The Archive Lithuania Says Does Not Count

There is a word that closes files in Lithuania.

Soviet.

Attach it to a document and the document is contaminated. Attach it to a witness and the witness becomes an agent. Attach it to a book and the book becomes propaganda. The allegation does not have to be answered, because the origin of the evidence has answered it.

This is not source criticism. It is a conversion mechanism, and it belongs to the same machinery I have described before, in which evidence enters Lithuanian institutions as documentation and exits as exoneration.

I was born in Riga. I know what Soviet institutional architecture looks like from the inside, and I know what its successor looks like when it keeps the furniture.

Concede the Politicization

Begin by conceding everything the Lithuanian state wants conceded. Soviet historiography was politicized, and the politicization is not hidden. It sits in the front matter of the books. I am not defending these books. I am auditing them.

Kauno getas ir jo kovotojai, published in Vilnius in 1969, opens by attributing the Kaunas ghetto underground to the leadership of the Lithuanian Communist Party, presents the resistance as an expression of proletarian internationalism, and denounces books published in the West as falsifications written from bourgeois nationalist positions.

The document collection Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje 1941–1944 repeatedly subsumes murdered Jews into peaceful Soviet citizens and Soviet activists. Mordechai Kurganovas opens his Ninth Fort memoir by crediting his survival to the will of the Soviet people under Party leadership.

Be precise about what those books do, because precision is the whole argument. They subsume Jewish victims into a Soviet category. They do not conceal that the perpetrators were Lithuanian: Kauno getas ir jo kovotojai names lietuviškieji buržuaziniai nacionalistai, Lithuanian bourgeois nationalists, and describes the white-armband formations directly. What it does is recategorize them, dissolving Lithuanians into a class enemy acting under German direction. Two operations, then. Subsume the victim. Recategorize the perpetrator. Both will return.

The survivors said so first. Dimitri Gelpern, a Kaunas ghetto prisoner and a leader of its underground, told an international conference in Vilnius in 1993 that what had been published under Soviet rule had necessarily undergone political distortion. Alex Faitelson, a Ninth Fort prisoner who escaped in December 1943 from the detail forced to burn the corpses, reduced the demand of socialist realism to a formula: ten percent of truth and ninety percent as it must be.

Note what neither man concluded. Neither said the books were worthless. Both said the books required work.

What Those Same Books Contain

Meir Yellin, who published in Lithuanian as Mejeris Eglinis-Elinas, explained where his material came from. Behind the wire of the Kaunas ghetto he kept notes on what he and others experienced, sometimes in coded allusions for reasons of conspiracy, recording real incidents and real names. Part of the notes burned when the Germans torched the ghetto. From what survived he built the book.

He also distinguished. He records that the poet Kazys Binkis, his wife Sofija and their daughters turned their home into a refuge, sheltering Jews, sharing food, finding medicine and hiding places, and that as the terror continued more Lithuanians helped. A source that calls one Lithuanian a rescuer and another a killer is not producing ethnic denunciation. It is describing conduct, and conduct can be checked.

Check one. In 1963 Yellin names a murdered man who left an inscription in his own blood: Akiva Puchertas, a locksmith at the Drobė factory. The 1969 history names him again and adds that his family was murdered in front of him. The 1970 book gives Yellin’s first-person account of seeing the marks. Faitelson later criticized the embellishment that grew around the famous photograph, tracing whether the writing was on a wall, a door or a floor, and whether it said revenge or Jews, revenge.

That is how it is supposed to work. The variance does not abolish Akiva Puchertas. It separates the core from the accretion. Name, occupation, family, killing, inscription, photograph: each proposition is tested on its own.

Then there is the problem the label cannot survive at all. Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje is a Soviet publication that reprints German records. Its first document is the secret report of SS Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A. The editors note that it was a prosecution document at Nuremberg.

Stahlecker describes assigning the Kaunas pogrom to Klimaitis’s unit. He complains that setting local antisemitic forces in motion proved rather difficult. He records the requirement that the killings appear to be the spontaneous work of a liberated population acting on its own initiative, with no German direction visible, and congratulates himself that his own instructions never became apparent.

Lithuania’s standard account of 1941 is that the Germans were responsible and local participation was coerced or incidental. The German officer who organized it says otherwise, in writing, at the time. Calling the book Soviet does not delete Nuremberg.

