Test the History Before the Defendant
Artur Fridman is a Jewish citizen of Vilnius facing criminal charges over a Facebook post about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The prosecution necessarily puts contested history into a criminal courtroom. Behind that history sits a state institution, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, LGGRTC. If the court is asked to rely on a historical proposition supplied by the Centre, there is a prior question: what does this institution do when documents contradict it? The answer is not speculation. It is a written record with dates on it.[1]
The stakes are older than the present prosecution. In The Shoes Were Still Warm, I followed Kazimierz Sakowicz’s Ponary diary from the killing pits into the market that formed around the possessions of murdered Jews. On February 18, 1943, he recorded a Lithuanian trying to sell walking shoes whose owner had just been murdered. The shoes were still warm. The political claim beneath that transaction was also in writing. A Lithuanian underground circular asked what right the Germans had to seize the property of Jews and answered that it “is all part of the general wealth of the Lithuanian nation and the Lithuanian State.” Both records survive in print. One was published in Vilnius.[2]
In Show the File, I set out the procedural question for Fridman’s case. If LGGRTC supplied a historical premise, archival letter, consultation, research note or institutional conclusion being used against him, the defense should be able to inspect the source and the reasoning beneath it. The form matters less than the function. A state history center should not become a shadow witness whose conclusions enter a criminal case without the file that produced them.
The verdict Lithuania invented for the United States
The Brazaitis file shows what happened after an official demand for a reasoned answer. On February 2, 2018, Seimas Ombudsman Augustinas Normantas found my complaint well founded and recommended that LGGRTC provide a clear, reasoned response. Twenty-four days later, the Centre issued Letter No. 55R-21. It stated that Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting head of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government, had been exhaustively investigated by the United States Congress and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and had been “completely exonerated.” The American paper beneath that claim was an administrative notification that Brazaitis had been removed from the active investigation list. He had died four months earlier. No court, no hearing, no finding.[3]
Then came direct correction. Four American lawyers concluded that “exonerated” was a misstatement of fact. In September 2019, Congressman Brad Sherman wrote to Lithuania’s Prime Minister and asked the government either to produce credible support or retract the claim. He received no answer. What arrived instead, more than a year later, was a Centre letter to me explaining that Sherman’s intervention was “the opinion of a politician, but not as a new historical source or a new circumstance of historical events.” Sherman quoted that sentence back to Lithuania’s Ambassador in Washington in May 2021. In May 2026, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry finally acknowledged that “complete exoneration” was legally imprecise and that ending an administrative investigation is not judicial exoneration under American law.[4]
The correction did not end the public problem. In July 2026 the Centre’s page still stated that Brazaitis had been rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry had already conceded that “complete exoneration” was legally imprecise. The Centre’s public page nevertheless continued to invoke an American rehabilitation that the underlying record did not establish.
The same method, a different name
In June 2024 LGGRTC issued Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E) on Kazys Škirpa and again produced an exculpatory assessment. Within weeks the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing thirty-two Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, rejected the report by its reference number. It cited the International Commission established by Lithuania’s President, which had recognized the activity of the Lithuanian Activist Front and the Provisional Government under Škirpa as antisemitic, and rejected the report’s effort to distance Škirpa from the TDA battalion and the mass murders at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas. The original report remains publicly available from LGGRTC.[5]
Nobody needed a foreign archive to see the contradiction
The wartime record was already in Vilnius. In 2005 Vilnius University Press published Thomas Remeikis’s collection of American Legation despatches from Stockholm together with the Lithuanian documents carried inside them. The volume printed material from the Lithuanian Activist Front stating that approximately 170,000 Jews had been murdered after nine months of German occupation; a Lithuanian nationalist statement describing a plan formulated “in concurrence with the German Army”; and a 1943 statement that acknowledged Jewish annihilation was still continuing and then said, “We will not mention here.”[6]
I set out that wartime documentary chain in We Will Not Mention Here. The point is not that Lithuanian political figures never mentioned the Jews. They did. They counted the murdered, discussed German measures against Jews and argued over Jewish property. The question is what happened when those facts collided with a national account organized around Lithuanian suffering, sovereignty and resistance.
A second claim can be tested even more simply. In 1943 Lithuanian representatives told Allied and neutral governments that Lithuanians had “repeatedly made spoken and written protests against mass-murder of the civil population,” mainly Jews. In Produce the Protest, I asked for one identifiable protest: date, author, addressee, text and archival locator. The strongest surviving memorandum contains a sentence disapproving of unspecified “measures taken against the Lithuanian Jews,” but its operative requests concern colonization and property. If other protests exist, identify them. That is how the claim becomes evidence.[7]
The modern record is documented in Vilnius Printed It. LGGRTC Kept the Myth. Publication in 2005 proves availability, not that a particular LGGRTC official read the volume. The later correspondence proves something different: direct challenges arrived, institutions and outside authorities corrected specific claims, and LGGRTC continued publishing.
