Thirty Jewish men. Seventy-two Jewish women. Twenty-three Jewish children. The Jäger Report records 125 Jews murdered at Petrašiūnai. Arūnas Bubnys, in a volume published by Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, tells how approximately forty soldiers of the TDA Battalion’s Third Company arrived in two trucks under Lieutenants Anatolijus Dagys and Bronius Pauliukonis. Armed local men guarded the Jewish victims beside two prepared ditches. Bubnys attributes the firing commands to Dagys and Sergeant Major Zigmas Arlauskas. The company’s soldiers shot them. German Gestapo personnel, Bubnys writes, did not participate in this massacre.

Yet on page 40 of that very volume, Darius Furmonavičius begins with “If there were Lithuanians who took part in these events” and concludes that their contribution was “supporting cast and thus essentially marginal.” If? His editor’s book already says yes. It supplies men, ranks, trucks, ditches, guards, firing orders—and twenty-three murdered Jewish children.

To the Jews held at the ditches, which part of the operation was marginal? The armed men preventing escape? The order to shoot? The soldiers who fired? Calling participation marginal does not alter the work those men performed. It alters the way later readers are instructed to value it.

Bubnys compiled the 2011 Lithuanian edition, helped update the 2020 English volume, wrote the Petrašiūnai account and, as acting director of the Centre, signed its November 3, 2026 refusal to correct or annotate the phrase, which the Centre called the contributor’s scholarly interpretation. The historian who counted twenty-three Jewish children among the dead signed the letter keeping that description.

The men at the ditches

Bubnys places the massacre probably on August 30, 1941. Bubnys cites a Kaunas county governor’s letter dated November 5, 1941, reporting the burial of Jews shot there. Bubnys’s account of the movement to the site and the firing draws on a 1961 interrogation of J. Palubinskas. The soldiers reached a lowland overgrown with bushes. The ditches had been dug. Jewish men, women and children were already there. Armed locals in civilian clothing guarded them. Groups were brought to the edge. The shooting occurred at both ditches on the attributed commands.

Put the Centre’s adjective beside each action: marginal guards; a marginal firing command; marginal bullets; twenty-three marginal murdered Jewish children. What sort of historical language can still call these acts peripheral?

Pauliukonis is identified as an officer who accompanied the men, not as the person Bubnys names giving a firing order. Dagys and Arlauskas are attributed those orders; the soldiers are described as shooting; local armed men as guarding. Whether German personnel could have replaced them is irrelevant to the acts they performed.

Palubinskas’s statement was taken during a Soviet-era interrogation. Bubnys nevertheless used this witness in his own published reconstruction of Petrašiūnai. The Centre cannot treat that testimony as usable for its account of the killing and then evade the account when asked to defend “marginal.”

Jäger counted the murdered Jews. His report attributed killings to Lithuanian partisans.

The Centre’s volume reproduces the Jäger Report’s tally of 125 Jewish victims at Petrašiūnai. On page 40, 255 printed pages earlier, Furmonavičius disputes Jäger’s attribution of the July 4 and 6 Seventh Fort executions to “Lithuanian partisans.” The victim counts are reproduced; the identification of the Lithuanian participants is challenged. On what source-critical basis?

Jäger’s report attributes the executions of 463 Jewish victims on July 4 and 2,514 on July 6, 1941, at Kaunas Seventh Fort to Lithuanian partisans acting on his instructions and orders: 2,977 murdered Jews in two days. For operations after Hamann’s mobile killing detachment was formed, Jäger described cooperation with Lithuanian partisans. Furmonavičius recasts the earlier Seventh Fort attribution as cooperation and then challenges the designation “Lithuanian partisans” as fraudulent.

Jäger’s late-August and early-September entries include Petrašiūnai under the later Rollkommando-period operations, for which the report uses a cooperation formula involving Lithuanian partisans. On Jäger’s own terms, the operations in this period involved cooperation with Lithuanian partisans; on Bubnys’s, Lithuanian soldiers fired, local armed men guarded, and no Gestapo personnel participated at the site. German operational command and Lithuanian execution are both in the historical account. The Rollkommando label cannot make the documented guards and shooters marginal.

The publisher was shown its own pages

My signed request of September 20, 2026 expressly directed the Centre to page 294, along with pages 314 and 367–368, when challenging the “marginal” characterization on page 40. It was registered on September 21 as 7R-1167. On November 3, Bubnys signed response 55R-1130 refusing a correction or editorial annotation, describing the phrase as the contributor’s scholarly interpretation. The refusal followed a request that placed the Centre’s own account of the shootings before it. I addressed the correspondence in Fuzzy History.

I give the Centre’s authorship no independent evidentiary weight. It needs none to establish what that institution published: the Petrašiūnai account cites Jäger’s tally, a 1941 county-governor letter and testimony from J. Palubinskas. The Centre cannot disown an account its acting head wrote and relied upon.

Lithuania’s own test

Lithuania has belonged to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since 2002. IHRA members adopted its nonbinding working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion by consensus in 2013. The definition includes intentional efforts to minimize the Holocaust’s principal elements, including collaborators. IHRA’s 2021 guidance gives a concrete example: portraying the Holocaust as irrelevant to a country’s history because Nazi Germany organized it, while overlooking local collaborators. Does the appeal to German command explain the actions of Lithuanian participants—or attempt to diminish them?

The word cannot survive the murdered

Thirty murdered Jewish men. Seventy-two murdered Jewish women. Twenty-three murdered Jewish children. Two ditches. Local guards. Soldiers shooting on attributed commands. Bubnys recorded all of it. Then, after being shown the page that counted them, the Centre he heads refused to correct the claim of marginality.

An adjective that makes the people who held and killed those victims historically negligible is not a neutral statement about command. It is a decision about whose actions are allowed to matter. “Marginal” is the word the Centre elected to preserve. The Jewish dead are the reason it must answer for that choice.