The Innocence Was Manufactured – The evidence produced culpability. The courts produced exemption.

Part I set out the documentary record: the Lithuanian Security Police arrested, interrogated, confined, robbed, and transferred Lithuanian Jews to the men who shot them, and American federal courts reconstructed the institution from Lithuania’s own archives. That institution’s history is now written by the LGGRTC, whose acting director, Arūnas Bubnys, called the force’s role in exterminating Jews “auxiliary and minor” in 1997 and “an integral part of the repressive mechanism” in 2003, and who remains in post because the Seimas rejected his proposed successor on June 11, 2026.

The defense collapses inside the record

The Saugumas served under German direction. Subordination does not erase the subordinate. A Lithuanian office did not become German because it obeyed a German superior. Its officers remained Lithuanian. They read Lithuanian names, searched Lithuanian homes, questioned Lithuanian witnesses, and arrested Lithuanian Jews.

Germany supplied the exterminatory command. Lithuanian institutions supplied reach. Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe.

The target of this accusation is not Lithuanians as a people. Some Lithuanians hid Jews and died for it. Gita and Fruma survived as long as they did because Adolfas Domeikas and Juozapatas Domeikas chose rescue. The target is the state apparatus, the officials who operated it, and the postwar institutions that decided whom to punish, whom to excuse, and whom to honor.

Purpose-built procedure, no punishment

Independent Lithuania opened its archives to American investigators. Lithuanian officials authenticated the records. That cooperation carried the evidence and must be stated. It also sharpens the result. American courts entered judgments. Lithuanian courts imposed no punishment.

American courts stripped four Vilnius Saugumas officers of citizenship. Lileikis in Boston in 1996. His deputy Kazys Gimžauskas in Washington the same year. Adolph Milius in Tampa in 1998, for arrests of Jewish civilians carried out with Dailidė. Dailidė himself in Ohio. All four went to Lithuania. Milius died there in 1999. None was punished.

The United States revoked Lileikis’s citizenship on May 24, 1996. He returned to Lithuania the next month. In February 1998, Lithuanian authorities forwarded genocide charges to the Vilnius court, initiating what the Justice Department called the first prosecution for Second World War crimes in a successor state to the Soviet Union. The Lithuanian case charged him in connection with the murder of seventy-five Jews. Gimžauskas was charged in connection with five. Dailidė was charged with taking part in arrests of Jews and detaining two who had escaped the ghetto. The American judgment found that tens of thousands died under Lileikis’s command. Mukasey later described Fruma as one of almost fifty thousand victims of Lileikis.

Lithuania changed criminal procedure to keep the cases alive. On December 23, 1997, the Seimas amended procedure to permit a genocide case to proceed despite the accused person’s medical condition. On February 15, 2000, it amended the code again to permit a first-instance genocide trial in the defendant’s absence. Diplomat and historian Alfonsas Eidintas described the second measure as without precedent in Europe or the world.

The law was purpose-built. The result remained empty. Lileikis died in September 2000 before judgment. In February 2001 the Vilnius court found Gimžauskas guilty; the Justice Department records the conviction as participating in genocide. The court imposed no penalty after a special forensic medical commission found that age and illness had left him unable to comprehend his actions. He died shortly afterward.

The Dailidė proceedings ended the same way. The Vilnius Regional Court found on March 27, 2006, that he had systematically persecuted Jewish civilians, then released him from criminal responsibility. Prosecutors had sought five years’ imprisonment. In 2008, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish. The evidence produced culpability. The courts produced exemption.

Lithuania had the perpetrators, the archives, the victims’ names, special procedural legislation, and American judicial findings. It still produced no punishment.

The perpetrator restored

The administrative method did not end with the police files. It became state memory.

Lileikis tried the rescuer defense in 1996. He suggested that he had used his office to help persecuted people and relied on a story that he had saved a Jewish girl, Sifra Grodnikaitė. Judge Stearns called the claim “self-flattery” unsupported by fact, rejected the article offered for it as hearsay, and held that even if Lileikis had saved one Jew, that did not atone for the tens of thousands who died under his command. A district court is not a rule of American law. It is, however, the only court that has examined this defense on this record, and it refused it.

