The Witness That Cannot Survive Cross-Examination, Part II
The witness’s own documents convict the institution
Part I tried LGGRTC through the institutions that have already impeached it. Lithuania’s own presidential commission. IHRA. Yad Vashem inside the Seimas. The parliamentary record. Academia. Oversight bodies. The Eichmann Defense filed by the Lithuanian state itself in court. Part II turns to the witness’s own statements.
I am not part of Fridman’s defense. I write before Lithuania has the opportunity to dispose of the case quickly and avoid institutional exposure. A courtroom can be narrowed. Public memory cannot. The witness’s own documents convict the institution. Part III addresses the legal architecture. Part II is the documents and the confession.
The Stančikas memorandum
On December 17, 2019, LGGRTC issued its second memorandum on Jonas Noreika. The memorandum reclassified Noreika as a rescuer of Jews. Its author, Dalius Egidijus Stančikas, was a geologist working at LGGRTC as a public relations specialist. The matter is summarized in the public Case summaries and in A Director Lied on the National Broadcaster.
The memorandum produced no wartime document revoking the ghettoization order, no revocation of the September 10 property order, no named rescued Jew identifying Noreika as rescuer, and no evidence that the signed orders were forged. It supplied retrospective motive against the documentary record, built largely on a fragment of late testimony given decades after the war in a U.S. court proceeding concerning a different Lithuanian official.
That is not scholarship. It is rescue by assertion. A non-historian advanced a non-falsifiable explanation to protect the reputation of a signatory of anti-Jewish orders. If that method is acceptable for LGGRTC, the court must ask whether LGGRTC is testifying as historian or as state reputational counsel.
14R-94: the self-impeachment letter
The strongest document against LGGRTC may be its own letter Ref. 14R-94, dated October 24, 2017, cataloged in the Lithuania litigation inventory. The Center admitted that surviving documents demonstrate the antisemitic ideology of the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, that personal responsibility of LNP leaders and members for Holocaust crimes is documented, that no comprehensive research on LNP-Holocaust collaboration had been conducted in twenty years of LGGRTC operations, and that it would be appropriate to take up the investigation as a separate research topic.
That admission should end the pretense. LGGRTC knew the evidence existed. It knew the research was appropriate. It had the mandate. It did not do the work. A state research institution that admits a Holocaust-collaboration research gap and leaves it open is not under-resourced. It is directionally selective. The institution that left documented Lithuanian collaboration insufficiently examined when the subject was Lithuanian responsibility for the murder of Jews is now expected to certify offenses against Lithuanian memory in a criminal trial against a Jew.
The fabricated American exonerations
LGGRTC has also published the claim that the United States Congress completely exonerated Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. The Brazaitis Ombudsman file and Congressman Brad Sherman’s repeated corrections expose the fabrication. The words complete exoneration and rehabilitation do not appear in the congressional record as LGGRTC used them. Sherman wrote to Lithuanian authorities seeking retraction in 2019, in 2021, and again in 2026. The fabrication remains unretracted across seven years and three letters from a sitting Member of Congress.
LGGRTC converted foreign silence and partial archival facts into a laundering device for a Lithuanian Holocaust collaborator. When corrected, the institution dismissed the correction as political opinion. A witness that manufactures foreign legislative meaning cannot be trusted to manufacture criminal evidentiary meaning.
Vulgarity, belief, and the personal-opinion retreat
On March 8, 2019, LGGRTC published a self-defense on Delfi.lt titled, in English, The Genocide Research Center Will Not Yield to Vulgar Pressure. The piece is examined in Vulgarity and Belief. The Center described the demand to correct the Brazaitis fabrication as vulgar pressure. A research institution under scholarly criticism cites evidence. A reputation defense unit labels critics. LGGRTC chose the second register in writing, on its own platform, while litigation was pending.
The same architecture appeared on December 27, 2019, when Director Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė appeared on the national broadcaster LRT. The Lithuanian title of the program translated as Genocide Center Director: History Education Not Important, Believing in Research Results Is. A state historical research institution had moved its certification standard from evidence to belief. A procedural court dismissal of one of Grant Gochin’s filings was publicly recast as broadcaster-level vindication of the Noreika research program.
Then came the retreat. In her reply of February 20, 2020, on Centre letterhead under reference Nr. 14R-14, Burauskaitė conceded the contested public statements as her personal, subjective opinion and refused retraction. The same statements made in her official capacity, broadcast on national radio, published on the Center’s website, and reproduced in litigation, were reclassified as personal opinion when the demand was retraction.
That is the architecture in three moves. The institutional finding is delivered through state machinery. Critics are labeled vulgar. Method is described as belief in research results. When retraction is demanded, the same statements are reclassified as private opinion. The first move converts opinion into state finding. The second shields the finding from substantive challenge. The third discards the finding as private when private status is convenient. The court must ask which capacity LGGRTC occupies on the stand. If it testifies as state institution, the personal-opinion retreat is unavailable. If it testifies as personal opinion, it is not state-certified evidence against Fridman. Lithuania has used it as both.
