On August 19, 2026, I transmitted a separate supplemental submission to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance concerning Lithuania’s official treatment of Kazys Škirpa. It is the fourth document in the same submission sequence that began with my May 28 petition: the original petition, the June 3 procedural supplement, the Brazaitis evidentiary submission transmitted earlier on August 19, and now the Škirpa submission.[1]

The Škirpa submission was transmitted at 4:10:32 p.m. Pacific time, after the separate Brazaitis submission had been transmitted at 11:09:18 a.m. Pacific. The two August 19 documents are companion supplements to the same May 28 petition. They are not new petitions, and they were deliberately transmitted separately because the underlying documentary records are different.[2]

The title of the new submission is The Škirpa Determination: Undisclosed Favorable Premises, an Unremedied Transparency Finding, Differential Attribution, and Persistence After Ministerial Correction. Its central question is narrower than the historical controversy that surrounds Škirpa: whether the reasoning and correction practice of an IHRA Member Country’s state historical institution falls within the Alliance’s own standards on Holocaust denial and distortion, rehabilitation, research, archival access, and accurate treatment of the historical record.[3]

On August 20, in response to my earlier request for procedural clarification, IHRA Secretary General Michaela Küchler confirmed receipt and stated that “there is no process for external submission of petitions.” She added that the chairs of IHRA’s working groups and committees are responsible for setting their agendas. I therefore do not claim that IHRA has docketed, accepted, or opened formal proceedings on these materials. The record has nevertheless been transmitted to the Secretariat, national delegations, and relevant IHRA recipients and placed in the public record. (Michaela Küchler, email to the author, 20 Aug. 2026.)

What the submission does not ask IHRA to decide

The submission does not ask IHRA to determine Škirpa’s criminal guilt. It does not claim that he directed or participated in killings in Lithuania while he remained in Berlin. It does not claim that he personally drafted every antisemitic text issued by the Lithuanian Activist Front. It does not ask the Alliance to decide whether a street should bear his name or whether a plaque should be installed.

Those limits matter. The submission is about institutional historical method. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre issued a favorable historical certificate concerning Škirpa in 2015. That certificate was not a document of simple concealment: it acknowledged antisemitic manifestations within the Berlin Front, quoted anti-Jewish material, and stated that antisemitism within the organization had been raised to a political level and may have encouraged some Lithuanians to become involved in the Holocaust. It then bounded the significance of that material through the distinction between expulsion and extermination, the absence of prewar knowledge of a plan of total extermination, and Škirpa’s physical absence from the killing sites.[4]

A historian may agree or disagree with that weighting. By itself, that would be an ordinary scholarly dispute. The reason this record was placed before IHRA’s Secretariat and national delegations is what happened around the published conclusion.

The favorable reasoning that was not published

In February 2018, the Centre disclosed that it had taken additional favorable considerations into account when reaching its Škirpa conclusion even though those considerations did not appear in the published finding. The examples it identified were the supposed complete American exoneration of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and the fact that Škirpa had lived for roughly three decades in the United States without being accused by American authorities.[5]

Lithuania’s own Seimas Ombudsman recorded the same acknowledgment and found that the Centre had failed to observe the principle of transparency. The complaint was recognized as well founded. That is the hinge of the present submission: this is not my inference that the Centre had unpublished reasoning. It is preserved in the Lithuanian State’s own oversight record.[6]

The record became still more difficult for the Centre on July 11, 2018. In Letter No. 14R-51, its substantive response in the Škirpa matter again described Brazaitis as having been completely exonerated in the United States. On the same page, however, the Centre reproduced the American language stating that the names had been removed from an active list and that the investigations had been deactivated. The stronger favorable conclusion and the limiting American language therefore sat together in the same Škirpa file.[7]

That matters because the favorable American proposition was not merely background rhetoric about another man. It was used inside the reasoning surrounding Škirpa.

Then Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry corrected the premise

On May 12, 2026, Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to United States Representative Brad Sherman and acknowledged that the ‘complete exoneration’ formulation was legally imprecise. The Ministry also acknowledged the central legal distinction: administrative discontinuation of an investigation is not formal judicial exoneration under United States law.[8]

That correction does not prove that the historical conclusion concerning Škirpa is false. The submission says the opposite. Its point is methodological: if a favorable premise formed part of the reasoning and the State later concedes that premise was legally imprecise, the historical assessment becomes unreproducible until the institution explains what weight, if any, the premise still carries and what the determination rests on without it.

