Lithuania’s Genocide Centre calls the perpetrators marginal. Its own publications record what they did to Jewish women.

Jewish women were raped and murdered at the Seventh Fort, in a camp the Lithuanian Provisional Government approved on June 30, 1941 and, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, administered. At Rainiai, Malke Gilis testified that the same men who murdered husbands raped their wives. At Jonava, testimony names five girls raped near a bathhouse, one before her mother. These crimes confront Lithuania’s state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, whose 2020 book characterizes Lithuanian participation as a “supporting cast and thus essentially marginal.”

This is the fourth article in a series about the language Lithuania uses to describe the Holocaust. The first examined how words such as “vanished” and “perished” obscure the murder of Jews (What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”). The second showed how descriptions conceal the Lithuanian identity of perpetrators (The Germans Called Them Lithuanians. Lithuania Will Not.). The third returned to Jäger’s records to identify the perpetrators whom later accounts obscured (Jäger Kept the Ledger. Lithuanians Filled It.). This fourth article examines rape and sexualized violence against Jewish women and girls, and how official historical language minimizes the responsibility of those who committed it. The related article (‘Marginal’ Murders) challenged the description of Lithuanian participation as “essentially marginal.”

A formula that says Jews “vanished” removes the murder. “Nazis and collaborators” can remove the nationality and role of the killers. “Marginal” reduces the weight of what those perpetrators did. When the rescue narrative replaces the history of the perpetrators, Lithuanian agency returns only where it earns praise. Those are the connected arguments of the four essays.

A government’s camp, and what happened inside it

On June 30, 1941, the Lithuanian Provisional Government, chaired at the cabinet meeting by Juozas Ambrazevičius, approved Commandant Jurgis Bobelis’s proposal for a concentration camp for Jews and an auxiliary police battalion. Vice-Minister V. Švipas was tasked with the camp in cooperation with Bobelis. Bobelis’s July 5 budget provided twenty-one soldiers and a major to guard it, effective July 1. TDA Order No. 3 dispatched forty-nine men to the Seventh Fort on July 7. The documentary chain appears in the Kaunas Seventh Fort supplement and in the minutes LGGRTC itself published in 2001.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records Jewish women raped and murdered at the Seventh Fort. It states that guards who shot Jewish men “belonged to a newly-formed battalion of Lithuanian policemen.” Martynas Kosas and Vytautas Petrikėnas, in their 2011 study, describe guards taking Jewish women to remote parts of the fort, raping them and shooting them. The EHRI catalogue of Yad Vashem testimonies describes Peshe Kagan’s account of women raped and murdered on July 4–5, and Chasia Khodash’s account of women kidnapped and raped by Lithuanians.

Jäger’s original report recorded 463 Jewish victims at the Seventh Fort on July 4, including forty-seven women, and another 2,514 Jewish victims on July 6. Its heading says: “Executions carried out by Lithuanian partisans on my instructions and under my command.” The subsequent heading, for Hamann’s raiding commando, describes operations conducted “in collaboration with Lithuanian partisans.” They are two different headings for different entries.

On page 40 of LGGRTC’s 2020 volume, Darius Furmonavičius writes: “If there were Lithuanians who took part in these events, examination of the command structures of the SS will make it plain that their contribution was as supporting cast and thus essentially marginal.” He adds that the SS involved others “whether these people wanted to or not.” Two sentences later, he describes the July 4 and 6 executions as carried out “with the co-operation of Lithuanian partisans” and calls the designation “Lithuanian partisans” a “fraudulent identification.” He applies the later, weaker cooperation formula to the earlier executions, for which Jäger explicitly identified Lithuanian executors under German command. A state institution’s authorship establishes what it published; the historical case rests on the documents, not its institutional seal.

A woman taken to a remote part of the Seventh Fort to be raped and shot did not experience her assailant as “marginal.”

The government was “clearly exempt”: the Centre’s first contradiction

Two pages earlier, on page 38 of the same volume, Furmonavičius writes that “the Lithuanian Provisional Government, which attempted to save the Lithuanian Jews, is clearly exempt from this charge.” The charge under discussion is collaboration in the Holocaust. LGGRTC’s own 2001 edition of the government minutes records that cabinet approving “a concentration camp for Jews.” The USHMM history of Kovno records rape and murder in the camp that government administered.

The Centre’s claim of governmental exemption must answer the cabinet record, the camp budget, the guard deployment and the documented assaults and murders. Those primary records do not describe a government merely rescuing Jews.

A widow, her husband’s possessions and the men with knives

At Rainiai, Malke Gilis testified: “The murderers who had earlier murdered the husbands enjoyed themselves immensely as they raped the women.” The men came at night “with knives in their hands,” shone flashlights into the women’s faces and ordered them to come along. Her testimony directly contradicts the portrayal of local perpetrators as people involved “whether these people wanted to or not.”

