Lithuania’s problem is no longer merely what its historians conclude. It is what the state does to evidence that produces the wrong conclusion.

There are many ways for a state to falsify history.

The crudest is to destroy the evidence.

A more sophisticated state does not need to.

It can promote the evidence that supports the national story. It can retire evidence that threatens it—not necessarily by suppressing the document, but by degrading the witness, changing the evidentiary standard, or describing the record in a way that makes the inconvenient part disappear.

And once the resulting historical narrative has acquired institutional authority, the state can weaponize it against those who refuse to accept it.

Promote. Retire. Weaponize.

Lithuania has now supplied an unusually clear demonstration of all three.

I published the underlying documentary record in Lithuania Changed the Testimony. The documents concern Jonas Noreika, Aleksandras Pakalniškis and the murder of the Jews of Plungė in 1941.

The significance of the episode, however, is larger than Noreika.

It shows us the method.

Promote

Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has spent years defending the conclusions its national narrative requires.

That defense requires historical evidence. Some of it comes from precisely the kinds of sources that Lithuania has elsewhere treated as problematic: Soviet interrogations, Soviet criminal files, recollections recorded years after the events, and postwar testimony.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about using those sources.

That is the point.

A Soviet interrogation is not automatically false because a Soviet institution produced it. A memoir is not automatically true because its author wrote it in America. Historical evidence has to be tested against provenance, context, corroboration, internal consistency and the rest of the available record.

But the test has to remain the same when the evidence changes direction.

Consider the Centre’s determination on Kazys Škirpa.

Lithuania did not merely tolerate favorable evidence. In reaching that determination, the Centre relied on a favorable proposition it did not disclose: that the United States government had comprehensively investigated Juozas Brazaitis and completely exonerated him.

The Seimas Ombudsman recorded the Centre’s admission that it had considered these undisclosed extenuating circumstances, and found a transparency defect. Weeks later, LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21 placed the same supposed American exoneration into the official defense of the Centre’s historical position.

In May 2026 Lithuania’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs conceded that “complete exoneration” was legally imprecise, and that the termination of an administrative investigation is not a judicial exoneration.

Two state documents record the reliance. A third state institution later conceded that the legal characterization underlying that premise was imprecise.

That is not an inference about institutional preference. The reliance is documented.

Evidence favorable to the national narrative received institutional life. It was analyzed, incorporated and used to construct an official conclusion — without disclosure, and on a premise later conceded to be legally imprecise.

It was promoted.

Retire

Then there was Aleksandras Pakalniškis.

Pakalniškis worked in the Plungė commandant’s office in July 1941. He was not a distant recollector assembling a narrative from rumor. He was inside the building in the days before the town’s Jews were murdered.

He was not a perfect witness. He gave Lithuania’s defenders genuine material with which to challenge him.

He acknowledged that he had not personally known Jonas Noreika. He could not identify him from a photograph. His later memoir supplied additional specificity. Those are legitimate matters for historical criticism.

But witness criticism cannot alter printed text.

Pakalniškis published a memoir in Chicago in 1980. In it appears a sentence identifying Plungė as being governed by Lithuanian officers su komendantu kapitonu Noreika viršūnėje — “with commandant Captain Noreika at the top.”

Immediately afterward, the narrative enters the commandant’s office. A German asks what will happen to the Jews. The commandant says he has already ordered them shot.

The surname is not repeated inside the dialogue.

It does not need to be.

The commandant has just been identified.

Those Jews were the Jewish population of Plungė. They were confined in the town synagogue, taken to pits in the forest near Kaušėnai, four kilometers away, and shot. Approximately 1,800 Jews of Plungė were murdered at Kaušėnai in July 1941. A Jewish community that had lived in the town for centuries was destroyed in days.

This is not an abstract discrepancy between memoir editions. The sentence whose evidentiary force Lithuania has spent decades reducing is the sentence identifying the officer who ordered those murders.

Nor is it my reconstruction of an obscure source. Alfredas Rukšėnas, a historian at Lithuania’s own Genocide Centre, reproduced the relevant 1980 passage in the Centre’s journal Genocidas ir rezistencija in 2016, at page 54.

And then something extraordinary happened.

After printing the words “commandant Captain Noreika,” Rukšėnas wrote that the surname of the commandant who gave the shooting order was not indicated in the 1980 memoir.

