My Grandfather’s Antisemitism Did Not Begin With the Nazis

Before Jonas Noreika signed the orders during the Nazi occupation, he had already published an antisemitic political program in 1933

My grandfather’s 1933 pamphlet is public, scanned, and readable in the original. Lithuania has not revoked the state decoration it conferred on him in 1997. The replacement plaque installed on the Wroblewski Library in 2019 has been taken down for renovations, not repudiated, and is to go back up when the work is finished. The honor has been interrupted by construction. It has not been withdrawn.

The Document He Published in Independent Lithuania

Fifty cents. Printed in Kaunas. The author’s name across the cover in capitals: JONAS NOREIKA.

He was 23, and there was no occupier in the country. Eight years later he was chief of Šiauliai district and signed orders establishing a Jewish ghetto and expropriating Jewish property. I am his granddaughter.

I was raised on the hero, and I have written before about how that ended. This is the document the defense of him cannot absorb.

Internal evidence dates the pamphlet to after Germany announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations on 14 October 1933. Antanas Smetona’s Lithuania was authoritarian, but it was independent and at peace. The Soviets were seven years away.

No German official dictated the text. No foreign occupier compelled my grandfather to write it. He published it under his own name and priced it for sale.

An Antisemitic Program in His Own Words

The pamphlet opens with a parable of a ship drifting through violence and storm. Then it arrives in Lithuania, and then at Jews.

My grandfather argues that Jews hold too much of the country’s commerce and capital. He asks what becomes of Lithuanians if the money and the land end in Jewish hands, and answers that Lithuanians will be forced to scatter.

From there it becomes instruction.

He demands an oath against buying from non-Lithuanians. He forbids the sale of land to a Jew at any price and calls the seller a traitor. He writes, “Once and for all, we will not buy from Jews.”

Trade is condemned not merely as unfair dealing but because a transaction sustains a Jewish household in Lithuania. Jewish continuation itself becomes the injury.

The rest is delivery.

Newspapers are to refuse advertising from non-Lithuanian firms and print lists of Lithuanian traders instead. Journalists are to carry the theme every day, placing Vilnius under Polish rule and Jewish commerce inside the same grievance. Writers are to stop describing autumn and begin rousing young men. Officers are to use the army’s teaching hours on their conscripts and enter trade after discharge.

The Lithuanian who declines is marked as having handed the country to Jews.

Near the end, my grandfather tells the reader that the property is already his by right. Then he invokes what he calls the law that has governed the world from the beginning: the stronger kills the weaker.

He placed economic exclusion, property entitlement, organized mobilization, and the rule of force on the same pages.

Eight Years Later, He Held Power Over Jewish Lives

Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe. Roughly 220,000 Jews lived there on the eve of the German invasion. Approximately 212,000 were murdered, a destruction rate of about 96 percent.

In August 1941 the new administration made my grandfather chief of Šiauliai district. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania’s own published account of Noreika’s activities during the Nazi occupation records that on 22 August 1941 Noreika issued a notice concerning the removal of Jews and half-Jews from the district’s rural areas and towns and the handling of their property. The Centre’s account argues that Noreika did not participate in mass killing operations but was involved in matters connected with the isolation of Jews and the administration of confiscated Jewish property.

That distinction matters. It does not erase the administrative record.

The Jäger Report, compiled by Einsatzkommando 3 commander Karl Jäger on 1 December 1941, records the murder at Žagarė on 2 October 1941, Yom Kippur, of 633 Jewish men, 1,107 Jewish women, and 496 Jewish children.

My grandfather did not personally carry out those shootings.

As district chief, he exercised administrative power during the process of ghettoization and expropriation.

The Defenses Do Not Erase the Record

The Commission records that he acted following directives from the German District Commissar.

Take that at full strength. It establishes the occupation hierarchy. The Commission states in the same document that German command does not diminish the responsibility of local collaborators.

It also cannot account for an antisemitic political program published eight years earlier, in an independent country, under my grandfather’s own name.

He was young. He was twenty-three, had completed the Kaunas War School, and addressed officers as one of them. He commissioned a print run and placed a price on it.

No retraction by him has been identified.

The state that later decorated him has not withdrawn the honor.

Everyone Thought That Way Then

Some did.

Interwar Lithuania had a boycott press and movements built around economic exclusion. Most men who shared those views were never placed in command of a district.

My grandfather was.

And his orders put administrative power behind an exclusionary program he had already published.

Did He “Rescue” Jews?

He “rescued” Jews.