The perpetrators also brought murdered men’s remaining possessions before their wives and mothers. Gilis said the better things had already been taken; what remained was displayed so the women could be made to weep and scream. She called it a “special sadistic tactic.”

The Telšiai supplement reconstructs the separate Rainiai and Geruliai episodes. The Yad Vashem account of Geruliai preserves repeated rape testimony, and the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, printed page 1132, describes incursions and “rapes by their Lithuanian guards.” These were armed men holding women whom Lithuanian guards, under commandant Benediktas Platakis, kept confined.

At Telšiai, after the Jewish men had been murdered, the surviving women conducted the High Holiday prayers themselves. Miriam Vaserman, nineteen, had graduated from the Yavne gymnasium; she gave birth in the ghetto and died of blood poisoning. These identified lives, families and communal practices supply the human record against which the perpetrators’ acts must be read.

Five girls at the Jonava bathhouse

In the Koniuchowsky collection, Gershon Reybshteyn names Eydl Grinblat, fifteen; Rivke Zalmenovits, seventeen; Beylke Beten, seventeen; Gite Kagansky, seventeen; and Nekhome Selsky, whose age is not given. He records that all five were raped near the Jonava bathhouse by “a band of Lithuanian murderers, headed by Antanas Gineika.” Reybshteyn was then in the Kaunas ghetto and does not identify his informant for this incident.

Reybshteyn states that Nekhome Selsky was raped before her mother’s eyes. The same source describes Jonava’s Yavne and Tarbut schools, yeshiva, synagogues and study houses: a Jewish community whose children had names, schooling and families before their tormentors seized them.

In late 1943, according to the Jonava testimony, Lithuanian peasants informed Lithuanian police and partisans where fifteen-year-old Khane Lafer was hiding with her mother at Ragazh. They shot her mother. Khane refused to identify herself as Jewish. The men raped and tortured her, suspended her head-down in a barn doorway, beat her, poured cold water over her and tortured her to death.

Men who bragged, and women who warned them

In a 1998 interview, Jonas Baura remembered men drinking and comparing shooting totals: “I shot this many, I shot that many.” Baura heard a man named Jurevičius who, Baura said, “was shooting Jews in Rokiškis,” say: “I forced aside two Jewesses, beautiful ones, raped them and forced them to dig their own pit.” According to Baura, the women warned him, “Child, the same will fall on your head.” The man laughed: “Ha ha ha!” Baura heard the confession, not the crime. Violeta Davoliūtė published the interview account.

The victims’ names remain unknown in this testimony. The location of their rape and murder is not fixed by Jurevičius’s association with shootings in Rokiškis.

The Anykščiai report reproduces testimony by Juozas Vyšniauskas, an imprisoned Soviet activist distinct from the partisan commander of the same name, accusing Bronius Janickas and Juozas Kalendra of repeatedly raping and murdering the Dubovskytė sisters. In a separate oral-history account analyzed by Davoliūtė, Anelė Mičiulienė named Gražys and Kalendra as local perpetrators of rape and murder. LGGRTC published the July 1941 roster naming Kalendra in 2000, and its own historian Gintaras Vaičiūnas reproduced the rape testimony. The Darbėnai report records S. Japertas identifying armed policeman V. Jašinskas, described as a man known for raping condemned women, as the man who took Estera Kverelytė away; she was found raped and shot. In the Batakiai report, Goldshteyn’s witnesses attribute the rape of Peshke Segal to Juozas Ambrozaitis and Bronius Toliushiush, who boasted about it. In a statement reproduced from the Ulm proceedings, Harms stated that Schwarz showed him close-range photographs depicting Lithuanian police shooting women. He described a policeman holding a naked Jewish woman by her hair and pressing a pistol against her neck at the edge of a swamp.

Seventeen women vanished inside the Centre’s own books

On September 9, 1943, Kazimierz Sakowicz recorded Lithuanian men beating women at Paneriai, forcing them to remove their underwear and pointing at their exposed bodies. Two Germans stood to one side, talking and lighting cigarettes. On a German’s command five or six women descended from a truck; Lithuanian men, “some with rifle butts, some with sticks,” drove them into the pit and shot from above. In the Centre’s own Lithuanian edition, the entry asks: “Žydės, ar ne?” (“Jewish women, or not?”). Sakowicz learned the total of seventeen women later from a participant, who identified three Polish adolescent girls and the rest as Jewish.

The participant did not independently enumerate fourteen Jewish women; fourteen is seventeen minus three. The account of escape from the ghetto also came from that participant. These details were present in the diary LGGRTC itself published in 2012. The Vilnius supplemental report compares the source editions and the institutional account.

LGGRTC published Sakowicz’s diary in Lithuanian in 2012, with Arūnas Bubnys’s introductory study, “Mirties konvejeris Paneriuose: budeliai ir aukos” (“The Death Conveyor at Paneriai: Executioners and Victims”). In 2016 the Centre’s journal published Mantas Šikšnianas’s research explaining that Sakowicz used “lietuviai” and “šauliai” for members of the Vilnius Special Squad.

