LGGRTC Supplies the Alibi and VLE Makes It History
Lithuania’s encyclopedia imports the Genocide Center’s account of Noreika while omitting his persecution orders. The shared account appears in the encyclopedia’s own text.
Lithuania’s national encyclopedia cites the state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC) to explain Jonas Noreika’s role in Jewish isolation. The German administration, it says, drew him into that work. His participation in the Holocaust becomes a matter of public opinion. His orders disappear.
LGGRTC supplies an exculpatory interpretation; the encyclopedia, VLE, incorporates it into a national reference work. Read beside VLE’s treatment of Jurgis Bobelis and Švenčionėliai, the pattern shows, in my assessment, a shared agenda: preserving heroic biography while separating Lithuanian officials and formations from their documented acts against Jews.
My earlier investigation examined rescue used as an alibi. My October 30 comparison documented VLE’s omissions. This article follows the transfer of an official interpretation into the encyclopedia and what the institutions published or preserved after explicit notice.
VLE imports the Genocide Center’s formulation
LGGRTC authorship gives a historical claim no independent evidentiary weight. I cite its statements as institutional assertions; the historical facts rest on documents and independently evaluated scholarship.
VLE’s Noreika biography attributes its account of his Jewish-isolation role to an LGGRTC certificate. Its passive formulation makes the German administration the actor and Noreika the person acted upon. The resulting question of Holocaust participation is described as opinions circulating publicly. The entry then gives a paragraph to his anti-Nazi resistance and records his 1997 Grand Cross of Vytis.
His August 22 and September 10, 1941 orders concerning ghettoization and Jewish property are absent. The reference to an LGGRTC certificate supplies institutional authority without giving readers the acts against which to judge its interpretation.
On April 11, 2019, the Holocaust subcommission of Lithuania’s presidentially established International Commission issued a written response to LGGRTC. It recorded that LGGRTC itself acknowledged Noreika’s two orders and subsequent implementing instructions. It rejected the surrounding exculpatory reasoning and explained that rescue associations and anti-German sentiments did not mitigate his role in ghettoization and expropriation.
VLE turns documented administrative conduct into a controversy about reputation. The institution it cites had acknowledged those orders by March 2019.
A condemned argument returns eight months later
The Commission’s April response specifically rejected portraying ghettos as havens. Such a portrayal, it wrote, “recycles the Nazi argument of 1941.”
Eight months later, LGGRTC’s memorandum published by Bernardinai on December 18, 2019 argued that, before the liquidation of the Žagarė ghetto, Noreika and other Šiauliai residents believed Jews could be safe only in ghettos. Among its supporting passages was Stahlecker’s report recounting how the Jewish committee was told that establishing a ghetto would prevent further pogroms.
The memorandum presented Noreika as an organizer of Jewish rescue. It cast his acceptance of the county-chief post as cover for underground work. The same document used a Nazi official’s explanation of compulsory confinement to support a benign interpretation of Noreika’s understanding.
In April the Holocaust subcommission condemned the ghetto-as-haven argument. In December LGGRTC repeated its substance. VLE’s biography now carries the Center’s passive account of Noreika’s involvement while withholding the orders that define it.
Stanley Cohen describes “moral balance” in States of Denial (2001, p. 94): favorable parts of a life are used to diminish the weight of wrongdoing. His illustration concerns Lithuanian villagers who handed over Jewish neighbors and occupied their homes, then emphasized their earlier kindness toward Jews. The mechanism applies here when rescue is used to neutralize evidence of persecution. Saving particular people does not erase an official’s orders concerning confinement and property.
Bobelis keeps his decorations and loses his camp
VLE’s Bobelis biography gives his commandancy a date, June 23, 1941, then moves to his employment in 1942–1944. His decorations retain their classes and dates. His formation of the TDA battalion and involvement in the Jewish concentration camp receive no account.
The June 30 cabinet minutes, reproduced in the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum’s documentary collection, printed page 186, record his report on the battalion and camp. The cabinet approved the camp, assigned Vice-Minister Vladas Švipas to deal with it in contact with Bobelis, and authorized a ten-day battalion advance at 7,492 rubles daily.
Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis’s study, printed pages 118–119, identifies Bobelis’s June 28 formation order. Pages 134–135 identify the camp as the Seventh Fort; note 169 records his July 5 budget provision for the camp and its guard. Pages 168–169 attribute the July 4 and July 6 killings, on Jäger’s account, to Lithuanian partisans acting under his orders: 463 and 2,514 Jews murdered.
VLE’s Kaunas-ghetto entry names the TDA and commander Andrius Butkūnas in the fort killings and gives a Seventh Fort toll exceeding 3,000. The institution can identify Lithuanian participation. It leaves the connecting administrative acts out of the commandant’s biography.