No reissued Škirpa determination stating the actual reasons has been identified. No reassessment following the May 12 concession has been identified. No withdrawal of the Brazaitis premise from the Škirpa reasoning has been identified.

The 2024 report and the source-standard problem

The submission also examines Report No. 9R-598, the Centre’s 2024 historical-archival report prepared for a live commemoration process. Again, the objection is not that the report hid all adverse material. It did not. It reproduced substantial antisemitic Front texts. The issue is the source rule applied to that material.[9]

For adverse organizational texts, the report’s method places substantial weight on whether a text can be personally attributed to Škirpa. Yet the report admitted favorable material from a much weaker source: a June 25, 1941 report in the Chicago Lithuanian newspaper Draugas saying that the latest reports from Berlin stated that Škirpa had prohibited persecution of Jews. No underlying order, transmission record, or identified original source is supplied.

The report then converts that newspaper report into the premise of its own research question. It asks why Škirpa prohibited the persecution of Jews, given the antisemitism in the organization he led. The question is no longer whether such a prohibition existed, but why he issued it. Lithuanian historians interviewed by LRT in September 2024 publicly challenged the source handling, including the absence of a primary prohibition order and the report’s broader selection and attribution method.[10]

IHRA is not being asked to decide what weight the Draugas item deserves. It is being asked to examine whether a state historical institution may demand a high attribution threshold for adverse material while admitting favorable material through a lower threshold without stating either rule.

A published-source test from Škirpa’s own book

The submission adds one narrow test from a published source that the Centre itself used: Škirpa’s 1973 documentary survey Sukilimas Lietuvos suverenumui atstatyti. This is not part of the separate archival transmission study, and the submission does not rely on an unpublished archive comparison.

In item 18 of the book’s document register, beginning at printed page 165, Škirpa describes an Administracijos sudarymo pasiūlymas – an administrative formation proposal – given to Lieutenant Colonel Graebe. Point 5 names Jews, together with others characterized as pillars of the Soviet regime, for immediate dismissal and, where necessary, arrest and accountability. After the eighth point, Škirpa states retrospectively that all of those introductory points were inserted on his own initiative, without Graebe specifically asking him to do so, and then explains his statehood rationale.[11]

The submission is deliberately careful about what this proves. It is a retrospective 1973 statement about Škirpa’s own claimed role; standing alone it is not contemporaneous proof that he personally drafted every word, and it does not establish operational responsibility for later killings. The English rendering has not been independently certified by a named translator. The submission therefore publishes a falsification condition in advance: if competent linguistic review does not confirm that the grammar attributes inclusion of all eight introductory points to Škirpa’s own initiative, or if the scope excludes point 5, the source-use proposition is withdrawn.[12]

The source-use audit itself is simpler. Both the 2015 certificate and Report No. 9R-598 cite Škirpa’s 1973 volume. Neither cites printed pages 165-167. Neither names the administrative proposal, Graebe, point 5, or the first-person initiative statement. The submission does not call that suppression or deliberate concealment. A published report’s silence proves only what the published report does not discuss. The unanswered question is whether the passage was consulted or weighed internally, and that is why the working files are requested.[13]

Why this is an IHRA question

IHRA has already addressed this institution. In 2019, the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s expert bodies expressed grave concern over the Centre’s treatment of Jonas Noreika and explicitly applied the Alliance’s Holocaust-distortion framework to a Lithuanian state-memory controversy. The present submission cites that statement as institutional precedent, not as a finding about Škirpa.[14]

The Lithuanian Jewish Community also rejected Report No. 9R-598 in August 2024, stating that it represented thirty-two Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations. That rejection does not decide the historical dispute either. It establishes the public and institutional materiality of the report inside Lithuania itself.[15]

The remedy requested from IHRA is correspondingly limited: register and preserve the submission; refer it to the relevant expert bodies; invite Lithuania to respond document by document; encourage production of the working files; ask Lithuania to state the evidentiary basis of the 2015 determination without the undisclosed premises; and preserve the right to supplement if the still-separate documentary-transmission study is later independently verified.

