The speeches promise Holocaust remembrance. The honors files demand an explanation.

On September 5, 2002, the United States Justice Department sought to revoke Ildefonsas Bučmys’s citizenship over his service as an armed guard at Majdanek. Eight weeks later, on October 31, Lithuania posthumously made Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejys a colonel, according to historian Mindaugas Pocius’s account of Decree No. 1965. Pocius also identifies Baltūsis as a company commander in the Lithuanian battalion guarding Majdanek. Washington demanded an accounting from a guard. Vilnius supplied an officer with another rank.

This autumn I sent President Gitanas Nausėda a series of submissions asking what the state had examined, whom it had honored, and what it would do about the evidence. The documents are now public.

In June 2023, I called Lithuania’s enthusiasm for decorations “Size Matters”. Phaleristics, the study of orders and medals, offered opportunities for discussing the national importance of an impressive chest. This update requires less measuring tape and more reading of the nomination files.

A medal is a government’s judgment made wearable. A posthumous promotion makes that judgment available to future generations. The recipient can no longer explain himself; the state has volunteered to do it for him.

That makes national honors more revealing than a speech delivered to foreign guests. At a Holocaust ceremony, officials know what their audience expects to hear. In choosing national heroes, they tell their own citizens whose lives deserve admiration, which achievements outweigh which injuries, and whose victims may be pushed into the small print.

The state’s medal cabinet is a useful place to check its values before applauding its next statement of them.

A martyr by another name

When Ismail Haniyeh was killed in July 2024, Hamas declared its leader a “martyr”. The organization was teaching its audience how to remember him. Its political purpose supplied the honorific; the victims of its terrorism supplied no veto.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. Lithuania has archives, historians and state institutions responsible for examining the record. Those resources increase its responsibility for the heroes it chooses. The comparison concerns the glorification of chosen heroes: whether service to the national cause is allowed to excuse persecution of Jews.

We understand the obscenity when a terrorist movement turns its leaders into exemplary martyrs. A European ribbon should not make us forget the question we were asking.

The Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” system supplies another comparison. Its former scheme linked prisoners’ payments to sentence length and included convicted attackers; Abbas decreed its replacement in February 2025. The Taylor Force Act identified payments to imprisoned terrorists and deceased terrorists’ families as an incentive to terrorism. A payment and a presidential decoration both tell the domestic audience what the institution rewards. Under pressure, Ramallah commissioned Alvarez & Marsal to audit its replacement welfare system and published a summary supporting the reform; Washington alleged continuing payments through other channels. On October 26, 2026, the British Foreign Office told Parliament that initial reports indicated a needs-based system was operating, while full audit publication remained necessary for verification. Ramallah has faced an external audit of its reforms. Where is the independent audit of the Lithuanian honors whose vetting Burauskaitė acknowledged had been rushed? Let Vilnius publish that examination, the evidence and the resulting decisions. A Holocaust-remembrance speech cannot substitute for it.

Israel needs allies. Its government must conduct foreign relations in a dangerous world, sometimes with partners whose historical conduct and present policies deserve severe criticism. I recognize that necessity. A diplomatic relationship does not require Jewish descendants to certify the moral credentials of the other government’s heroes. Strategic cooperation buys cooperation. It should not buy an indulgence for Holocaust distortion.

An Israeli official can shake a Lithuanian official’s hand without asking the murdered Jews of Lithuania to shake it too.

The documents behind the decorations

Jonas Noreika supplies a direct test. Lithuania awarded him the Cross of Vytis. On April 11, 2019, IHRA expert working-group and committee chairs, joined by its chair and honorary chair, challenged the Centre’s defense of him in their “Statement on Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Lithuania”. They identified his role in the ghettoization of Jews and expropriation of their property in Šiauliai district. They also rejected the suggestion that association with rescuers established that he himself rescued Jews.

Noreika’s later anti-Soviet resistance does not reverse an order confining Jews or return their property. A state that wishes to honor that later resistance must explain why the earlier persecution does not disqualify him. Admiration cannot perform the work of historical examination.

His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, petitioned to remove his honors. My October 16 records request concerning Foti’s petition and Noreika’s state awards asks the Presidency to show how it handled those approaches. It seeks the administrative trail, including the award’s supporting records. A citizen should not have to infer a government’s answer from its commemorative choreography.

The Škirpa file is particularly well suited to a country fond of decorative historical symbolism. Kazys Škirpa founded and led the Berlin Lithuanian Activist Front. His state decorations preceded the conduct at issue: the Centre’s 2024 report lists awards in 1919, 1930 and 1935, including the Order of Vytautas the Great. The question is what the Republic does with that inheritance after examining his subsequent record.

One LAF appeal, preserved in Lithuania’s Central State Archives as Document LXIV, folios 213–215, orders every Lithuanian Jew to leave, provides for the transfer of Jewish property to Lithuanian national ownership, and denies Jews civil rights and a livelihood in the projected new state. Its final page expressly repudiates the historic protection associated with Vytautas the Great.

The Order of Vytautas the Great bears his name. The organization’s appeal revokes his protection. The ribbon appears to have survived the contradiction rather better than the Jews survived the program.

Škirpa’s retrospective manuscript, pages 136–137, refers readers to that very document. The archive supplies the appeal; his own manuscript supplies the cross-reference. I examined that documentary chain in “Has Lithuania’s Revocation Been Revoked?”.