Majdanek, ghettos, and institutional trivialization
Former LGGRTC Director General Burauskaitė dismissed Lithuanian guard service at Majdanek on national television as simply tales and stretching the facts. The case concerned Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejys, the leader of the guards at the Majdanek concentration camp. Her successor, Adas Jakubauskas, publicly characterized ghettos as relatively safe for Jews. The matter is developed in A Director Lied on the National Broadcaster and Believe Lithuania?. Successor directors did not correct the institutional denial.
The directional asymmetry is unmistakable. When Jewish citizens criticize Lithuanian state memory under Article 170², criminal exposure appears. When the state’s own memory institution trivializes Lithuanian involvement, denies documented complicity, or softens ghettos, institutional protection appears. The asymmetry is the case.
The insult against Jews
On November 16, 2015, LGGRTC publicly characterized the Lithuanian signatories of a petition opposing honors for Noreika as the work of Agents of the East, Jews, and other stupid people. The phrase has never been retracted. It is preserved in the Lithuanian state record itself, including in the Journalist Ethics Inspector’s later decision S-424 of April 25, 2022, which recited the formulation in its factual background and proceeded to rule against the Jewish complainant who had brought it forward. The matter is discussed in Agents of the East, Jews, and Stupid People and in Verdict First, Reasoning Later.
Lithuania’s Article 170² regime reaches insults to nations and protected groups. The state institution whose public vocabulary placed Jews beside agents and stupid people suffered no comparable consequence. The witness institution has produced such speech, refused to retract it, and the state body designated to police it recited the formulation in an official decision while ruling in favor of the institution.
The institution confesses to not being a research institution
The strongest evidence on the witness’s character comes from the institution itself. On August 11, 2023, Dr. Alfredas Rukšėnas, an LGGRTC historian publicly identified with the Center’s Noreika output, admitted that LGGRTC is not a scientific center but rather serves nationalist, pro-Nazi, political interest groups. Lithuanian journalist Arkadijus Vinokuras published the admission in the Lithuanian press. The record is anchored in After the truth, questions and re-examined in Lithuania Has Placed Itself on Trial. The Center did not retract. The historian did not resign. This is not a hostile foreign characterization. It is the operating description of LGGRTC by an LGGRTC historian, on the record, without institutional denial.
The confession does not stand alone. On February 10, 2021, in a parliamentary oversight discussion, Seimas members stated that LGGRTC is not a scientific, academic institution, that its statutory functions are far broader than scientific research, and that it cannot be turned into another history institute. The point is documented in Holocaust Fraud Is Legally Mandated in Lithuania.
On March 22, 2026, LRT reported that the Seimas-established external expert council overseeing LGGRTC had formally notified parliamentary leadership that it could not communicate with LGGRTC leadership and that its recommendations were being ignored. Council member Algis Vyšniūnas described the institution before the Seimas Commission for the Cause of Freedom and the National Historical Memory as de jure a research center, de facto a bureaucratic institution. The same Council documented that LGGRTC had failed to maintain a statutorily required list of research directions, that scientific work was fragmented and oriented toward individual employee interests rather than national priorities, and that of approximately 152 staff positions, only about thirty are direct historical-research roles. The record is set out in The Selective Enforcement Index. That is not a research center. That is a public-administration body with a small research department attached.
The sequence matters for the Fridman case. Rukšėnas was one of two LGGRTC historians the state deployed alongside the February 28, 2019 court filing in defense of Jonas Noreika. He supplied state-deployed conclusions for the Eichmann Defense filing. Four years later, he publicly stated that the institution producing those conclusions is not a research body and serves political interest groups. The historian’s confession does not impeach LGGRTC by inference. It impeaches it by direct admission.
The documentary record on Lithuanian state letterhead
The pattern is now visible. A non-historian author certifies a Lithuanian Holocaust collaborator as rescuer. A documented research gap on Lithuanian Nationalist Party collaboration is admitted and left open. Foreign legislative meaning is fabricated and defended as research. Critics are labeled vulgar. Evidence is replaced with belief. Institutional finding is recoded as personal opinion when retraction is demanded. Death-camp service is dismissed as tales. Ghettos are described as relatively safe. Jews are placed in a sentence with agents and stupid people. The institution’s own historian admits, on the record, that the institution is not scientific and serves political interest groups. Each item appears on Lithuanian state letterhead, on the national broadcaster, in court files, or in oversight decisions that recited the language without condemnation. None has been retracted.
That is the witness’s record on its own paper. Part III takes the next step. The legal architecture by which Lithuanian courts protected this record from substantive review. The Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court ruling that has already disqualified the witness on its own terms. The Ethics Inspector classification that has reversed direction. The Article 6 perimeter under the European Convention. The seven paths the Lithuanian government can take from here, each producing the same outcome.