The Centre Reads Soviet Files When They Help

Here the mechanism becomes visible.

The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, the LGGRTC, does not actually reject Soviet evidence. Asked about Jonas Noreika, its historian and later Director General Arūnas Bubnys stated that within the KGB transcripts there is no evidence associating Noreika with the killing of Jewish citizens. The Centre read KGB interrogation material, weighed it, and published a conclusion drawn from it. Provenance raised no objection. The finding was exculpatory.

It goes deeper. The rehabilitation instrument on which Noreika’s clearance rests was produced under a framework for reversing Soviet convictions, reflected in the 1989 Lithuanian SSR rehabilitation law and a Supreme Court certificate of 27 May 1991. It addressed a Soviet conviction. It adjudicated nothing about Noreika’s conduct in 1941. It was converted into a Holocaust exoneration it did not contain.

And it operates in criminal court. The file in the prosecution of Artur Fridman references LGGRTC letter No. 13R-645, confirming Soviet recruitment contact under the codename Džūkija in January 1945. A Soviet operational record, supplied by the state history centre, treated as reliable, inside an indictment.

The Centre knows how to use these archives. The question is when.

The Standard Runs One Way

Reverse the polarity and watch the standard change.

Aleksandras Pakalniškis placed Noreika inside the Plungė commandant’s post while the fate of that town’s Jews was being decided. He was not a KGB interrogator and not a Soviet file. He was an émigré in the free world. The Centre did not examine him. It set out to discredit him, collapsing the difference between a witness who requires careful handling and a witness who has been disproved.

The same asymmetry governs documents. When a record incriminates Kazys Škirpa, the Centre demands personal authorship, a signature, direct attribution. When an anonymous newspaper item favors him, none of that is required. Its 2024 report on Škirpa concludes he was not a collaborator. Speaking to LRT, the historian Valdemaras Klumbys said the report’s choice of sources was more likely to exonerate Škirpa than to show his other side, and Professor Saulius Sužiedėlis faulted it for underestimating central aspects of Activist Front ideology and for resting on an unsupported claim about Draugas.

Reduced to mechanics, the procedure runs in two directions at once. Adverse evidence: provenance objection raised, authorship demanded, witness discredited rather than examined, finding left undisturbed. Favorable evidence: provenance objection waived, anonymity accepted, Soviet transcripts read on the merits, Soviet instruments operationalized, conclusion published on state letterhead.

That is not a methodology. It is an outcome with a bibliography attached.

Now recall the two operations. Subsume the victim. Recategorize the perpetrator. The Centre has abandoned the first: nobody in Vilnius today calls the murdered Jews peaceful Soviet citizens. It has refined the second. Where the Soviet editors dissolved Lithuanian killers into a class enemy under German direction, the Centre dissolves a district chief’s signed orders on ghettoization and Jewish property into administration, coercion and ambiguity. The category changed. The function did not.

Lithuania Was Told

The state cannot claim it learned this from its critics.

Two different authorities warned it, on two different grounds, in the same month. On 11 April 2019 the Sub-commission of Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission — a body on which the LGGRTC Director General sits ex officio — called the Centre’s exculpatory arguments and obfuscations unacceptable and in part offensive to the victims, found the evidence of Noreika’s collaboration in the persecution of Jews unequivocal, and observed that the Centre appeared to be practicing the very selective use of sources it accused its critics of. Separately, IHRA chair-holders measured the Centre against IHRA’s own Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion and urged Lithuania to acknowledge and condemn Noreika’s actions. The World Jewish Congress called the Centre’s document Holocaust revisionism. In August 2024 the Council of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing thirty-two organizations, rejected the Škirpa report outright.

Then measure what the government did with that knowledge.

The Seimas passed a law restructuring the LGGRTC on 18 July 2024, raising qualification requirements for its staff and creating a governing council, and the President signed it on 25 July. The legislature opened the Centre’s statute, examined its staffing and governance, and required the correction of nothing in its Holocaust-related findings. Report No. 9R-598 was already dated 25 June 2024. Two weeks after the President signed the reform, on 8 August, the Centre posted it.

