Lithuania and Holocaust Justice Failure

Comparing Europe’s Prosecution of Perpetrators — and Lithuania’s Low Ranking

A Personal Reckoning

When people ask me where to place Lithuania on the European map of Holocaust prosecution, I tell them that it is one of the lowest. I tell them about my own file of refused requests to label my grandfather a perpetrator, not a hero. The state honors that placed my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, in the national pantheon remain in force. I have asked that they be retracted. Lithuania has refused because that is their pattern of denial.

Europe Chose Accountability

Across postwar Europe, every state with blood on its hands made a choice. Germany built the most sustained prosecution system in modern legal history and is still convicting camp guards in their 90s. Soviet Poland tried 673 Auschwitz personnel and ran the Majdanek trials from 1944 to 1981. France purged after liberation, then reopened the cases for Klaus Barbie and Paul Touvier when the witnesses were old. The Netherlands and Belgium worked through tens of thousands of collaboration cases.

The Exception: Lithuania

Then there is Lithuania. The country where my grandfather operated. The country with the highest Jewish destruction rate in Europe. 96.4 percent of the Jewish population was murdered. Most of them in pits, at the edge of their own villages, by Lithuanian hands.

One Conviction, No Punishment

In the 35 years since independence, that country has produced one Holocaust conviction. It produced that conviction only because the United States dragged it to the bar.

Kazys Gimžauskas was deputy head of the Vilnius Saugumas. The US Office of Special Investigations identified him, stripped him of citizenship for concealing his role in mass murder, and sent him home to Lithuania in the early 1990s. Lithuania declined to prosecute. The Wiesenthal Center pressed. The US State Department pressed. The Israeli embassy pressed. The Lithuanian Jewish community pressed. Years passed. Lithuania declined again. Lithuania finally indicted him only when refusing had become more expensive than indicting. The trial dragged through every available delay. He was convicted in 2001. On the day of his conviction the same court declared him too ill to serve his sentence. He died at home before the year was out, in his own bed, attended by family, in a country that called him a victim of Soviet repression. The Jews his Saugumas murdered died on their knees in pits, naked, after the beatings, watching their children shot first.

That is what Lithuanian Holocaust justice has produced. One conviction. Zero punishment. The state tucked him in.

A Pattern of Delay and Escape

The other names on the file run the same way. Aleksandras Lileikis ran the Vilnius Saugumas above Gimžauskas. The US Office of Special Investigations stripped him of citizenship and he returned to Lithuania in 1996. Lithuania indicted him in 1998 and then deliberately stretched the proceedings until he died, declaring him too ill to attend hearing after hearing, granting postponement after postponement. Lithuania ran the clock. He died at home in 2000.

Algimantas Dailidė was deported from the United States and tried in absentia in Lithuania. The court convicted him in 2006 and gave him a suspended sentence on grounds of age. Lithuania did not pursue his extradition from Germany. He died in Germany in 2015, having served no time.

Antanas Gecas commanded the Lithuanian police battalion that murdered approximately 46,000 Jews in Belarus. Scotland identified him, took testimony from his own surviving men in court, and was prepared to extradite. Lithuania did not give Scotland the prosecution commitment that would have allowed extradition to proceed. Gecas died in Edinburgh in 2000, without having to attend a Lithuanian courtroom.

Juozas Brazaitis ran the Lithuanian Provisional Government in June 1941 and signed the orders that initiated the Kaunas pogrom and the ghetto deportations. The US Office of Special Investigations was building a deportation case against him when he died in 1974. In 2012 Lithuania reburied his remains in Kaunas with national honors. The country honored a man the United States had been preparing to expel as a Nazi collaborator.

Every name runs the same shape. Independent prosecutors abroad–American, Scottish, and German–did the work of identification and built the cases. Lithuania, when handed back the perpetrators, declined to punish them. In some cases, they built honors to them.

Institutions that Protect, not Prosecute

For the most part, the Soviets prosecuted anti-Soviet activity, not the murder of Jews, because they did not care too much about Jews either. My grandfather is a good example of this. The Soviets prosecuted him for leading a rebellion against the Communists during the Soviet era, not for being involved in killing Jews during the Nazi era.

In 1989 the Lithuanian SSR passed a rehabilitation statute clearing those convicted under Soviet anti-state articles. In 1991 my grandfather received Supreme Court Certificate No. 8-17228, a procedural finding that erased his Soviet anti-state conviction. The certificate said nothing about Jewish murder. Lithuanian state historians have been describing it ever since as if it had.

In 1992 the Law on Responsibility for Genocide of the Lithuanian People classified Soviet repression as legal genocide and converted Soviet-era resisters, some of whom had murdered Jews months earlier, into juridical victims by statute.

The Lithuanian institutions that should have prosecuted those who participated in the Holocaust rehabilitated them instead. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the body legally tasked with investigating Lithuania’s twentieth-century mass crimes, has failed to release the names of Holocaust perpetrators, let alone participate in indicting any of them. The chairs of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s expert working groups have publicly called the Centre’s conduct a grave concern.

Prosecuting the Wrong People

By the same token, Lithuania has no trouble indicting a Jew. A Lithuanian Jewish citizen named Artur Fridman wrote a Facebook post about his grandfather while at a Vilnius cemetery. The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Lithuania filed a 220-page indictment against him under Article 170² of the Criminal Code. The same article, the same office, declined to charge Member of Parliament Vidmantas Rakutis when he publicly accused Jews of Holocaust perpetration on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It prosecutes the Jewish witness and protects the parliamentarian who slanders the Jews.

A Tier of Justice–and Its Bottom

European prosecution of perpetrator rankings look like a tier list. Germany and Poland at the top. France and the Low Countries in the middle. Italy and Austria below them. The Baltic states at the bottom.

Why Lithuania Ranks Last

Lithuania is at the bottom because Lithuania likes it that way. Where the murder was most intense, the perpetrator state has built the most elaborate machinery for evading judgment– dismissing lawsuits, refusing retractions, honors still standing for my grandfather who signed orders against the Jews of Šiauliai.

I wrote Storm in the Land of Rain about him.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti