on institutional letterhead. They bear a signature. They were held by the institution evaluating them. To reach its finding, the Centre had to imply that some unidentified person entered Noreika’s office, impersonated him on official state correspondence, established a ghetto and liquidated Jewish property in his name, and was never detected, questioned, or recorded. Noreika himself, watching these events unfold under his authority, apparently never declared himself the victim of impersonation.
That is not historical analysis. It is institutional self-exposure. The finding says less about Noreika than about the organization that produced it. The LGGRTC’s task was not to follow evidence to accountability. Its task was to prevent evidence from producing accountability.
No Punishment, No Guilt, No Lithuanian Perpetrators
The LGGRTC’s broader doctrine makes the Noreika finding structural rather than exceptional. The Centre treats guilt as requiring criminal conviction and punishment. No Lithuanian perpetrator of the Holocaust has ever been punished by the Lithuanian state.
That sentence is the key to the system.
No punishment means no guilty Lithuanians. No guilty Lithuanians means every figure rehabilitated by the state can be treated as innocent. The absence of accountability is then converted into proof that there was nothing to account for.
The Commission’s 2019 admission that Noreika participated in the persecution of Jews changed nothing. Lithuania had awarded Noreika the Cross of Vytis in 1997. His plaque at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences library in Vilnius was later quietly removed during renovations, without public reckoning and without revocation of the underlying exculpatory findings. The plaque disappeared; the absolution remained. His Šiauliai plaque still stands.
This is not remediation. It is a shell game: remove the visible symbol of moral bankruptcy, leave the fraudulent conclusion intact. The Commission spoke. The LGGRTC absorbed the statement and produced the same exoneration it always produces. The system is not broken. It is working.
The Exoneration Now Has Criminal Consequences
The LGGRTC’s findings do not sit passively in reports. In the prosecution of Artur Fridman, they function as state-sanctioned predicates for criminal exposure.
Fridman visited Antakalnis Cemetery on May 9, 2024, to honor his grandfather, a Jewish soldier who fought against Nazi Germany. He posted a Facebook message raising historical questions about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, whom Lithuania has elevated to national-hero status. Seventeen months later, the Lithuanian Prosecutor-General filed charges under Article 170-2, paragraph 1, and Article 313, paragraph 2.
Article 170-2 is framed as a memory-law provision covering genocide, crimes against humanity, and the crimes of occupying regimes. In practice, the Fridman prosecution shows its asymmetry. Criminal law is mobilized to protect the honor of figures associated with anti-Soviet resistance, while denial, minimization, and institutional laundering of Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust carry no comparable legal risk.
This is the conversion mechanism in its most dangerous form. The state historical institution produces exoneration. Challenges to those conclusions are dismissed without merits review. Prosecutors then use the same institutional conclusions as if they were settled truth. A Jewish citizen who challenges the mythology becomes the defendant.
The exculpation does not merely protect perpetrators from history. It arms the state against those who name them.
The Educational Face of the Cover-Up
The Commission’s Newsletter No. 2, 2026 shows what Lithuania’s acknowledgment of perpetrator responsibility looks like after passing through the institutional machinery.
In March 2026, the Commission ran a Centropa teacher seminar, activated its Tolerance Education Center network, commemorated rescuers, and featured Emanuelis Zingeris lecturing on Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who saved Jewish lives during the war.
There is nothing wrong with honoring rescuers. There is everything wrong with using rescuers to avoid naming perpetrators.
The newsletter names no Lithuanian who murdered a Jew. The Commission that acknowledged Noreika’s participation in 2019 produced educational programming in 2026 in which Lithuanian perpetrators have no names, no units, no commands, no orders. The evidence entered the system; the newsletter performs as if it never arrived.
This is the public face of the contradiction: tolerance education without perpetrator naming, rescuer commemoration without perpetrator accountability, Holocaust memory without Lithuanian agency.
What the Ceremonies Do Not Name
At Paneriai/Ponary, German SD and SS units, together with Lithuanian auxiliaries including Ypatingasis būrys, murdered tens of thousands of people. Approximately 70,000 Jews were murdered there; estimates of total victims reach as high as 100,000.
