Seimas Sets the Rule. Lithuania Faces the Record
On September 24, 2026, Lithuania’s Parliament adopted Resolution No. XV-1203 on the 85th anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The vote was 110–0–0. The resolution calls on public life not to tolerate antisemitism, Holocaust denial or distortion, or attempts to diminish the scale of the Holocaust, Jewish resistance or the memory of its victims. It calls for preservation of historical sources and testimony and describes the cultivation of historical memory as a commitment of all citizens and institutions of Lithuania to future generations.
In my translation of the operative clauses, the official act records that during Nazi occupation part of Lithuania’s population and officials of local structures serving the occupation regime participated in the persecution of Jews, the expropriation of their property and killing operations. It states that participants in the killing of innocent people had a moral choice; many could have refused to take part in the killings or in the administrative actions connected with them, and consciously did not. The same-day LRT/BNS report corroborates those clauses.
The same day, the Office of the Prosecutor General refused to open pre-trial investigations on applications AP-29927 and AP-29972 concerning the Genocide Centre’s Škirpa and Brazaitis texts. Prosecutor Sergejus Stulginskis described Report No. 9R-598, in my translation, as a “historiographical (not legal) assessment” and its contested conclusions as the opinion of “specialists (historians).” In the Brazaitis matter, the decision treated the Centre’s August 26 edit as a clarification of its position.
I will not appeal. The 2018–2019 refusal inventory records three Article 170² complaints concerning LGGRTC; all three were refused, and the first expressly named both the Centre and Director General Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė. I filed AP-29927 and AP-29972 to place the state’s answer on the record. The record now shows a unanimous vote against Holocaust distortion and, on the same day, the state’s refusal to examine its own historical institution under the criminal standard I invoked. A resolution Lithuania will not apply to its own institutions is, in my judgment, remembrance staged for Jewish and international audiences.
The institution inside the resolution’s “institutions” clause
Much of that commitment falls on the institution the state built to research this period.
Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as a presumptively reliable historical authority. In my assessment, its publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history.
Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a historical claim merely because it has been published by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Any material proposition originating with the LGGRTC must be independently verified against primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship before it is relied upon.
Until such verification is obtained, the LGGRTC’s assertion is treated as unverified and presumptively unreliable, with particular scrutiny for omission, selective quotation, exculpatory reframing, or factual distortion.
On September 21, three days before the vote, LGGRTC response No. 55R-920, signed by acting Director General Arūnas Bubnys, concluded that Kazys Braželis and Jonas Bakanavičius should not be regarded as repressed persons and that their biographies will be removed from the new digital edition of Volume VI in 2027. It also found that Bonifacas Jonas Kukuška’s 1961–69 punishment was not repression and said his biography will be removed from digital Volume II.
That letter proves a narrow institutional fact: the Centre can revisit a published classification when the underlying record defeats it. The Seimas has now called historical memory a commitment of “all citizens and institutions of Lithuania to future generations.” LGGRTC is one of those institutions. A correction that merely disappears from a later edition, without an auditable statement of what was wrong and why it changed, preserves less history than the resolution asks institutions to preserve.
Noreika: the warning came from IHRA itself
In 2019, chairs and recent chairs of IHRA expert bodies expressed “grave concern” about the Centre’s treatment of Jonas Noreika. They described the Centre’s March 27, 2019 statement as part of a series of attempts to rehabilitate Noreika’s reputation and wrote that documentary sources indicated his key role in the ghettoization and expropriation of the property of Jews in the Šiauliai district in 1941.
The Centre’s own 2019 defense acknowledged Noreika’s role in ghettoizing the Jews of Šiauliai while arguing that this did not establish complicity. The Seimas has now placed administrative actions connected with the killings, including the expropriation of Jewish property, inside the field of personal responsibility and moral choice. The archival orders Noreika signed as Šiauliai district chief were administrative actions of exactly that kind. The Seimas standard and the Centre’s 2019 defense cannot both stand.
The longer notice history is documented in “IHRA Was Warned in 2019. Lithuania Did Not Cure.” Eugene J. Levin has separately set out why IHRA now has a record on which it can act institutionally.
Brazaitis: “corrected” before the correction existed
LGGRTC repeatedly described Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis as rehabilitated or completely exonerated by the United States. On May 12, 2026, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas wrote to Representative Brad Sherman that the “complete exoneration” formulation was legally imprecise and that the wording “has since been corrected.” Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis transmitted the letter on May 13. The Foreign Ministry package, including the American records, is publicly preserved.
The Centre dates its visible edit to August 26. On page 3058, it now asserts that Brazaitis and Jonas Šlepetys were removed from a list of suspects because no evidence of crimes was found. The INS recorded an administrative deactivation, stating that the evidence then obtained did not substantiate the allegations, while it continued querying new sources and reserved reactivation. Brazaitis died before investigators ever questioned him. Four paragraphs above the edited sentence, page 3058 still says, as of September 25, 2026, that he was “rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice.” Page 2969 still carries, as of September 25, 2026, the same proposition.
The chronology is the contradiction. The Foreign Ministry told a member of the United States Congress in May that the wording had already been corrected. The Centre marks its partial correction in August. Two public Centre pages still preserve the Department of Justice rehabilitation claim. The American file itself records no rehabilitation order, judicial exoneration or adjudication of Brazaitis’s wartime conduct.
On September 24, I asked Lithuania’s IHRA delegation, headed by Arvydas Daunoravičius, to place the documented complaint before IHRA and transmitted revised Brazaitis and Škirpa submissions. As of September 25, I have received no substantive response.
Škirpa: the state’s favorable premise was not published
Two days before the vote, the Seimas Human Rights Committee produced the certified oversight record in which LGGRTC acknowledged that its favorable Škirpa conclusion had relied on circumstances it never published. Among them was the supposed American “complete exoneration” of Brazaitis, a premise the Foreign Ministry has since called legally imprecise. The Ombudsman found a transparency failure. That finding concerns the earlier 2015 Škirpa conclusion and the 2017–2018 oversight process; Report No. 9R-598, issued on June 25, 2024, is a later document.
Report No. 9R-598 does not repeat the Brazaitis “complete exoneration” premise. It does repeat other elements of the 2015 reasoning, including the Centre’s claim that the aim was expulsion rather than genocide, lack of prewar knowledge of a total-extermination plan, and Škirpa’s physical absence from the killings. The premise the Centre once relied on without publishing has disappeared from the 2024 report without explanation. The favorable conclusion remains.
Lithuania wrote the standard
The Seimas emphasized personal responsibility. The state has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. Lithuania’s parliament now says the killers chose. Lithuania’s courts have never imposed punishment on any Lithuanian for those murders.
On September 24, the Seimas voted 110 to 0 for a resolution stating that those who carried out killings and the administrative actions connected with them had a moral choice. The same day, the Prosecutor General’s Office declined to investigate the state historical institution whose pages still tell readers that the United States Department of Justice rehabilitated Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. He was acting prime minister of the Provisional Government. His signature is on the preserved copy of the Regulations on the Status of the Jews adopted August 1, 1941.
