VLE Erases some Lithuanian Roles in Jewish Persecution
In Švenčionėliai, the town entry omits local actors. The ghetto entry omits the shooting squad’s Lithuanian composition.
Lithuania’s national encyclopedia names Jurgis Bobelis in the order forcing Kaunas Jews into the ghetto. His biography omits the order, the battalion he ordered formed and the cabinet decision approving a Jewish concentration camp on his report. At Švenčionėliai, the town entry leaves out local participants in persecution and murder. Its separate ghetto entry restores police escorts and guards but strips the visiting shooting squad of its Lithuanian composition.
These omissions remained visible in the four entries checked on October 30, 2026. I had already sent the publisher SVL-001 on October 19 and BOB-R2 on October 23. The requests identify the challenged passages and seek specific corrections.
The Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, or VLE, operates within the Martynas Mažvydas National Library. Its Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Centre expressly lists updating and expanding the digital encyclopedia among its functions. The publisher responsible for correcting these accounts is identifiable.
The battalion and camp missing from Bobelis’s biography
VLE’s Bobelis biography records his military education, career, Soviet arrest and escape. It places him in the Kaunas city and district commandancy on June 23, 1941, then moves directly to his service as chief of the housing administration in 1942–1944. The weeks in which his office helped organize Jewish confinement disappear between the appointments.
On June 28, Bobelis issued Order No. 9 reorganizing armed formations into the TDA battalion. Arūnas Bubnys’s 1998 account attributes the formation order to him; Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis’s study, printed pages 118–119 and note 86, identifies Bobelis’s order and the commandant’s office’s organization of the battalion. My published Commandant’s Report sets out the chronology and source references.
Two days later, the cabinet heard Bobelis’s report concerning the battalion and a Jewish concentration camp. The June 30 minutes reproduced in the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum’s documentary volume, printed pages 185–186, record approval of the camp and assign its establishment to Vice-Minister Švipas, working in contact with Bobelis. The same resolution approves a ten-day advance for the battalion.
Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis identify that camp as the Seventh Fort, on printed pages 134–135. Their discussion of the German execution reports records 463 Jews murdered there on July 4 and 2,514 on July 6: 2,977 people in those two actions. They also cite Bobelis’s June 30 communication placing the Fifth Company at Sonderkommando 1b’s disposal. These are source-specific administrative and organizational acts. They do not establish that Bobelis personally shot anyone.
VLE’s own Kaunas-ghetto entry records the TDA battalion’s participation in murdering Jews in the Kaunas forts. It also says German Security Police and the TDA killed 205 Jews at the Fourth Fort on August 2 and 534 on August 9. Those later killings are part of the battalion’s history, not an assertion that Bobelis remained its superior after his July removal. The biography omits his role in forming the battalion in the first place.
The entry can name Lithuanian perpetrators. Its pogrom passage says “vietiniai baltaraiščiai nužudė daugiau kaip 1500 žydų”: local white-armbanders murdered more than 1,500 Jews. It attributes approximately 60 murders at Lietūkis to Kaunas insurgents encouraged by German Security Police. It also names the battalion’s Third Company as participating in the October Great Action, alongside German personnel.
VLE therefore publishes a battalion’s killing record while leaving its formation out of the biography of the commandant who ordered it formed. The separation leaves the biography insulated from facts the encyclopedia already carries elsewhere.
A reader consulting the ghetto entry learns that Lithuanian formations participated in mass murder. A reader consulting Bobelis’s biography learns that he held the commandancy, but not what he did through that office. The missing connection is concrete: an identified formation order, a dated cabinet resolution and an order for compulsory Jewish confinement. These belong in an account of his commandancy because they describe its exercise. A biography that records the appointment while omitting those acts leaves the public with the title and removes its historical content.