Yet Bubnys’s 2020 chapter states on page 143: “On September 9, 1943, 14 Jews were shot for attempting to escape from the ghetto on Rasų Street.” Its sentence omits the women’s sex, the three Polish adolescent girls, the forced undressing, the beatings, the Lithuanian shooters and the two Germans standing aside. It preserves the explanation of escape given afterward by a participant.

The Centre published the detailed account and its own terminology study. Its 2020 summary eliminated the acts by which the women were humiliated and murdered, and erased the local perpetrators from the sentence.

The book that prints rape and then calls the perpetrators marginal

On page 258, Bubnys wrote that the Geruliai camp was “guarded by policemen from the liquidated Rainiai and Viešvėnai camps,” that “many of the women and girls were raped,” and that “Lithuanian self-defense unit soldiers and police officers did the shooting.” The rape sentence itself leaves the rapists unnamed; USHMM’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos explicitly describes “rapes by their Lithuanian guards.” This is the Centre’s own book acknowledging rape and Lithuanian shooting, while another chapter describes local participants as marginal.

On page 451, the rescue chapter states that “Lithuanians are simply programmed to resist duress.” On page 40, duress diminishes responsibility for participation in persecution. The same volume credits national agency in rescue and treats local participation in murder as reluctant and secondary. On page 467, its rescue chapter also recounts two “white armbands” taking twenty-four Jewish girls and a boy to the Rainiai woods on December 24, 1941; the boy was shot.

Individual acts of rescue deserve recognition. But the Centre’s own volume names Lithuanian agency when it praises rescue and can suppress it when confronting rape and murder. That asymmetry in the text is the subject of this series.

Bubnys wrote, compiled and then signed the refusal

Furmonavičius wrote the marginality passage. Bubnys compiled the 2020 volume, authored its Paneriai and Geruliai chapters, and signed the Centre’s November 3, 2026 response No. 55R-1130 as acting Director General. The Centre rejected my September 20 correction request, registered September 21 as 7R-1167, concerning pages 38–40. It defended the marginality characterization as the scholarly interpretation of its author and declined correction or annotation.

How can the institution that wrote and published the contested history be the sole historical arbiter of a source-based challenge to it? The state must provide independent scrutiny of that response.

The documentary challenge has reached parliamentary oversight

On November 6, 2026 (U.S. time), I filed a signed complaint against 55R-1130 with the Lithuanian Administrative Disputes Commission, a signed supplement in Seimas Ombudspersons case 5D-2026/2.1-1655, and a request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to forward the material to IHRA. On November 5, a complaint about a different LGGRTC decision, 55R-1129, went to the Seimas Commission for Freedom Struggles and Historical Memory. Registration and substantive decisions on these new filings are pending.

The town reports make the pattern testable

My Lithuania Town Research Reports project documents persecution, dispossession, forced labor without wages—slavery—sexual violence and murder community by community. Readers can follow named witnesses, original documents and competing official descriptions from these linked reports.

IHRA must confront the record, not the rescue presentation alone

The IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion identifies among forms of distortion “intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.” Whether Lithuania’s state publications meet that test is a question for IHRA’s member governments to examine against the documents.

My submissions to IHRA began in May 2026 and have included later documentary supplements. The November 6, 2026 request to Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry asked that material be forwarded to the Alliance or that a reasoned decision be provided. IHRA’s member governments should independently assess the challenged texts, the evidence offered and LGGRTC’s signed refusal. They should determine what institutional review and membership measures are actually available under IHRA’s rules.

Which rape was marginal?

Bubnys compiled a book acknowledging rape at Geruliai, wrote the chapter that reduced the abuse and murder of seventeen women at Paneriai to one sentence, and signed the refusal to correct Furmonavičius’s marginality claim. The Centre also called the Provisional Government “clearly exempt” from complicity even though its published minutes show that government approving the Seventh Fort Jewish camp.

LGGRTC must correct its account of Jäger’s headings on page 40; account for the Provisional Government’s June 30 camp decision on page 38; restore the victims, Lithuanian shooters and German presence to the September 9, 1943 account on page 143; and explain how page 258’s acknowledgement of rape can coexist with the description of perpetrators as marginal. The Seimas Ombudspersons should independently examine the refusal, and IHRA’s member governments should review the historic record and Lithuania’s compliance with their remembrance commitments.

The women raped at the Seventh Fort, Rainiai, Jonava, Anykščiai, Darbėnai and Batakiai were not marginal to their own history. Their attackers were not marginal to the crimes they committed. Lithuania’s state history cannot present Lithuanians mainly as rescuers while refusing to name the perpetrators.

Which rape was marginal?

Corrections and source-based disagreements are welcome at ggochin@gmail.com. Substantiated corrections will be considered and, where warranted, published with a dated explanation.