Lithuania Has Promised the Truth for Thirty Years
Presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers have vowed to face the Holocaust. The state they lead still honors the man who signed the orders. If they will not tell the truth about the murder of their own citizens, what will they tell the truth about?
On September 23, 2026, Lithuania marked the 85th anniversary of the destruction of its Jews at Paneriai. Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius called the site “a place of Lithuania’s tragedy.” The government’s own account says he spoke of the need to protect historical truth. The Speaker of the Seimas, Juozas Olekas, said of the murdered: “they had names, they had their voices, faces, their memories.”
Nobody said who killed them.
That silence is not an accident of one speech. I have spent the past weeks assembling a register of 119 statements by Lithuanian presidents, prime ministers, speakers, ministers and diplomats from 1990 to 2026, each traced to an official or contemporaneous source. Read together, they show a state that knows the truth, has said it out loud, has promised to act on it, and has not acted.
They know
Lithuania cannot plead ignorance. Its own leaders have said what happened.
On May 8, 1990, before independence was even recognized, the Supreme Council adopted a declaration on the genocide of the Jews in Lithuania under the Nazi occupation. The text put before the deputies stated that among the executioners serving the occupiers there were also Lithuanian citizens.
On March 1, 1995, President Algirdas Brazauskas stood before the Knesset and asked forgiveness for those Lithuanians “who ruthlessly killed, shot, deported, and robbed Jews.” He promised to establish the truth about the Holocaust “without any exclusion.” He promised to bring war criminals to trial. He told the Knesset he had just issued a decree to review the rehabilitation of suspected participants.
In 2005 President Valdas Adamkus told Yad Vashem that Lithuanians “participated in killings and looted Jewish houses.” In 2009 Foreign Minister Vygaudas Ušackas said, in an interview his ministry still hosts, “this is a shame for which we ask forgiveness.” In 2017 Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said at Paneriai that “our local murderers participated.”
President Gitanas Nausėda went further than any of them. At Paneriai on September 23, 2020, he said that admitting to ourselves that our state’s citizens also died at Lithuanian hands had been hard, and that the only way to come to terms with history is to understand the truth and say it to ourselves. A year later, at the Malmö Forum, he pledged that Lithuania must fight all attempts to falsify history.
Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė spoke at Paneriai in 2022 so that the truth would prevail and never be hidden again. Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys told the American Jewish Committee in February 2026 that the distortion of Holocaust memory is “unaceptable,” spelling as published.
These are not activists. They are heads of state and government, speaking for the Republic. The knowledge is official.
Two years after the Knesset
In 1997, two years after his Knesset apology, Brazauskas signed the decree that posthumously awarded Jonas Noreika the Order of the Cross of Vytis, reported as the first degree. The same year a memorial plaque went up on the Wroblewski Library in central Vilnius.
Noreika was the Nazi-appointed chief of Šiauliai County in 1941. His orders are not rumor. On October 15, 1941, he signed Order No. 3687 directing the sale of property confiscated from Jews and the deposit of the proceeds into the Reich Credit Bank in Šiauliai. The order survives in Lithuania’s own Central State Archive, fund R-1099, list 1, file 2, folio 451. He signed the orders that sent the Jews of his county to the Žagarė ghetto. The Jews of Žagarė were murdered.
I do not yet know what Brazauskas was told about Noreika before he signed that decree. I am asking the Office of the President for the award file: the decree, the nomination, the body that proposed it and what it submitted. I will report what comes back. But the question of what one president knew in 1997 does not rescue the state. What matters is what the state learned afterward, and what it did.
Then they were told
The record of notice is long and specific.
In 2017 and 2018 I wrote repeatedly to President Dalia Grybauskaitė, including a formal request in June 2018 that Noreika’s award be withdrawn. My submissions since 2015 are public.
In September 2018 Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told the national news agency that he had seen copies of documents showing Noreika’s clear collaboration with the Nazis, establishing ghettos and seizing Jewish property. “We shouldn’t be waffling on this,” he said. A sitting foreign minister had the documents in hand.
In April 2019 Noreika’s granddaughter, Silvia Foti, launched a petition, “Remove all honors awarded to my grandfather Jonas Noreika.” The same month, the chairs of IHRA’s expert bodies issued a statement of grave concern about how the state’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre was treating Noreika. Lithuania did not cure it. On April 11, 2019, the President’s own International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes rejected the official defense of Noreika and identified his orders on the Žagarė ghetto and Jewish property.