The biography lists his Crosses of Vytis, fifth and fourth class, dated 1923 and 1920, and the Order of Gediminas, third class, dated 1937. These prewar decorations receive their dates and classes. His 1941 administrative acts receive no account. The duties of the later housing-administration post also warrant examination against that office’s records; its title alone supplies no answer.
Correct the date; preserve the responsible office
VLE’s Kaunas-ghetto entry names Bobelis and mayor Kazys Palčiauskas as signatories of an order dated July 7 compelling Jews to move to Vilijampolė by August 15. The date and autograph attribution require correction or substantiation. They cannot become a device for removing the commandant’s role from the history.
In United States v. Palciauskas, finding 4 dates issuance of Order No. 15 to on or about July 10, 1941. Footnote 3 authenticates the copy before the court while explaining that the unsigned place for the mayor’s signature did not prove he signed it. The court nevertheless found ample evidence that Palčiauskas helped implement its directives. Finding 7 holds that the ghetto, ordered by German military commanders, was unquestionably implemented by the Lithuanian civilian government, including the mayor.
The judicial finding concerns Palčiauskas. The separate evidence for Bobelis’s office comes from the order’s published form and the scholarship: Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis state that Bobelis and Palčiauskas issued Decree No. 15 on July 10. The published document identifies the commandant’s and mayor’s offices. The absence of an autograph on the court exhibit does not undo issuance in those offices’ names.
The unresolved autograph question is distinct from the documented administrative act. Replacing an unsupported signature claim with an accurately sourced account of issuance would be a correction. Using that uncertainty to erase Bobelis’s documented role would falsify the account instead.
BOB-R2 asks the publisher to identify the sources for July 7 and the attributed signatures, reconcile the chronology, and examine the June 30 camp decision for inclusion in the biography. It asks for editorial authorship, revision history and a reasoned outcome. The demand is to restore and verify the history, not to delete the official from it.
My Commandant’s Report preserves the competing order accounts and favorable testimony concerning Jewish prisoners released through Bobelis’s intervention. When Lithuania Made Rescue an Alibi examines how rescue became a defense of the wider record. Those interventions saved people. They do not erase the formation order, cabinet report or ghetto order issued in his office’s name.
Švenčionėliai has two levels of omission
The Švenčionėliai town entry says approximately 8,000 Jews from the town and other towns were shot in a nearby forest in October 1941 on the Nazi occupation authorities’ order. The ordering authority remains identifiable. The local participants disappear.
The ghetto entry supplies the county police chief’s order for confinement in the training-ground barracks and confiscation of Jewish property. It describes policemen and former local June insurgents driving approximately 300–400 Jews there, and about 120 county policemen and former insurgents assembled to guard the killing site. It also reports participation in the killings by a dozen or so former local white-armbanders.
But the ghetto entry does not give the visiting squad’s Lithuanian composition. It identifies the unit only through subordination to German Security Police and SD, introducing its arrival as witness testimony. The Germans are identified through the command relationship; the predominantly Lithuanian personnel of the shooting squad are not.
The Holocaust Atlas’s Lithuanian account, citing Bubnys’s 2009 study, identifies the Special Squad and expressly states that most members were Lithuanian policemen. Bubnys’s earlier published account identifies the visiting squad with the unit responsible for the Paneriai massacres. My Švenčionėliai research report places these accounts beside the encyclopedia’s wording and the survivors’ testimony.
The town entry removes local actors from the summary. The ghetto entry retains escorts and guards while withholding the shooting squad’s Lithuanian composition. Calling the latter a sufficient acknowledgment would reproduce the second omission.
German authorities ordered extermination, and German Security Police officials communicated the instruction locally. The predominantly Lithuanian Special Squad carried out the shooting. Both facts belong in the account. Describing German command cannot substitute for identifying the personnel who fired.
This distinction matters particularly when the two VLE entries are read together. The shorter town history directs attention to an occupation order without naming the local machinery. The longer ghetto history supplies some of that machinery but describes the visiting killers through the institution above them. Moving between entries therefore does not complete the account. The reader still needs another source to learn the squad’s predominantly Lithuanian composition. The correction must reach both entries, with the detail appropriate to each.