The submission sequence

May 28, 2026 – Original Formal Petition. Formal Petition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the Review, Corrective Action, Suspension, Downgrade, or Revocation of the Member-Country Status of the Republic of Lithuania.
June 3, 2026 – Procedural Supplement. Supplement recording Lithuania’s non-response after the response window and correcting the delegation record. It supplemented the petition; it did not substantively amend it.
August 19, 2026 – Brazaitis Evidentiary Supplement. Separate submission concerning the attribution of a United States exoneration to Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, its operative reuse, repeated notice, the May 12 ministerial concession, and continued publication.
August 19, 2026 – Škirpa Evidentiary Supplement. Separate companion submission concerning the reasoning and correction practice surrounding Lithuania’s favorable Škirpa determination.

A procedural letter to the Secretary General of July 23, 2026 sits inside the same sequence. It requested acknowledgment and the routing procedure. It is correspondence, not a submission, and it is not counted as one.

That is the clean procedural sequence: May 28 petition -> June 3 procedural supplement -> July 23 procedural letter -> August 19 Brazaitis evidentiary supplement -> August 19 Škirpa evidentiary supplement.

The Škirpa record has now been transmitted to the IHRA Secretariat and national delegations and placed in the public record. Lithuania can answer it on Lithuania’s own documents.

Public submission

Full public text: Supplemental Submission to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – Škirpa

Direct PDF: IHRA Supplemental Submission – Kazys Škirpa – 19 August 2026

Combined Submission: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/08/IHRA-Petition-Gochin-combined.pdf

[1] Formal Petition to IHRA concerning the member-country status of the Republic of Lithuania, 28 May 2026; Procedural supplement of 3 June 2026; public account: “The Ministry of Memory”. A procedural letter to Secretary General Michaela Küchler of 23 July 2026 requested acknowledgment and the routing procedure; it is correspondence within the sequence and is not counted as a submission.

[2] Brazaitis Supplemental Submission, 19 Aug. 2026 — PDF; Brazaitis public text. Škirpa Supplemental Submission, 19 Aug. 2026 — PDF; Škirpa public text. Transmission times are taken from the sent-message headers in the author’s email account: the Škirpa submission at 4:10:32 p.m. Pacific on 19 Aug. 2026 and the Brazaitis submission at 11:09:18 a.m. Pacific the same day. If either time is contested, the message headers are the record.

[3] IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion; IHRA Statement on Rehabilitation (2020); 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration.

[4] Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Dėl Kazio Škirpos veiklos Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais (2015). See especially the discussion of Berlin LAF antisemitism and the closing summary.

[5] Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Letter No. 55R-21, 26 Feb. 2018, pp. 4–5 of the English translation.

[6] Office of the Seimas Ombudsman, Pažyma No. 4D-2017/1-1558/3D-317, 2 Feb. 2018, signed by Augustinas Normantas. The record preserves the Centre’s acknowledgment of undisclosed considerations and the Ombudsman’s transparency finding.

[7] Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Letter No. 14R-51, 11 July 2018, Dėl informacijos pateikimo, p. 5. The same letter’s later-insertion discussion appears at pp. 9–10.

[8] Vice-Minister Vidmantas Verbickas to U.S. Representative Brad Sherman, 12 May 2026, Ref. (19.2.3)3-2806, transmitted by Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis on 13 May 2026.

[9] Alfredas Rukšėnas, Dėl Kazio Škirpos asmenybės (istorinė-archyvinė pažyma), LGGRTC Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E), 25 June 2024.

[10] Karolina Aleknavičė, “Tikrasis Škirpos veidas: didvyris ar antisemitizmui pasidavęs kolaborantas,” LRT.lt, 15 Sept. 2024; English version, 18 Sept. 2024.

[11] Kazys Škirpa, Sukilimas Lietuvos suverenumui atstatyti: Dokumentinė apžvalga (Washington, D.C., 1973), document-register item 18, printed pp. 165–167 / public PDF pp. 147–149.

[12] Škirpa Supplemental Submission, Part IX-A and para. 83, 19 Aug. 2026. The submission states that the English rendering is not independently certified and pre-registers withdrawal if competent linguistic review does not confirm that the initiative statement covers all eight points or if its grammatical scope excludes point 5.

[13] Škirpa Supplemental Submission, Part IX-A, paras. 66A and 83. The audit records that neither the 2015 certificate nor Report No. 9R-598 cites or discusses item 18 / printed pp. 165–167, while expressly refusing any inference about what the researchers read or knew internally.

[14] International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Statement on the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Lithuania (2019); preservation copy.

[15] Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community statement on the newest LGGRTC report concerning Kazys Škirpa, 23 Aug. 2024; English version, 26 Aug. 2024.