The Lithuanian role was not incidental. Lithuanians in units such as Ypatingasis būrys were central to the killing process. These men were not abstract instruments of occupation. They were volunteers. They went to the killing site knowing what the day required and returned home with their neighbors’ property: clothing, furniture, jewelry, gold dental fillings, baby carriages.
The 121 signed testimonies collected by Leyb Koniuchowsky — 569 pages of Lithuanian Jewish witness accounts from 1941 to 1944 — record these events in the voices of those who survived long enough to describe them. Jewish women were raped before they were shot. Jewish children were thrown into killing pits. Lithuanian perpetrators were not ordered by Berlin to rape. They were not instructed by German officers to steal baby carriages. These were local decisions by local men.
Yet these crimes are described, when described at all, as having “occurred during the Nazi occupation” — passive voice, ownerless, regime-attributed. The Commission honors those who helped Jews. The state refuses to name those who murdered them.
Škirpa and the Continuing Pattern
The pattern extends beyond Noreika. Kazys Škirpa issued antisemitic declarations and, through the Lithuanian Activist Front, called for the elimination of Jews from Lithuanian public and economic life before German forces arrived. The European Jewish Congress described the LAF’s manifesto as calling for liberation from the “Jewish yoke” and identified Škirpa as one of the ideologues under Nazi influence in the Provisional Government.
After that call, 96.4 percent of Lithuanian Jews were murdered — the highest destruction rate in Europe.
On June 21, 2024, Lithuania’s National Alliance installed a plaque to Škirpa on June 23rd Street in Vilnius. City authorities later removed it — not because Škirpa bore documented responsibility for the ideological preparation of Lithuania’s Holocaust, but because the installation lacked a municipal permit.
The moral question was avoided. Administrative procedure substituted for accountability. That is the system again. Evidence enters. Procedure neutralizes. Innocence exits.
The Same Warning Has Been Given Again and Again
Lithuania cannot claim it has not been told.
In 2019, the Commission’s own historians stated the Noreika problem plainly. The World Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, Lithuanian Jewish Community, European Jewish Congress, and IHRA-linked authorities all warned Lithuania about Holocaust distortion. The record was also presented publicly in The Table of Truth. In 2020, concern was raised over the Genocide Center’s adviser. In 2021, Lithuania confirmed Bubnys as LGGRTC Director General. In 2026, Lithuania’s own Seimas-established expert council reported that LGGRTC leadership had become unreachable.
On September 21, 2023, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan addressed the Lithuanian Seimas and said Lithuania must stop glorifying war criminals associated with the massacre of Jews. He named Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis. His video address placed the message inside Lithuania’s parliament and into the public record.
Lithuania did not correct the rehabilitations. The warnings are not missing. The evidence is not missing. The international record is not missing. What is missing is consequence.
The Question Lithuania Will Not Answer
I am Baltic-born. I know what Soviet institutional architecture looks like from the inside. It does not announce itself as repression. It announces itself as scholarship, historical integrity, due process, education. It builds commissions. It issues newsletters. It holds ceremonies. It drafts charters that, read carefully, exclude the inconvenient truth by design. It builds courts that refuse to examine evidence and then calls the refusal legality.
Lithuania has constructed the most effective Holocaust-accountability performance in Europe — a performance with no accountability in it.
The apparatus carries IHRA credentials. It receives European legitimacy. It welcomes Jewish delegations. It teaches tolerance. It honors rescuers. It publishes newsletters. It presents as Western accountability architecture.
It functions as its opposite.
Silvia Foti named her grandfather Jonas Noreika a perpetrator. The LGGRTC contradicted her. Grant Gochin brought evidence to Lithuanian courts. The courts declined to examine it on the merits. Artur Fridman questioned a state-honored commander. The Prosecutor-General indicted him.
Those who engage with Lithuania without examining this record are not exercising judgment. They are declining to exercise it.
The question is no longer whether Lithuania teaches the Holocaust. It is whether Lithuania will name the Lithuanians who helped make the Holocaust happen — and stop prosecuting Jews who do.
Lithuania has already answered. The remaining question falls on Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders who continue to lend credibility to this apparatus. Some have failed to do the due diligence. Others have done it and chosen not to see. Either way, the worldwide Jewish community is entitled to ask them, publicly, on whose behalf they are acting.