The same printed page records that approximately 1,800 people were murdered near Kaušėnai. One page of Lithuanian state scholarship thus carries both the number of the murdered and the words “commandant Captain Noreika” — followed by the assertion that the commandant’s surname was not given.

The reader does not have to choose between historians. The contradiction is on the page.

The contradiction did not remain inside a journal.

Vytautas Landsbergis is not a commentator at the margins of Lithuanian public life. He led Lithuania to restored independence and chaired the Supreme Council–Reconstituent Seimas.

In an article of 25 September 2018 he argued that the commandant in the first version was unnamed, identified him instead as Povilas Alimas, and wrote that Pakalniškis or his editors remembered Noreika as the man ordering the killing fifteen years later. In a 2021 essay in Naujasis židinys–Aidai, he stated that the first authentic version contains no word about Noreika as the killer of Plungė’s Jews, and wrote: Noreika atsiranda po 15 metų — Noreika appears after fifteen years.

But the Centre’s own historian had already printed the 1980 words:

Commandant Captain Noreika.

An institutional contradiction had become a national position, advanced by the founding figure of the restored Lithuanian state.

There is an important distinction here.

Pakalniškis may have been wrong about Noreika.

He may have confused identities. His memory may have deteriorated. His later account may have accumulated detail. Every one of those propositions can be investigated.

What cannot legitimately be done is to transform weaknesses in a witness into the disappearance of words that are demonstrably present in his earlier text.

That is something different from historical criticism.

It is retirement.

The document survives. The witness survives. The inconvenient sentence even survives inside the state institution’s own scholarship.

But its evidentiary force is progressively reduced until the official narrative can proceed as though the sentence had not said what it plainly said.

That is a much more efficient system than censorship.

You do not burn the evidence.

You make it cease to matter.

Weaponize

This would already be serious if the consequences ended in an argument among historians.

They do not.

Lithuania is now prosecuting Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, over Facebook speech concerning the historical reputation of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. In 2018 the Seimas recognized Ramanauskas as Head of the Lithuanian State fighting Soviet occupation, and official material has since placed him among the country’s heads of state and held him up as a model for Lithuanian soldiers. Speech about him is therefore not treated as speech about a dead partisan.

Fridman was charged under Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2 of the Criminal Code. Prosecutors signed a 220-page indictment.

I have written extensively about that prosecution. I do not need to retry it here.

What matters here is that the Genocide Centre is not merely cultural background to that prosecution. The indictment references LGGRTC Letter No. 13R-645 of 2 September 2025, addressing archival material on the January 1945 Soviet-security approach to Ramanauskas under the codename “Džūkija.”

The state historical institution whose conclusions help construct the official partisan narrative supplied material that entered the criminal case itself.

I know that transition is not theoretical. Years before Lithuania prosecuted Fridman, the Genocide Centre answered my own challenges to its Holocaust-era conclusions by invoking Lithuania’s Constitution and Criminal Code. I later documented that warning in “Before Lithuania Prosecuted Fridman, It Warned Me.” What reached him as an indictment had already reached me as a warning.

So consider the sequence.

A state historical institution determines which evidence is reliable.

Its conclusions enter public memory.

Those conclusions help define who is a hero, who is a perpetrator, what may properly be said about the past and what kinds of historical assertions the state considers false or defamatory.

Then criminal law enters the room.

I am not claiming that the Pakalniškis episode caused the Fridman prosecution. It did not.

I am describing an architecture.

First, evidence is sorted.

Then history is certified.

Finally, the certified history acquires consequences.

That is why the dispute over a sentence published in Chicago in 1980 matters in Lithuania in 2026.

The question is no longer simply whether Jonas Noreika was the commandant whom Pakalniškis described.

The narrower question is more revealing:

What does Lithuania do when evidence threatens a conclusion Lithuania has already chosen to preserve?

We now have an answer.

Evidence supporting the national story can survive questionable provenance, imperfect witnesses and postwar reconstruction.

Evidence threatening that story encounters another standard.

And once the preferred history emerges from that process, a Jewish citizen who challenges Lithuania’s heroic narrative can find himself facing the machinery of criminal prosecution.

That is not a dispute over one memoir.

It is a system for governing historical memory.

Promote the useful evidence.

Retire the dangerous evidence.

Weaponize what remains.

Lithuania does not need to destroy the archive.

It only needs to decide which parts of it are allowed to count — even when that requires undisclosed reliance on a premise its own Foreign Ministry later concedes was not a judicial exoneration.