The Company He Kept

In “The Impossibility of Ignorance,” I argued that Lithuania asks the world to believe Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas did not know what was happening around him in 1941, and then criminalizes those who refuse to accept that fiction. This second article asks a different question: from what company did Lithuania elevate him?

In November 2018, the Seimas formally recognized Ramanauskas-Vanagas as the “Head of the Lithuanian State, which was fighting the occupation.” Two years later, Lithuania’s defense minister placed him in the Heads of State Pantheon and called him “a role model for the new generation of Lithuania’s officers and soldiers.” Once a parliament and defense establishment confer that level of honor, the burden shifts to the state to show what Holocaust-era due diligence it conducted before conferring it. What file was reviewed? By whom? On what date? Under what standard? Lithuania has never published an answer.

The Soviet Union was a criminal regime. Its occupation, deportations, executions, imprisonments, and repression are matters of record. There can be no redemption or forgiveness for those crimes. Nothing here softens that judgment. But a truthful condemnation of Soviet crimes gives Lithuania no license to launder Holocaust-linked figures, criminalize scrutiny, or turn official narrative into legal doctrine. Lithuania manages history through fear, selective enforcement, and protected falsehoods, reproducing the coercive memory politics it condemns in Russia and Belarus.

That burden matters because Ramanauskas-Vanagas does not stand alone. He stands inside a Lithuanian hero system that has repeatedly collapsed under scrutiny.

Take Jonas Noreika. Lithuania honored him as an anti-Soviet hero and national model. His own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, later concluded publicly that he was not a hero but a war criminal. That matters not because family confession is superior to archival work, but because her investigation destroyed the protected legend from inside the family itself. Lithuania did not answer Noreika with a clean file. It answered him with honors, then defended the honors until the record broke through. Noreika and fellow “Honored Prisoner” Balys Sruoga were held at Stutthof concentration camp, where they and other Lithuanian inmates were permitted to “visit” Jewish women. These are the kinds of men Lithuania apparently considers their national heroes, to be “a role model for the new generation of Lithuania’s officers and soldiers.”

Take Juozas Krikštaponis. Lithuanian historian Mindaugas Pocius said there were “no doubts among historians” regarding Krikštaponis’s participation in the mass murder of Jews and other civilians. That should have ended the public-honors question. It did not. Evidence did not produce correction.

Take Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Here the problem moved beyond glorification into something worse: laundering by falsification. As I documented in “The Brazaitis Fraud,” Lithuanian institutions converted an American administrative closure into a public claim of innocence and kept repeating it after notice from lawyers, historians, complainants, and members of Congress. Congressman Brad Sherman later demanded that Lithuania stop claiming the United States had exonerated Brazaitis. Lithuania’s problem was not confusion. It was intentional fraud after notice.

This is the company Ramanauskas-Vanagas keeps. Not a clean field with one disputed outlier. A hero class repeatedly contaminated by exposed perpetrators, facilitators, and state-sponsored false exculpation. That does not prove identical conduct by every individual. It proves something more damaging to Lithuania’s position: the state has no right to demand a presumption of purity for figures elevated from a field it has repeatedly defended through omission, minimization, and fabrication.

The institutional pattern is itself evidence. The LGGRTC has never revoked a finding on a state-honored figure with a disputed Holocaust-era record. It has never withdrawn a false claim. It has never corrected a record after external challenge. The known documented correction rate is zero. An institution with a zero-correction rate on the subject matter it exists to investigate is not functioning as a research body. It is functioning as a defense attorney for the state’s vast pantheon of Holocaust perpetrators.

That is why the standard must stay fixed. If Lithuania wishes to distinguish anti-Soviet resistance from Holocaust conduct, it must publish the pre-elevation investigative record for each honored figure whose 1941 conduct is disputed. The burden is not on critics to disprove a monument. The burden is on the state to justify it. No file, no burden met. No burden met, no defensible canonization.

That is also why the IHRA definition matters here. IHRA defines Holocaust distortion to include intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the Holocaust or its principal elements, including “collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.” A state that elevates unresolved figures, refuses to publish the due-diligence file, and answers contradiction with protected myth is already operating inside that zone.

Now place this beside the prosecution of Artur Fridman. According to the published indictment record, Fridman — a Jewish citizen — posted a Facebook message on May 9, 2024 while visiting Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather, a Jew who fought against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. On January 8, 2025, Lithuanian authorities imposed a written pledge preventing him from leaving the country. On October 30, 2025, prosecutors filed formal charges under Article 170-2 §1 and Article 313 §2.[9] This is not a dispute in a seminar room. It is criminal process directed at a private Jewish citizen for Holocaust-related speech written at his grandfather’s graveside.

The state institution whose conclusions help underwrite that process is the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. On March 22, 2026, Lithuania’s own national broadcaster reported that the Seimas-created external expert council said it could not effectively communicate with the institution’s leadership, that recommendations were ignored, that documents were withheld or delivered too late for meaningful review, that the Center’s strategic plan lacked vision, values, and scholarly quality criteria, and that the institution was “de jure” a research center but “de facto” a bureaucratic institution. The same report said only about 30 of 152 positions directly conduct historical research. A month earlier, the Center itself had advertised that candidates for director must hold clearance to work with information marked “top secret.” Lithuania is therefore asking courts and the public to defer to a body that its own oversight structure describes as bureaucratic rather than genuinely research-led, while the body itself is built around state-security access rather than academic transparency.

This is not guilt by association. It is state responsibility by selection. Lithuania elevated Ramanauskas-Vanagas from within a hero class already damaged by exposed perpetrators and exposed fraud. It never published the file showing the review that elevation required. It then placed the resulting pantheon behind state institutions whose own credibility is now under public domestic challenge. And when a Jewish citizen questions the result, Lithuania reaches for criminal law.

The issue is no longer whether one can build a patriotic legend around Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The issue is whether a democratic state can continue to demand deference to that legend after Noreika, after Krikštaponis, after Brazaitis, after Fridman, and after the public discrediting of the institution that polices the narrative.

The remedy threshold is not another speech, another wreath, or another recommendation left unimplemented. It is disclosure. Lithuania should publish the full pre-elevation review file for Ramanauskas-Vanagas and every other state-honored figure with a disputed Holocaust-era record; identify the reviewing officials; state the evidentiary standard applied; disclose any dissent; rescind the coercive measures imposed on Fridman; dismiss the charges; and explain why criminal process was used to defend a pantheon whose surrounding record is already crowded with exposed fraud and unresolved honors.

Until then, the question remains simple: What investigation was conducted, by whom, on what date, under what standard, with what published result, and what corrective action followed? Lithuania has asked the world for reverence. It will not supply the file.