In December 2019 the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania published its account of the claim that Noreika organized a Jewish rescue network in Šiauliai. The Centre argued that Noreika simultaneously participated in anti-Nazi resistance and helped organize efforts to rescue Jews.

Alvydas Nikžentaitis of the Institute of History, Nerijus Šepetys and Jurgita Verbickienė of Vilnius University took the report apart in public, one of them noting that a history student would be marked down for work of that standard. The Centre’s director answered that she is not a historian herself, and that what she asks of her specialists is that they believe in the results of their research.

Take the rescue allegations at their highest and the orders remain.

Rescue evidence and perpetrator evidence can coexist.

Neither cancels the other.

The Argument That Suffering Erases Responsibility

Behind all of it is the argument the Centre and my grandfather’s defenders return to.

He was imprisoned at Stutthof. He organized anti-Soviet resistance. The Soviets shot him on 26 February 1947.

That is the Genocide Equalization Doctrine: suffering under one regime used to erase responsibility under another.

The replacement plaque made the argument physical by adding Stutthof and the execution date to the inscription.

A later death does not unwrite an earlier order.

Suffering one crime has never disqualified anyone from committing another.

What Lithuanian Institutions Have Chosen to Remember

The wartime record concerning my grandfather has been public for years.

The presidential commission addressed it directly in April 2019: Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes IHRA leaders and expert committee chairs, including IHRA Chair Georges Santer and Honorary Chair Yehuda Bauer, condemned the Centre’s attempt to justify his wartime actions and applied IHRA’s definition of Holocaust distortion to that defense.

Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius ordered the original plaque removed on 27 July 2019. AJC praised him for it two days later.

Nationalists installed a replacement in September without a permit, restoring the commemoration. The library declined to remove it, its deputy director explaining that memory should be preserved where the state has established that a person deserves commemoration.

The only such establishment is the decoration.

On 30 October, six weeks after the honor went back up, AJC hosted Šimašius at a Washington reception and praised him again for the removal.

The plaque was on the wall throughout that evening.

Renovation Interrupted the Honor. Historical Judgment Did Not.

It came down again later, and not by decision.

Library Director Sigitas Narbutas stated on 2 May 2023 that the plaque had been removed for repair work on the façade and would be reinstalled once the work was complete.

Three years on, that remains the position.

Renovation interrupted the honor.

Historical judgment did not.

In January 2020 the Centre’s director, Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė, told LRT that an administrative court had ruled the Centre’s conclusions were produced using scientific methodology.

No court ruled that.

The Vilnius Regional Administrative Court rejected Grant Gochin’s complaint on 27 March 2019 in Case No. eI-534-281/2019 without assessing the Centre’s methodology.

On 1 April 2020, in Case No. eA-1768-624/2020, the Supreme Administrative Court modified that disposition: it held that the underlying request did not concern activity classified as public administration and was neither a complaint nor an application within the meaning of the Law on Public Administration, terminated the claim seeking annulment of the Centre’s reply, and refused to compel an administrative procedure.

The case record classifies the outcome as a decision modified.

Neither court examined whether the Centre’s account of my grandfather is accurate.

The director of a state institution told the national broadcaster that a court had validated her Centre’s scholarship.

No court had looked at it.

Application No. 10930/21 to the European Court of Human Rights was later declared inadmissible and is closed.

The Foti Doctrine: When a State Protects the Myth

Grant Gochin first named the state mechanism the Foti Doctrine in April 2026: when a state’s documentary record of participation in mass atrocity cannot be reconciled with the image it projects to the Western democratic community, it keeps the image and manages the record.

He later developed the descendant dimension in Endless Capacity for Reconciliation.

The two obligations are asymmetric.

A family can discharge its responsibility by telling the truth.

A state discharges nothing by permitting the family to speak while preserving the honor.

What Descendants Owe the Truth

Responsibility means confronting and refusing an inherited lie, not inheriting guilt.

A perpetrator’s descendant must reject the myth, name the crime, and accept the evidentiary record.

A victim’s descendant owes no forgiveness.

Reconciliation may extend to individuals who tell the truth. It does not extend to institutions that go on protecting the lie.

My mother asked me on her deathbed to write her father’s biography, and she wanted a hero.

What I found was a man who published an antisemitic political program in 1933 and, eight years later, exercised administrative power over the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews.

The pamphlet does not prove that he planned the Holocaust.

It destroys the claim that his conduct toward Jews began with German occupation.

Lithuanian institutions have long possessed the wartime record. This article places the 1933 pamphlet beside it.

What remains is a state decoration that has never been revoked.

I confronted the family myth.

Lithuania has not confronted the honor it conferred.

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

Silvia Foti