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 Times of Israel (Blogs)