Sinica Says the Government Condemned. Its Minutes Say Otherwise.
The bill asks Lithuania to recognize the Provisional Government’s declaration as state law while the government’s own records preserve anti-Jewish “measures,” a Jewish concentration camp, a German ghetto order, and legislation directed specifically at Jews.
On June 23, 2025, Seimas member Vytautas Sinica announced a bill to recognize the June 23, 1941 declaration of Lithuania’s Provisional Government as an act of the Lithuanian state. The e-Seimas record lists the proposal as XVP-616, registered June 23, 2025. BNS reported that the bill itself asserts that the murder of Lithuania’s Jews took place despite the Provisional Government’s calls not to take repressive measures against Jewish residents. At a press conference at the Seimas, Sinica went further, saying the government condemned such repression and approved it in no form.
According to BNS, the bill concedes that guilt fell not only on the occupation regime but on individual Lithuanian citizens who collaborated with it, then declares that an occupied nation cannot be held responsible for crimes committed with the help of collaborators “of all nationalities, including Lithuanians.” The bill therefore asks the Seimas to adopt a legal act containing a historical exculpatory proposition about the Provisional Government itself.
The e-Seimas record listed XVP-616 as “Registered” when checked on September 24, 2026.
June 27: the cabinet disowned the spectacle and reserved the measures
The Dieckmann–Sužiedėlis study published by Lithuania’s International Commission reproduces the substance of the Provisional Government’s June 27 cabinet minutes. Minister Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis reported the “extremely brutal” attacks on Jews at the Lietūkis garage. The ministers asked that Lithuanian partisans and civilians avoid public executions of Jews.
In the Commission report’s English translation, the same minutes exempted “all those measures which must be taken against the Jews for their communist activities and damage inflicted upon the German Wehrmacht.” The entry also recorded the cabinet’s claim that the perpetrators of the Lietūkis crimes had nothing to do with the activist headquarters, the partisan headquarters, or the Provisional Government. The cabinet disowned the killers and reserved the measures in the same record.
The cabinet record contradicts the bill’s proposition that the government opposed anti-Jewish repression as such. It objected to public executions while preserving measures directed specifically at Jews.
June 30: the cabinet approved a “Jewish concentration camp”
Protocol No. 6 records Colonel Jurgis Bobelis reporting on the Lithuanian battalion and on a “Jewish concentration camp.” The cabinet resolved to approve the camp’s establishment and assigned it to Deputy Minister of Communal Economy Švipa, working with Bobelis. The 2001 printed edition of the Provisional Government protocols places this resolution at pages 19–20.
A cabinet resolution approving a concentration camp for Jews is an act of government. Sinica’s phrase “approved it in no form” meets a dated cabinet resolution saying the opposite.
July 7: “mass liquidation” and the ghetto order
The July 7 cabinet protocol records Bobelis reporting again to the cabinet. He relayed a statement attributed in the minutes to “German general Stahlecke” — SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A — that the “mass liquidation” of Jews would not be carried out further. Bobelis then reported that, by German order, a ghetto would be established in Vilijampolė and all Kaunas Jews moved there within four weeks. In the 2001 printed edition, this is Protocol No. 12, p. 50.
A statement that mass liquidation would cease records that mass liquidation had been occurring. Acting prime minister Juozas Ambrazevičius, later known as Juozas Brazaitis, signed minutes that placed that statement and the ghetto order in the same cabinet record.
July 10: Bobelis and the city administration implemented the ghetto order
Three days later, Bobelis and the municipal administration under Mayor Kazys (Kazimieras) Palčiauskas issued Order No. 15, requiring Kaunas Jews to move to Vilijampolė by August 15. The copy examined in United States v. Palciauskas contained a place for the mayor’s signature but bore no signature. No personal signature is proved by that copy.
The same 1983 federal judgment found that German military commanders ordered the ghetto’s initial creation and that the indigenous civilian government of Kaunas, including Palčiauskas, “unquestionably implemented” it. The court found that the municipal government appropriated Jewish-owned property outside the ghetto and ordered the ghetto physically enclosed with barbed wire.