That defense came from the Centre, the state body that has spent years presenting Noreika as a rescuer. Nothing it says about him carries weight because it says it; its statements are assertions, and the facts rest on the archive and on independent historians, including the President’s own Commission.
On November 2, 2021, three weeks after Malmö, I wrote to President Nausėda and to the Chancellor of the State Orders. I quoted his Malmö pledge back to him and asked him to use the power the Law on State Awards gives him to strike Noreika from the list of recipients. That power is real. In 2025 the Seimas Petitions Commission confirmed that the President’s authority to remove a person from the list, where their conduct disgraces the award, is constitutionally grounded.
Silvia Foti wrote in March 2026 that she had already asked the Lithuanian government to revoke the honors given to her grandfather out of respect for his victims. She also gave the medal away, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The award stands. No President has announced a review of it.
What the President did instead
When the City of Vilnius removed the Noreika plaque in July 2019, President Nausėda responded by calling for a “moratorium on the erasure of historical memory” and said the evaluation of historical figures must be depoliticized. His own International Commission had depoliticized the question three months earlier, on the documents. The moratorium protected the honor, not the evidence.
In January 2020, as a member of the Seimas pushed a resolution declaring that the Lithuanian state bore no part in the Holocaust, the President asked, “Who is making the accusation that Lithuania … carried out the Holocaust?”
I have found no speech by President Nausėda at Paneriai since 2021. His Holocaust statements since then honor rescuers. The rescued had to be rescued from someone. The state’s ceremonies do not say from whom, a pattern I documented in Rescued From Whom?
The language is shrinking
The words have narrowed as the notice has grown.
Skvernelis spoke of “our local murderers” in 2017. Šimonytė spoke of executioners and onlookers in 2021. Since then, prime ministers have called the Holocaust “a tragedy of Lithuania, Europe and the entire world” and named no one. In January 2026 Budrys said at the Ninth Fort that the crime required “observers and collaborators,” without saying whose. The Seimas resolved in 2023 that streets and monuments should not honor people who “allegedly collaborated” with the Nazis. Allegedly, about men whose signatures sit in the state archive.
In July 2025 Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas unveiled a memorial in Žagarė and said that a mature society does not tear out any of its pages, however painful. He said it in the town whose ghetto Noreika ordered. The page with Noreika’s signature on it is still torn out of the official story, and his decoration is still in.
The truth they will enforce
Lithuania has not punished a single Lithuanian for the murder of its Jews. Aleksandras Lileikis died before judgment. Kazys Gimžauskas was convicted in 2001 and Algimantas Dailidė in 2006; neither was ever made to serve a sentence.
Yet the state does enforce one version of history. Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jew, faces criminal prosecution under Article 170² of the Criminal Code, the provision written to punish denial and gross trivialization of Nazi and Soviet crimes. His offense was a Facebook post saying that men the state honors were implicated in the Holocaust and that its institutions lie about them. A state that has punished no one for the murder of its Jews has found a defendant under its Holocaust-crimes speech law: a Jew who named the people it decorates.
What can they be believed about?
An omission in a single speech proves only an omission. I do not claim more from one speech. The case here rests on three things the record establishes.
They know. Their own presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers have said Lithuanians took part, in words more specific than mine.
They have the power. The President can strike a name from the list of decorated. The Centre that defends Noreika is a state institution, funded from the state budget. The Seimas can resolve what it likes, and has.
They were told, again and again, by their own Commission, by IHRA, by a sitting foreign minister, by Noreika’s own granddaughter, and by me. And they kept the award, kept the defense, and narrowed the words.
A state that says “truth” at every commemoration and acts against it after every warning is not simply failing to tell the truth. That is my conclusion from the record, and I state it as mine: the word is being used to manage an audience. The vow has become the product. It is offered to Yad Vashem, to the Knesset, to the American Jewish Committee, to IHRA, and to every ambassador who lays a wreath at Paneriai. It works because each audience hears it once.
Read across thirty-six years and 119 statements, it reads differently.
If the Republic of Lithuania will not tell the plainest truth there is, that its own citizens were murdered by its own citizens and that it still decorates one of the officials who signed the orders, then its other assurances deserve the same weight. Its antisemitism action plans. Its pledges at IHRA. Its assurances to Washington about historical truth. Its promise to its own Jewish citizens that it will protect them. Each comes from the same institutions, under the same leaders, with the same record.
There is a simple test, and it costs nothing. Revoke the decoration. Withdraw the Centre’s defense of Noreika. Say, at Paneriai, who did the killing. Until then, the next promise of truth should be read against the 119 statements that came before it.
