The Witness That Cannot Survive Cross-Examination, Part I

The public trial of LGGRTC before Lithuania can avoid the courtroom

Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center, LGGRTC, is expected to become the prosecution’s historical witness against Artur Fridman. That is the immediate courtroom fact. The public fact is larger. Before Fridman’s trial begins, LGGRTC itself must be tried in public. This is the first installment of four.

I do not speak for Fridman’s defense. I am not involved in his legal strategy. I write as a documentary filmmaker who has spent five years recording the Baltic Holocaust, and as a former Soviet citizen who recognizes the institutional architecture of official truth. I also write before the state has a chance to make the problem disappear. Lithuania may decide that the safer course is to end the case quickly, before its own institutions are forced onto the witness stand. If that happens, the public record still has to exist. This is that record.

Fridman’s case has been described in The Prosecution of Artur Fridman, in The Prosecution’s Own Evidence, and in my own The Riga Witness, the Vilnius Defendant. Those pieces explain why the indictment matters. This one asks a narrower question. Is LGGRTC a credible witness?

By ordinary standards, it is not. Before I use a state institution’s certification in a film, I ask whether its claims have survived scrutiny by the institutions competent to evaluate them. I ask whether it retracted after correction. I ask whether outside educational organizations trust it more over time, or less. Applied to LGGRTC, those questions convict the institution before it ever reaches the stand.

The prosecution may need LGGRTC because the indictment needs institutional clothing. A Facebook post can be punished only if the state first supplies a certified historical meaning to the figure, the cemetery, the date, and the speech. LGGRTC’s function is therefore not merely historical. It turns state memory into criminal evidence.

That is why the court should not treat LGGRTC as a neutral research institute. It should be treated as a witness with a record, a method, prior contradictions, institutional enemies, public scandals, and unretracted falsehoods. It should be cross-examined like any other witness whose credibility determines whether a citizen is punished.

Lithuania’s own commission already impeached it

The first witness against LGGRTC is not foreign. It is Lithuania’s own International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes. On April 11, 2019, its Holocaust sub-commission answered LGGRTC’s statement on Jonas Noreika. It identified Noreika’s August 22, 1941 order moving the Jews of Šiauliai district into the Žagarė ghetto. It identified his September 10, 1941 property-distribution order. It stated that almost all the Jews rounded up under those orders were later murdered. The sub-commission described LGGRTC’s exculpatory treatment of Noreika as utterly unacceptable and in some respects offensive to the memory of the victims.

The commission asked the question LGGRTC never answered. If this was not participation in the process of genocide, then what was? It also rejected rescue-adjacent mitigation. Conversations with rescuers, anti-German feelings, or later anti-Soviet resistance do not erase participation in the ghettoization and dispossession of Jews.

LGGRTC did not retract. Lithuania did not correct the institutional record. The body Lithuania itself created to evaluate these matters rejected the Center’s method. The Center preserved the method anyway. The LGGRTC Director General sat ex officio on the very commission that issued the rebuke. The institution rejected itself, and its own director made no consequence flow from that rejection.

IHRA rejected the same method

Lithuania invokes IHRA when it wants foreign credibility. That makes IHRA’s expert-level criticism of LGGRTC directly relevant. In April 2019, the IHRA expert chairs, including Professor Yehuda Bauer, issued a statement of grave concern over the Center’s treatment of Noreika. The statement objected to LGGRTC’s attempt to suggest that Noreika was a rescuer without evidence of a direct rescue role. IHRA’s experts concluded that LGGRTC’s Noreika text meets the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

That is not a political disagreement from Lithuania’s enemies. It is expert criticism from the body Lithuania uses abroad as proof that it belongs inside respectable Holocaust-memory institutions. Membership without compliance is not credibility. It is laundering. The broader pattern is described in Membership by Violation and Lithuania’s EU Membership as Diplomatic Shield. In Fridman, the same laundering moves from diplomacy into criminal evidence.

Yad Vashem named the dishonor inside the Seimas

On September 21, 2023, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan addressed the Lithuanian Seimas. He named Jonas Noreika, Kazys Škirpa, and Juozas Krikštaponis as figures that do not add to Lithuania’s honor. These are not marginal names in LGGRTC’s public memory system. They are signature outputs of its rehabilitation machine.

Yad Vashem is the world’s flagship Holocaust institution. Its chairman delivered the warning inside the parliament that funds and authorizes LGGRTC. Lithuania heard it. It did not remove the problem. LGGRTC did not revise the underlying memory architecture. The Seimas did not summon the Center for explanation. The chamber received the speech, filed it, and the institution responsible for the named figures continued operating without interruption.

If the global institution Lithuania relies on for Holocaust legitimacy has already rejected the Center’s rehabilitative products in the legislature itself, no judge can pretend that LGGRTC enters the courtroom as an uncontested authority.

