The strongest evidence against Lithuania’s Holocaust-memory regime is not what its critics allege. It is what Lithuania’s own institutions have already admitted — and then refused to let matter.

The record is not hidden. It is acknowledged, absorbed, neutralized, and converted into exoneration.

What Lithuania Has Already Admitted

Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania is not wholly silent on Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. In 2019, the Commission’s own Sub-commission issued a statement on Jonas Noreika that directly contradicted the official state narrative.

Noreika issued orders for the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai District, the Commission acknowledged. Nazi authority over occupied Lithuania, the Commission further stated, did not diminish the responsibility of native collaborators. The Commission’s own language placed Noreika’s documented actions inside the machinery of Holocaust persecution.

That should have ended the matter. Instead, it revealed something more damaging than silence. The problem is not that the evidence is unavailable to Lithuanian institutions. The problem is that the evidence is admitted episodically, then neutralized institutionally. Evidence enters the system as documentation. It exits as exoneration.

How the LGGRTC Neutralized the Evidence

The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, or LGGRTC, carries the state mandate to research genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, occupation, and resistance. Its conduct in the Noreika matter was so extreme that, in April 2019, it provoked a cascade of formal condemnations from the international Holocaust-accountability community.

The World Jewish Congress called the LGGRTC document “nothing short of Holocaust revisionism.” The American Jewish Committee criticized the Centre’s legal effort to distort the Holocaust. The Lithuanian Jewish Community issued its own response repudiating the LGGRTC’s March 27, 2019 statement on Noreika. IHRA chair-holders, including Ambassador Georges Santer and Professor Yehuda Bauer, invoked the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion directly against the Centre. The European Jewish Congress later described the burden Lithuania faced in celebrating the Year of the Vilna Gaon and Litvak History while refusing to confront its own record.

Lithuania responded not by correcting the findings, but by preserving the machinery that produced them. In 2020, the European Jewish Congress reported concern over Vidmantas Valiušaitis’s appointment as adviser to the Genocide Center. In 2021, Lithuania confirmed Arūnas Bubnys as LGGRTC Director General. Defending History documented his June 23, 2020 appearance at an ultranationalist event beneath images of Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa; when the photograph was challenged, Defending History responded that the image was not manipulated.

The pattern continued past the Bubnys confirmation. In November 2024, the Lithuanian Seimas established an external expert council to oversee the LGGRTC, chaired by Vilnius University historian Professor Arūnas Streikus. On March 22, 2026, the council formally informed the Seimas Speaker, the Seimas National Security and Defense Committee, the Seimas Human Rights Committee, and the Seimas Freedom Fights and State Historical Memory Commission that it could not work with LGGRTC leadership. The council reported that LGGRTC leadership ignores its recommendations, withholds documents or delivers them too late for meaningful review, and avoids providing information. Streikus’s recorded statement: “Our key message........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)