The Centre’s 2024 report reproduces antisemitic LAF material while defending Škirpa through his independence activity, his enforced absence from Lithuania and a newspaper report that he prohibited persecution. Neither independence activity nor absence cancels the organization’s written program. The reported prohibition must be confronted with the appeal he later cited: expulsion, dispossession and civil exclusion. A newspaper’s claim cannot erase an archival text. The Centre’s report proves what the Centre argued; its authorship supplies no independent guarantee that the argument is true.

My September 27 Škirpa application, October 22 supplement and October 29 evidentiary supplement ask for independent examination and a reasoned decision, award by award. The October 22 submission also reproduces the Centre’s express statement that the LAF texts have no legal force in today’s Republic and do not represent its official position. That repudiation should lead to an explanation of the honors, not become another substitute for one.

The Baltūsis file exposes what the phrase “external guarding” is asked to conceal. In a January 12, 2015 LRT report on honored resistance figures, Centre director general Birutė Burauskaitė acknowledged rushed recognition: “Tikrai buvo paskubėta” — “It was indeed rushed.” She explained that officers’ activities during Nazi occupation had gone unexamined. In that same interview, she defended Baltūsis’s unit’s external guarding at Majdanek and dismissed the allegation of escorts to the gas chambers as “Čia viskas yra pasakos ir pritempimas” — “This is all tales and stretching.” These are my translations.

The Justice Department’s Bučmys announcement explained why guarding mattered: prisoners were held in a concentration camp and killing center, and guards had orders to kill escapees. Its complaint alleged armed service from December 1942 through November 1943. In a February 2005 settlement recorded in the Justice Department’s history, page 575, Bučmys consented to loss of citizenship, acknowledged an incorrect answer denying assistance in persecution, and agreed to testify about other Majdanek personnel; the government agreed not to seek deportation.

Pocius’s 2022 study identifies Baltūsis as a platoon leader and, from April 1943, commander of the 252nd Battalion’s Third Company, in its account of the battalion’s Majdanek guarding. A biography prepared by Rūta Trimonienė gives the same company appointment but says specific information about his Majdanek service could not be found. The Presidency should resolve that gap with the service and promotion files. Calling the duty external does not answer what the guards kept the prisoners inside.

My Baltūsis supplement of October 22 asks for the company, dates, duties and individual conduct to be established, for conflicting published rank dates to be certified, and for review by the competent authorities. The fuller record appears in my September 2026 Baltūsis report. The state should be able to explain a colonel’s promotion without requiring the public to solve his wartime service first.

The wider correspondence reaches other decorated figures through separate applications for independent investigation: Jonas Semaška-Liepa, Juozas Šibaila-Merainis, Dominykas Jėčys-Ąžuolis, Antanas Slučka-Šarūnas, Kostas Liuberskis-Žvainys, Viktoras Vitkauskas-Saidokas, Juozas Lukša-Daumantas and Izidorius Pucevičius-Radvila. These applications identify the evidence and the independent investigations requested in each case.

Other filings are narrower still. My Mackevičius request seeks certification and independent historical advice. The Bulvičius request seeks the 1997 award records. Requests concerning Rapolas Skipitis, Jonas Matulionis and Balys Vitkus seek certification of their state-award records. The Presidency should identify exactly whom it honored and on what evidence.

What would change look like

In January 2026, Lithuania’s government announced an action plan containing 157 measures, including combating Holocaust distortion and preserving Holocaust memory. The state can also recognize serious historical scholarship: in 2023 Nausėda decorated Holocaust historian Saulius Sužiedėlis for his research. Why not commission independent assessment of the Noreika, Škirpa and Baltūsis honors now, drawing on that scholarship? I examined the government’s promises in “157 Measures, No Credibility”. Applying expertise to politically cherished biographies is the test.

My November 2, 2021 letter to Nausėda already sought independent advice and reconsideration of honors concerning Noreika and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. The 2026 submissions make the questions more specific. They ask for nomination files, the evidence actually examined, independent reviewers and decisions within the authority of each institution.

The 63 PDFs below preserve applications alongside their supporting records and consolidated resubmissions. Each application states the particular examination or decision sought. Making the documents public permits something a ceremony cannot: checking the question against the source and the answer against the question.

A leopard does not change its spots because someone pins a tolerance medal over one of them. For Lithuania’s state institutions, change would mean examining the protected biographies, publishing the findings and changing the honors where the evidence and applicable law warrant it. A new speech cannot do that work.

President Nausėda should produce the award records, secure independent historical assessment, and give a reasoned decision on each matter within his authority. Where another authority must act, identify it and explain the referral. Where an honor survives, explain why the documented conduct is compatible with it.

An ally may deserve a seat at Israel’s table. Its chosen heroes do not thereby deserve a place in Jewish memory as anything other than what the evidence shows. Lithuania’s medals are its own moral signatures. Let the Presidency explain what it has signed.

If you know of other people honored by the Lithuanian state whose documented wartime conduct raises questions about persecution, dispossession or murder of Jews, please send me their names, the decoration or rank, and supporting records or links at ggochin@gmail.com. I will try to investigate the cases you bring to my attention.

Lithuania state honors submissions and documentary sources

Applications, correspondence and documentary sources concerning Lithuanian state honors. The numbers match the 63 public PDFs.