Test the history first
Before a court relies on a contested historical proposition against a defendant, the defense should be able to identify its source and challenge the reasoning behind it. Where the premise comes from LGGRTC, the court can ask which sources were examined, which were rejected and why. That is not a special indulgence for Fridman. It is the minimum discipline required when historical interpretation is being asked to do work inside a criminal prosecution.
The same question belongs to everyone else who relies on the Centre. Foreign ministries, Jewish organizations and international bodies that treat LGGRTC’s conclusions as authoritative are relying on an institution whose Škirpa report remains published after formal rejection by thirty-two Jewish organizations, and whose Brazaitis page survived its own government’s correction.
Of roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania in June 1941, about 212,000 were murdered. Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in Europe. The Lithuanian state has not punished any Lithuanian for those murders. It is now prosecuting a Jewish citizen over a Facebook post about history.[8]
None of this is an accusation against Lithuanians. It concerns one named institution and what it has chosen to leave published. Test the history before you test the defendant. The documentary record was printed in Vilnius twenty-one years ago.
[1]Grant Gochin, “Show the File,” August 18, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/show-the-file. The article identifies Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 and requests disclosure of any LGGRTC-derived historical material used in the prosecution.
[2]Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), February 18, 1943 entry, p. 62. The locator is confirmed in Grant Gochin, “The Shoes Were Still Warm,” August 18, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/the-shoes-were-still-warm. For the underground property formulation, see Thomas Remeikis, comp. and ed., Lithuania under German Occupation 1941–1945 (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2005), Desp. No. 1244, p. 190.
[3]Seimas Ombudsman Augustinas Normantas, Pažyma No. 4D-2017/1-1558/3D-317, February 2, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/05/4D-2017-1-1558-3D-317-2018-02-02.pdf; LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21, February 26, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/05/Gonocide-Reply-2018-02-26-Holocaust-interpretation.pdf; LGGRTC Letter No. 14R-82, October 11, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/05/4.-2018-10-11-Lietuvos-gyventoju-genocido-ir-rezistencijos-tyrimo-centro-rastas-Nr.-14R-82.pdf.
[4]Grant Gochin, complaint to the Seimas Ombudsman, December 12, 2018, attaching four American legal opinions, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/04/20181212_Letter_Brazaitis_Ombudsman_GC.pdf; Rep. Brad Sherman to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis, September 25, 2019, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/2.-Kongresmeno-Brad-Sherman-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2019-09-25.pdf; LGGRTC reply Ref. 14R-2020-11-26, December 22, 2020, reproduced in the Sherman compilation at https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congress-on-Brazaitis.pdf; Rep. Brad Sherman to Ambassador Audra Plepytė, May 25, 2021, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, Vice-Minister Vidmantas Verbickas, May 12, 2026 response transmitted by Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis on May 13, 2026, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/06/Letter-to-Rep.-Sherman.pdf.
[5]Alfredas Rukšėnas, “Dėl Kazio Škirpos asmenybės (istorinė-archyvinė pažyma),” LGGRTC Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E), June 25, 2024, posted August 8, 2024, https://www.genocid.lt/UserFiles/File/Titulinis/2024/20240808_skirpa_pazyma.pdf; Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community, Council statement dated August 23, 2024, English translation posted August 26, 2024, https://www.lzb.lt/en/2024/08/26/lithuanian-jewish-community-statement-on-genocide-centers-newest-report-on-kazys-skirpa/.
[6]Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, December 19, 1942, pp. 181–182 and p. 190; Desp. No. 2680, January 13, 1944, pp. 554 and 556. See Grant Gochin, “We Will Not Mention Here,” August 19, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/we-will-not-mention-here.
[7]Remeikis, Desp. No. 2502, November 29, 1943, enclosure 5, p. 506 para. 6, and enclosure 8, p. 508 para. 7; Desp. No. 1462, February 25, 1943, p. 287 for the clause concerning “measures taken against the Lithuanian Jews” and p. 288 for the operative requests. See Grant Gochin, “Produce the Protest,” August 19, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/produce-the-protest.
[8]For the population and murder figures and the comparative European rate, see Grant Gochin, “How many Jews did Lithuanians murder?,” August 1, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/how-many-jews-did-lithuanians-murder, and “We Will Not Mention Here,” August 19, 2026, https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/we-will-not-mention-here. The working corpus uses approximately 220,000 Jews in Lithuania at the German invasion and approximately 212,000 murdered.