Then watch what the governance mechanism produced. In March 2026 the expert council the Seimas had created reported to the Speaker and to three parliamentary bodies that it could not work with LGGRTC leadership: recommendations ignored, documents withheld or delivered too late for meaningful review, and no feedback from the institution’s leadership.

The council was not addressing the Holocaust and I will not pretend otherwise. Its finding was about access, cooperation and oversight. That is precisely why it matters. Having been warned in 2019 about the Centre’s Holocaust output, the state built an internal mechanism to supervise the Centre, and the mechanism then reported that it could not obtain documents, answers or cooperation from the institution it was created to supervise. The outputs were not corrected. The oversight body could not get through. The institution continued.

Meanwhile roughly thirty legal actions ended without factual adjudication, through standing, nonreviewability, informational-act classification, civil inadmissibility, prosecutorial refusal and refusal of cassation. Different doors, the same result: no Lithuanian forum has examined whether the Centre’s findings are true. A former Director then told the national broadcaster that a procedural dismissal had vindicated the Centre’s research. A dismissal for want of standing is not a finding of innocence. She knew the difference.

Every corrective option remained open. Publish a formal answer to IHRA. Withdraw the unsupported rescuer claim. Produce the due-diligence file. Separate anti-Soviet biography from Holocaust-era administrative conduct. Accept the invitation to joint research. None was taken.

This is not an oversight. A government told in writing by its own Presidential Commission that its state history centre had produced unacceptable exculpation of documented collaboration in the persecution of Jews, and told by IHRA that the same output engaged the Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, which then legislated about that centre, restructured its governance, and required no correction of the findings it had been warned about, has made a decision. Whatever the reasoning behind it, the decision is on the record, and it is that historical integrity is not a condition of the Centre’s continued operation.

Censorship, and the Absence of It

Here is where the comparison stops being rhetorical.

Yellin, Gelpern and Kurganovas wrote under state censorship, in a police state, with the archives closed and publication controlled. Faitelson’s ninety percent was his retrospective description of what Soviet publication required of him. I cannot prove that every distorted line in those books was extracted by force, and I do not need to. The system they wrote inside was coercive, they said so as soon as they were able to say it, and Gelpern said it about his own work.

The LGGRTC operates in a European Union member state. It has access to the archives. There is no censor and no political police. It is free to publish a correction, and it is a statutory institution whose corrections would carry the state’s authority.

It has not published one. Soviet distortion came out of a system that controlled what could be printed. The Centre’s findings come out of a system that does not, and they have been left standing through seven years of documented notice. Correction may not be costless for any institution. Nothing in Lithuania makes it impossible, and that is the difference the Centre cannot argue away.

There is a second difference. The Soviets attacked Western publications as falsification. Lithuania prosecutes a Jewish citizen under Article 170-2 of its Criminal Code for questioning a state-honored figure, using the Centre’s conclusions as the historical baseline. Findings that cannot be reviewed when a Jew challenges them become criminally enforceable when a Jew contradicts them.

What Would Settle It

The test is not difficult, and it works in both directions.

Faitelson alleged that Jonas Baršketis, an eyewitness to the Lietūkis Garage killings, later identified Juozas Lukša-Daumantas as a participant, and that Lukša’s photograph was shown to further witnesses who confirmed it. That allegation is not proved, and I will not publish it as fact. Lukša is entitled to the standard the Centre denies to Noreika’s accusers.

So produce the file. Produce Baršketis’s statement, the photographic identification record, the statements of the other witnesses, and whatever contradicts them. Then assess it and publish the conflicts.

A state confident in its record would welcome that exercise. The Centre has not applied it evenly. The method that protects Noreika and Škirpa does not survive being applied evenly.

The Question

Soviet describes provenance. It does not determine truth.

The LGGRTC cannot argue otherwise, because it reads Soviet files itself whenever the reading helps. That is not a claim about anyone’s private motives. It is a comparison of one institution’s conduct in two directions, published in its own documents, on its own website.

Which leaves the question for everyone else. Foreign ministries, museums, universities and Jewish organizations continue to accept this Centre’s output as the historical position of a democratic ally. They now know what its own government knows.

The label is a warning. It is an instruction to investigate. It is not an eraser, and an institution that treats it as one has told you, in its own published documents, how it will handle the next piece of evidence that reaches it.