Lithuanian academia walked away

On April 1, 2021, Speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen stated on the floor of the Seimas that universities and the Lithuanian Institute of History had refused to cooperate with LGGRTC because its activities did not meet scientific standards. The remark appeared inside the Seimas debate that led to the dismissal of LGGRTC Director Adas Jakubauskas. The statement entered the parliamentary record. It belongs in any courtroom credibility assessment.

A research institution that the country’s own universities will not work with has a credibility problem before any foreign critic says a word. Domestic academia is not a Russian disinformation outlet. The Lithuanian Institute of History is not Yad Vashem. These are the institutions Lithuania itself created and trusts to conduct historical research. They walked away from LGGRTC because LGGRTC was not doing the work.

At trial, we hope defense counsel asks which international educational organizations worked with LGGRTC in 2015, when Grant Gochin began the public exposure campaign, and which have since reduced ties, cooperation, or reliance because of the ongoing scandals. Credibility is not only what an institution says about itself. It is what serious institutions do after watching it operate over time.

A court that allows LGGRTC to testify while excluding that trajectory is not protecting evidentiary relevance. It is protecting the witness from its own history.

The Ombudsman violation is part of the record

The Lithuanian Parliamentary Ombudsman has also found fault with LGGRTC’s administrative conduct. The current public inventory of the institutional and litigation record is collected in the Lithuania litigation inventory. The point is narrow and devastating. LGGRTC is not an immaculate public authority. It is a repeat institutional actor with formal oversight findings, public rejections, and unretracted controversies.

That is the witness the prosecution appears prepared to use against a Jewish defendant.

The Eichmann Defense, filed in a Lithuanian court

The next document against LGGRTC is the one Lithuania itself filed in court. On February 28, 2019, the State of Lithuania filed a legal position in defense of Jonas Noreika. The filing is examined in detail in The Eichmann Defense. It argued that Noreika did not understand his orders, did not foresee Jewish deaths, and was a cog in a machine larger than himself.

That formulation is not new. Adolf Eichmann said the same thing in Jerusalem. He claimed he had not made policy, had only carried it out, and was merely a little cog in the machinery of destruction. The court rejected the escape route. Israel hanged him on June 1, 1962. Eichmann was not executed because he raised the cog defense. He was executed because the defense failed.

On February 28, 2019, Lithuania filed the same defense, in its own court, on behalf of a man who signed the August 22 and September 10 orders. The filing has never been withdrawn. The filing has never been charged under Article 170² §1, the same statute now used against Fridman. The Vilnius Public Prosecutor’s Office found no public-order or insulting-circumstances threshold met by the state’s own pleading. It found the threshold met by Fridman’s Facebook post.

The cog defense was historically refuted before it was filed. SS-Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker’s October 15, 1941 report described not Lithuanian passivity but Lithuanian initiative. It documented self-cleansing actions and thousands of Jews killed by Lithuanian partisans in Kaunas before German civil administration was even constituted. The Lietūkis garage massacre of June 27, 1941 had already made the point in public. Lithuanian violence was not absorbed into the Nazi machine. It helped operate it.

LGGRTC supplied the institutional framework that made the February 28 filing possible. The court accepted it. The state preserved it. The prosecutor never charged it. That is the same prosecutor’s office that filed 220 pages against Fridman.

The convening pattern

LGGRTC does not arrive at Fridman’s trial as a neutral expert. It arrives already impeached by Lithuania’s own presidential commission, by IHRA’s expert structure, by Yad Vashem’s chairman speaking inside the Seimas, by the Lithuanian Parliament’s own Speaker, by Lithuanian academia, and by oversight history. It also arrives carrying a court filing in which the Lithuanian state advanced the cog defense Adolf Eichmann advanced before he was hanged.

These facts do not decide Fridman’s case. They decide the credibility of the witness Lithuania appears ready to use against him.

Roadmap

The public trial has begun. Part II examines the witness through its own documents and its own vocabulary. The Stančikas memorandum. Letter 14R-94. The fabricated American congressional exonerations. The Vulgar Pressure self-defense. The director who replaced research with belief. The institutional confession by one of LGGRTC’s own historians that the institution is not scientific and serves political interest groups. Majdanek. Ghettos. The institutional insult against Jews.

Part III sets out the legal architecture. Procedure that runs one way when the Jew is the plaintiff and the opposite way when the Jew is the defendant. The Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court ruling that has already disqualified the witness on its own terms. The Ethics Inspector classification that the Lithuanian state designed to weaken a Jewish complainant and that now compels judicial consideration of his speech on the credibility of the prosecution’s witness. The Article 6 perimeter under the European Convention on Human Rights. The seven paths available to the Lithuanian government, and the reason each path delivers the same outcome.

Part IV closes the series. The verdict on the public record. LGGRTC as a global case study in how an ideological fraud unit operates and how to dismantle one. The open notice that converts publication into formal record before the Vilnius District Court, the Vilnius Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Government of Lithuania, and the European Court of Human Rights. The remaining question for the Lithuanian government, and the only question still open. Can it allow the trial to proceed?