Lithuania’s foreign minister condemns manipulated history abroad. The post-independence record shows that the same argument has been fought inside Lithuania since restored independence.

On September 18 in Washington, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys described what Soviet rule had taught Lithuania: censorship, propaganda and the “systematic falsification of history.” He said that experience helps Lithuania recognize the methods of authoritarian regimes. In the same statement he said Lithuania strengthens information resilience “not through restrictions, but through democratic tools.”

Four months earlier, his ministry told Congress that the Genocide Centre’s “complete exoneration” of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis was legally imprecise: administrative discontinuation is not judicial exoneration. As of September 13, the Centre still published that he had been “rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice.”

From September 20 to 24 Budrys will be in New York for UN General Assembly High-Level Week. His ministry says he will meet U.S. Jewish organizations. It has not publicly identified them.

Budrys has supplied a standard. Soviet crimes do not become less criminal because Lithuania has its own unresolved record. I reject Russian and Lithuanian historical falsification for the same reason: neither becomes legitimate by serving a state. My work concentrates on Lithuania because that is where I have standing, evidence, family history and continuing doctoral research.

The memory war began with restored independence

On May 2, 1990, less than two months after restoration of independence, Lithuania adopted Law No. I-180 restoring the rights of people repressed for resistance to occupation regimes. Reversing Soviet injustice was necessary. The problem appeared almost immediately: the rehabilitation process also reached people implicated in crimes committed during the Nazi occupation.

Helsinki Watch reported in its 1992 World Report that the law prohibited exonerating war criminals, yet people convicted by Soviet courts of crimes against humanity, including participation in Nazi crimes against Jews, had nevertheless been rehabilitated.

The issue reached Washington within weeks. Helsinki Watch reported that President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker raised the rehabilitation issue in separate mid-September 1991 meetings with President Vytautas Landsbergis, and that the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations provided access to its archives to help Lithuania review questionable rehabilitations.

By October 1991 Lithuania’s own Supreme Court was conceding error. The New York Times quoted Lithuanian Supreme Court justice Genadijus Slauta, as JTA reported, saying: “We were trying to rehabilitate everybody as quickly as possible.” He added: “Now we are sorry we acted so rapidly. We see serious errors were made.”

In the same report, President Vytautas Landsbergis denied that anyone had been pardoned in error and suggested that evidence supplied by the Simon Wiesenthal Center had been planted by the KGB. The Supreme Court was simultaneously reversing exonerations. In December 1992, JTA reported that Lithuania had reversed the rehabilitation of six people who collaborated with the Nazis after the Wiesenthal Center and other Jewish groups submitted their names.

The record dates Lithuania’s modern Memory War to the first years of restored independence, decades before today’s Russian information war.

A 2007 Wilson Center meeting report summarizing historian Saulius Sužiedėlis’s presentation says early independence emphasized Soviet crimes over the Nazi occupation and reinforced a self-image of heroes and martyrs. It records his view that some Western coverage of the 1991 scandal contained “hype and overstatement,” while the scandal itself “came as a rude shock.” Both can be true.

In 1995 President Algirdas Brazauskas went to Israel and asked forgiveness for “those Lithuanians who mercilessly murdered, shot, deported and robbed Jews.” The same Wilson Center report records a protest from parts of the “patriotic” intelligentsia demanding that Jews apologize in return for Soviet-era crimes. The dispute was already internal: could national memory hold Lithuanian victimhood and Lithuanian participation in the destruction of the Jews at the same time?

The dispute became institutional

By 2019 the argument had moved from hurried rehabilitation certificates into the state-funded Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre and its defense of Jonas Noreika.

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.

In April 2019, the chairman of Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes and members of its Nazi-crimes sub-commission rejected the Centre’s Noreika treatment and its attempts to minimize his collaboration in the persecution of Jews.

Chairs and recent chairs of IHRA expert bodies then expressed “grave concern” and described the Centre’s March 2019 statement as the latest in a series of attempts to rehabilitate Noreika. AJC separately said it was “deeply troubled” and said the Centre’s defense distorted Holocaust history.

In 2024, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing 32 Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, categorically rejected the Centre’s report on Kazys Škirpa and described it as an attempt to “justify or trivialize” his role. The continuing dispute is documented in “Budrys Wrote the Rule for Serbia. Lithuania Wrote Its Own Exemptions.”

The same institutional dispute persisted from rehabilitation into the Noreika and Škirpa controversies.

Budrys’s ministry already knows the legal distinction

Budrys has already spoken in the Holocaust context. Meeting AJC chief executive Ted Deutch in February 2026, he said distortion of Holocaust memory was unacceptable.

Three months later, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas, Ref. (19.2.3)3-2806, wrote to Congressman Brad Sherman that the Centre’s “complete exoneration” wording about Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis had been legally imprecise. Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis transmitted the letter on May 13. Verbickas stated: “the administrative discontinuation of an investigation does not constitute a formal judicial exoneration under U.S. legal standards.”

Helsinki Watch reported in 1991 that the Lithuanian government maintained the mistaken rehabilitation of war criminals was inadvertent. In 2026, the Foreign Ministry called the Brazaitis “complete exoneration” formulation “legally imprecise.”

The Centre corrected one public Brazaitis page on August 26. It did not correct all of them.

