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........