The court also found that Palčiauskas knew of the mass executions of ghetto Jews between August and October 1941. Its evidence was his administration: he established a special housing subcommittee that redistributed to other Lithuanians homes that had belonged to murdered Jews. Finding 3 states that the Provisional Government’s Minister of the Interior appointed Palčiauskas mayor because of his services in the Lithuanian Activist Front.
What the U.S. courts decided
The 1983 proceeding was civil denaturalization litigation. The district court expressly declined to make a specific finding that Palčiauskas personally participated actively in persecution because that issue was unnecessary to the judgment. An evidentiary footnote nevertheless states that his “participation in the creation and administration of the Ghetto is beyond dispute” and that there was ample unrefuted evidence that he helped implement its directives.
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denaturalization judgment in 1984. In later deportation litigation, Palciauskas v. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service held that findings unnecessary to the earlier judgment could not be given preclusive effect. The municipal-implementation findings remain findings in the 1983 opinion; the later court limited their preclusive use.
July 31 and August 1: confirmation, then legislation
On July 31, the new German civil administration under Stadtkommissar Hans Cramer officially confirmed the Lithuanian mayor’s resettlement order, according to the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos entry on Kovno. Germany commanded the murder; the cabinet and the city administration each did what their own records show.
On August 1 the cabinet adopted the Regulations on the Status of the Jews, printed in the 2001 edition of the government’s protocols as Annex No. 1 to Protocol No. 31, pp. 135–137, over the names of acting prime minister Ambrazevičius and Interior Minister J. Šlepetys. A Lithuanian Jewish Community page reproduces the annex heading and signature block. Brazaitis later called the document a forgery. Vytautas Landsbergis, Ambrazevičius’s most prominent defender, argues that the preamble is too crudely antisemitic to attribute to Ambrazevičius, yet acknowledges that the same passage appears in the collection of the liquidated government’s acts compiled in autumn 1941 by General Counselor Petras Kubiliūnas’s office.
The people inside the paperwork
The administrative sequence ended in murder. On October 29, 1941, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that German SS and police units and Lithuanian police auxiliaries murdered 9,200 Jews from the Kovno ghetto at the Ninth Fort. The Dieckmann–Sužiedėlis study names Leiba Kaplan, fifty, his wife Sara, and their children Mala, Frida and Benjamin, aged four to thirteen, among whole families seized on June 26 and held in prison.
The law Lithuania is being asked to adopt
Sinica’s proposal asks the state to adopt a legal act containing a historical characterization of the Provisional Government. According to BNS, the bill itself says the murders occurred despite the government’s calls not to repress Jewish residents and concedes individual Lithuanian collaborators while assigning the crimes to occupation and collaboration rather than to the occupied nation.
The cabinet’s own record answers that characterization. June 27 preserved anti-Jewish “measures.” June 30 approved a “Jewish concentration camp.” July 7 recorded both the German ghetto order and the end of “mass liquidation.” July 10 brought municipal implementation. August 1 brought the Regulations on the Status of the Jews. The sources are Lithuanian cabinet records, a U.S. federal judgment, and the Lithuanian state commission’s published scholarship.
The parliamentary argument is not new. In September 2000, the Seimas approved a law recognizing the same declaration. Sinica says the Seimas soon retreated from that decision. The Seimas chronicle preserves the contemporary legislative record.
Sinica told a press conference at the Seimas that the Provisional Government condemned anti-Jewish repression and approved it in no form. Its cabinet approved a Jewish concentration camp. Its acting prime minister signed minutes recording the German ghetto order and the end of “mass liquidation.” Its Kaunas administration later redistributed the homes of murdered Jews to other Lithuanians. A state that recognizes the declaration recognizes the government that signed those minutes.
Sources: Lietuvos laikinoji vyriausybė: posėdžių protokolai, 1941 m. birželio 24–rugpjūčio 4 d., ed. Arvydas Anušauskas (Vilnius: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, 2001), Protocol No. 6, pp. 19–20; Protocol No. 12, p. 50; Protocol No. 31, Annex No. 1, pp. 135–137. Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis, “The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941: Sources and Analysis”; United States v. Palciauskas, 559 F. Supp. 1294 (M.D. Fla. 1983), aff’d, 734 F.2d 625 (11th Cir. 1984); Palciauskas v. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 939 F.2d 963 (11th Cir. 1991); USHMM, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos entry on Kovno; USHMM, 1941 key dates.