In December 2019 the LGGRTC applied the same structure to Jonas Noreika. The Centre announced that a testimony by Father Jonas Borevičius, found in the archive of the Lithuanian and Latvian Jesuit Province, showed a Jewish rescue network connected to Noreika. Read closely, the testimony says something narrower. Borevičius told a United States federal court in Chicago in 1986 that he organized a rescue group after being taught by Noreika. The claim was reported as new documentary proof that Noreika organized the network. It identifies no Jew whom Noreika saved, no act of rescue he performed, and no rescue operation he directed. Proximity to rescuers was converted into participation in rescue.

The borrowed credibility was real. Borevičius was honored in 2017 for saving Jews, on the proposal of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, and a memorial plaque was installed. The Centre did not invent a rescuer. It attached one to an administrator. The Sub-Commission had already rejected that exculpatory structure on April 11, 2019: contact with rescuers did not mitigate Noreika’s ghettoization and expropriation orders, and the Centre’s surrounding obfuscations were “utterly unacceptable” and, in some cases, “offensive to the memory of the victims.”

The standard was already public. On March 19, 2016, the Sub-Commission on Nazi Crimes of Lithuania’s International Commission adopted it: no person should be publicly commemorated where reliable evidence shows participation in any way in persecution or murder, regardless of later conduct. Noreika signed orders in 1941 directing the confinement of Jews and the seizure of their property. On April 11, 2019, answering the Centre’s statement of March 27, the Sub-Commission applied that standard to the LGGRTC’s defense of Noreika. It identified the orders, noted that nearly all the Jews confined and dispossessed under them were later murdered, and asked the question the state has never answered: if that was not participation in genocide, what was?

Eight months later the Centre answered with a rescuer.

Noreika is not a diversion from this article. He is the afterlife of its method. The police file once delivered the Jew to death. The state history file now delivers the perpetrator to national honor.

We remember and honor the victims named in the surviving record

Gita Kaplan — born in Vilnius in 1896; rendered Gitta by Mukasey; murdered December 22, 1941.

Fruma Kaplan — six years old; murdered December 22, 1941.

Chaja Lapyda — confined by Lileikis’s personal signature on November 21, transferred three days later, and “treated according to orders” on December 5, 1941.

Lucija Pojevanskaitė-Sutarskaitė — a Roman Catholic woman born in the United States; arrested on December 11 as “suspected of being a Jew,” transferred on December 17, marked “Jewess” on the execution card, and “treated in accordance with orders” on December 22, 1941.

Saulius Varsavskis — eighteen years old, one year into an economics degree, married to Ita Buchbinda, who remained in ghetto I; confined at Lukiškės on November 26, transferred on December 6, and “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941. The Sixth Circuit renders his surname Varsaskis.

Dovydas Palenbaumas — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.

Malka Strazaitė — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.

Antoni Konas — “treated according to orders” on December 22, 1941.

Beila Levinson — recorded in the surviving prison and execution files.

Necha Berger-Levita — recorded in the surviving prison and execution files.

Jenta Rachmanienė — arrested for escaping the ghetto, imprisoned, and later executed.

Izrael and Riva Soak — arrested on October 30, 1941, searched, imprisoned at Lukiškės, and placed at the disposition of German authorities. The appellate record did not establish their individual fates.

Mark Šapiro — searched and robbed on November 3, 1941; rendered Sapyro and Sapiro in the American record. His ultimate fate was not established in the case.

Nine Jews and their families — unnamed in the surviving order, marked for liquidation at the first opportunity on July 5, 1941.

Of the names above, Judge Stearns wrote that they would have been lost to posterity but for the surviving records. The files preserved them because the institution had to account for its work. The state has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.

The murder was administered. The innocence was manufactured afterward.

This article is Part II of two. The complete text appears in a single article on Substack.