LGGRTC’s journal published Knezys’s TDA study in 2000. The museum collection, printed pages 164–165, quotes an LGGRTC note to the Seimas acknowledging that the government approved the battalion’s financing and took no steps to stop that financing when some of its soldiers were used in the mass killing of Jews. It also acknowledges approval of the camp. The cabinet minutes independently document the decisions.
Bobelis was removed in the July 23–24 putsch. The formation order, camp report and budget preceded it. The Commandant’s Report supplies the wider chronology.
VLE also dates the ghetto order July 7 and attributes signatures to Bobelis and Mayor Kazys Palčiauskas. Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis, pages 140–141, distinguish the July 7 cabinet report from the July 10 decree issued by the two officials. The 1983 Palciauskas judgment, finding 4 and footnote 3, distinguishes issuance from proof of personal signature. Finding 7 records the municipality’s implementation, appropriation of Jewish property and enclosure of the ghetto. My BOB-R2 request asks the publisher to reconcile those attributions and address the camp history.
Švenčionėliai loses the people who implemented the crime
The Švenčionėliai town entry records about 8,000 Jews shot under Nazi orders. It omits the formations that carried out the crime. In the same historical passage, it identifies Soviet authorities in the arrest of Lithuanian officers and soldiers and the German army in the burning of the town.
VLE’s ghetto entry describes police confinement, confiscation, escort and guarding. The county police chief and two German security officials ordered the mayor and rural-district police chief to mobilize residents to dig the trench; about 300 residents were gathered. Former local white-armbanders participated in the killings. The entry also describes a Jewish school and a synagogue later converted into a lock-up, and attributes all local commerce and household services to the Jewish community.
Arūnas Bubnys’s 2000 study, printed page 174, names county police chief Major Petras Januškevičius and rural-district police chief B. Gruzdys. It identifies the visiting Special Squad and its Paneriai record, describes confiscated property sold cheaply to residents, and recounts testimony by those brought to cover the trench that many children had been buried alive.
VLE’s ghetto entry cites Bubnys’s work. Its Special Squad entry identifies the formation as Lithuanian volunteers. The town page omits local implementation; the ghetto page leaves the visiting squad’s composition unstated. Readers must assemble the responsibility that the summary disperses.
Bubnys gives about 80 police guards; VLE gives about 120 policemen and former insurgents. The town entry gives about 8,000 victims, while the ghetto entry gives 3,726 for October 9. The publisher must reconcile these figures while identifying the documented actors.
Lithuania already recognizes the power of selective history
In the Paleckis ruling of December 9, 2025, case 2K-173-1073/2025, paragraph 16 discusses how omission of those responsible can contribute to minimization. Paragraph 18 faults Paleckis for an unsupported precise figure for partisan victims alongside an abstract account of Soviet repression.
The comparison here concerns editorial standards. VLE numbers the murdered Jews but leaves the shooters unnamed, while identifying the authorities responsible for other harms in the same town passage. Numbers acknowledge death; naming the implementing police and formations assigns responsibility. An encyclopedia must supply both.
IHRA’s working definition includes intentional efforts to minimize the Holocaust’s principal elements, including Nazi Germany’s collaborators and allies. In my assessment, the repeated choices documented here advance a shared exculpatory agenda. VLE’s explicit adoption of LGGRTC’s formulation shows how that account passes from one institution to the other.
The institutions have specific questions to answer
I sent SVL-001 on October 19 and BOB-R2 on October 23. LGGRTC acknowledged and registered its informational copy of SVL-001 as 7R-1366 on October 20. On October 15, answering another request, the publisher had said it currently lacked the means to answer each request separately. As of November 2, I had received no decision on either correction request, and the challenged passages retained the omissions.
On October 25 I also sent LGGRTC a 44-point request concerning Father Jonas Borevičius’s testimony and the Center’s December 2019 Noreika memorandum. It acknowledged registration as 7R-1532 on October 26. As of November 2, I had received that acknowledgment, without a substantive answer.
The required corrections follow the evidence:
- VLE must replace its Noreika passage with an account of his orders and their implementation, identifying the LGGRTC certificate it relies on.
- Bobelis’s biography must include the formation order, camp decision and administrative acts. The ghetto entry must reconcile dates and distinguish issuance from personal signature.
- Švenčionėliai’s town history must identify the implementing formations and restore Jewish communal life. Its ghetto entry must name the visiting squad and its Lithuanian composition alongside German command.
- LGGRTC must withdraw or defend point by point its December 2019 memorandum, including its ghetto-as-safety argument and underground interpretation of Noreika’s office-holding, and answer the October 25 request.
The National Library’s publishing center must obtain and produce the underlying sources, issue reasoned editorial decisions and publish dated corrections. Updating VLE is among its assigned functions.
Rescuers deserve recognition for the lives they saved. Their courage cannot supply an alibi for documented persecution. LGGRTC and VLE must account for the acts their shared narrative obscures.
Credible additional sources, corrections and competing interpretations with exact citations are welcome at ggochin@gmail.com. Substantiated corrections will be considered in good faith and may result in dated amendments.