As of September 13, 2026, the Centre’s page No. 2969, first published in July 2018, still said Brazaitis was “reabilituotas JAV Teisingumo ministerijos” – rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice. The September 13 record preserves that persistence. Page No. 3058 now carries the Centre’s own marker “pataisyta 2026 08 26” – corrected August 26, 2026.

The Foreign Ministry told Congress that administrative discontinuation is not judicial exoneration. The state memory institution still published an American “rehabilitation.” The evidentiary chain is set out in “Lithuania’s Genocide Centre: Death Is Not Exoneration.” No Russian source is needed to establish the contradiction.

The Foreign Ministry’s vocabulary changes

The ministry’s own Holocaust language supplies another record. In April 2021 it wrote that “Nazis and their local collaborators in Europe” murdered six million Jews, including about 200,000 Lithuanian Jews. The ministry therefore has the vocabulary “local collaborators” in its own archive.

On August 5, 2025, a Paneriai release said “the Nazis and their collaborators” killed six million Jews. On September 25, another said “Nazi occupation authorities” liquidated the Vilna Ghetto and that Lithuania “lost around 190,000 Jews.” Jews were not lost. They were murdered; the ministry’s own 2021 release had said about 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered. On January 27, 2026, Budrys spoke of “observers and collaborators” without nationality. On May 4, the ministry honored “Lithuanian residents who rescued Jews”.

Four releases in nine months show the pattern: Lithuanian identity is explicit for rescuers; perpetrator language becomes generic, passive or attached to Nazi occupation authority. The 2021 release proves the ministry knows the phrase “local collaborators.”

The question is now before Lithuania’s prosecutors

Between September 11 and September 18, I placed four recent matters before the Lithuanian Prosecutor General. These filings are allegations and requests for assessment, not adjudicated findings.

The September 11 filing concerns Alfredas Rukšėnas, Arūnas Bubnys and LGGRTC Report No. 9R-598 under Article 170² §1. The Prosecutor General registered it as AP-29927; the signed filing is public. The September 13 filing concerns the continuing Brazaitis rehabilitation claim after the Foreign Ministry’s correction; that filing is public.

The September 17 filing asks prosecutors to assess six general Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija (VLE) town-history entries against specialist Holocaust entries on the same system. The evidentiary pattern is set out in “The Semeliškės Police Vanish From the Town Page.” The operative Lithuanian filing is public. On September 18, I filed a fourth request concerning the Centre’s Gewecke-Bub characterization, German procedural sources and correction history; that filing is public.

The filings reduce the current disputes to documents, dates, state publications and legal questions that Lithuania’s own authorities can examine.

At the same time, Lithuania is prosecuting Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen, in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2 over a May 9, 2024 Facebook post. His case is pending. Fridman is innocent and the prosecution is illegitimate. No prosecutor or court has decided the four recent filings above.

Budrys says Lithuania answers information threats “not through restrictions, but through democratic tools.” Criminal prosecution of speech is a legal restriction, whatever the state’s justification. Lithuania has chosen criminal law for historical speech while state-authored historical claims remain under unresolved prosecutorial and documentary challenge.

Truth cannot be a one-way demand

Budrys’s two commitments belong together. In February, speaking with AJC chief executive Ted Deutch, he said distortion of Holocaust memory was unacceptable. On September 18, he said Lithuania had suffered “systematic falsification of history” and supports initiatives safeguarding historical truth. Those are his words.

The September statement did not mention Lithuania’s Holocaust record. A principle against historical falsification cannot apply only when the falsifier is an adversary. Budrys had already made Holocaust-memory distortion part of his public truth standard.

That is the hypocrisy. Lithuania cannot demand documentary honesty from Russia while giving Lithuanian institutions a looser rule for Lithuania’s Holocaust history. A one-directional demand for truth is not a principle. It is a double standard. Russian falsification remains false; Lithuanian falsification does not become permissible because Russia also lies.

I will take Minister Budrys at his word. He has committed himself to historical truth and, in his February words, to the principle that “the distortion of Holocaust memory” is unacceptable. I therefore expect his full support for applying that requirement to Lithuania itself.

That support should be visible. Budrys should state publicly that Lithuania’s opposition to Holocaust distortion applies equally to its own institutions; correct or supplement his ministry’s texts when reliable evidence establishes omitted Lithuanian perpetrators; publicly affirm the May 2026 Brazaitis correction; and support corrections by other state bodies when their records require them.

The same transparency should accompany his New York meetings with U.S. Jewish organizations. The ministry should identify whom it meets, publish substantive readouts and state what commitments on Holocaust memory were made. Jewish organizations should not become diplomatic scenery for a historical-truth policy whose domestic application remains undisclosed.

Budrys need not accept my characterization of every dispute. He does have to live by his rule. If systematic falsification is a democratic problem in Moscow, it is a democratic problem in Vilnius. If Holocaust-memory distortion is unacceptable, it remains unacceptable when it protects Lithuanian reputations.

Minister Budrys: keep your commitment. Apply it at home. Apply it to Lithuania’s Holocaust record. Do it publicly. Do it transparently.

Author’s note: I am not a lawyer. References to pending complaints, criminal provisions and prosecutorial review describe filings and procedural requests, not adjudicated findings.