The published research also distinguishes disputed individual command dates from the squad’s composition and function. Resolving who commanded it on a particular date is a specific historical inquiry. It does not suspend the evidence that the squad consisted predominantly of Lithuanian policemen or permit that fact to disappear from VLE.
SVL-001 asks VLE to restore source-supported actors and acts, retaining German responsibility. It separates that correction from differences in casualty figures, dates and personal attributions. Those differences should be investigated where they arise. They supply no answer to the omission of police escorts, guards and the shooting squad’s composition.
Jewish life is missing from the town’s history too
The town entry’s prose provides no account of the Jewish community’s religious institutions, schools or economic history. A photograph caption identifies a former Jewish quarter. VLE’s ghetto entry acknowledges a substantial community with a synagogue and school and a major role in trade and services.
SVL-001 proposes a population addition supported by the POLIN Museum’s demographic account: 540 Jews among 1,340 inhabitants in 1897. The town entry already gives the total of 1,340. Its population history can include the Jews who formed part of that population.
The request supplies material from the 1965 memorial book’s translated chapters on Novo-Sventzian: prayer houses, a cemetery, schools, credit and welfare institutions, cultural activity, Zionist organizations and emigration. The full town report preserves source disagreements and the testimony’s provenance. The comparison concerns what the encyclopedia selects for the public town history.
The town’s Jews appear chiefly at their destruction. Their community’s life is absent from the prose, and the local people who helped destroy it are absent from the massacre sentence. The reader receives the Jewish dead without the surrounding Jewish history or the locally staffed machinery of murder.
The publisher has the passages and the requests
SVL-001 was transmitted to the Library’s designated address on October 19, 2026, with informational copies. LGGRTC acknowledged its copy under registration 7R-1366, dated October 20. That registration is LGGRTC’s; it is not evidence of a VLE decision. BOB-R2 was transmitted to the Library on October 23. No case-specific VLE acknowledgment or merits outcome was located in the correspondence checked through October 30.
The record establishes documented omissions and transmitted correction requests. SVL-001 accepts a consolidated reply provided the publisher identifies its decisions on the individual items. VLE can answer the source and wording questions already put to it.
The linked reports carry the fuller documentary record so that this article need not reproduce it. Their function is to make the comparison checkable: the encyclopedia’s wording on one side, the relevant document or scholarship on the other. The immediate editorial question is whether VLE will incorporate those documented acts and actors into the entries where readers should find them.
The omissions also define the work needed across the entries. Bobelis’s biography needs the formation order, the camp decision and the ghetto-administration history. The Kaunas-ghetto entry needs a sourced distinction between issuance and signature and a defensible date. Švenčionėliai’s town history needs the local formations and their acts; its ghetto history needs the shooting squad’s Lithuanian composition.
The publisher should identify any challenged proposition it rejects and give its evidence. It should publish the resulting corrections and their dates. Restoring an actor to one entry while retaining an unsupported formulation in another would leave readers with another fractured account.
VLE can write that Lithuanian units murdered Jews. Its Kaunas-ghetto entry proves it. The National Library’s publishing centre must apply that same documentary precision to the commandant’s biography and to Švenčionėliai. An official’s decorations cannot be allowed to occupy the space from which his documented acts have been removed.
Across the cases examined here, the challenged errors and omissions lead in one direction: away from identifying Lithuanian participants and their culpability. Variation might support an explanation of editorial error. Such consistent omissions instead point to an editorial agenda of exculpation. That is my conclusion from the pattern documented above. IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion includes intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the Holocaust’s principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany. In my assessment, the systematic removal of documented Lithuanian participation from these accounts meets that definition of Holocaust distortion. A national encyclopedia that repeatedly removes culpability from the people it commemorates is producing an alibi.
