The present uproar over the Trump administration’s alleged attempt to “weaponize” denaturalization rests on historical illiteracy. Denaturalization is not a modern invention. It exists because the United States once granted citizenship to men who facilitated the murder of Jews—and then denied that murder under oath.

Every contemporary denaturalization proceeding descends from that failure.

The doctrine was not born of ideology. It was forced into existence when American authorities discovered, belatedly, that genocide perpetrators had embedded themselves inside the American body politic through coordinated fraud, testimonial reinforcement, and the systematic inversion of extermination into rescue.

Lithuania supplied the model.

Murder Denied Because No One Was Left to Speak

The inversion succeeded because there were no Jews left to testify.

Approximately 96.4% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered—the highest annihilation rate in Europe. The killings were rapid, local, and overwhelmingly in situ. Entire communities were erased where they lived. Ghettos were liquidated town by town. Killing pits emptied regions in days.

This was not an occupation executed at distance. It was neighbor-on-neighbor annihilation.

The decisive factor was not German manpower. It was voluntary, enthusiastic mass participation by the local population. Lithuanian police units, auxiliaries, civil administrators, and civilians participated directly in roundups, guarding, dispossession, and murder. Friends guarded friends. Neighbors dragged neighbors from homes. Property was redistributed in plain view.

When the Jews were gone, so were the witnesses.

The perpetrators understood the evidentiary consequence immediately. When they later denied murder under oath, there were no survivors to contradict them. When they claimed ignorance, there were no Jewish neighbors left to say otherwise. When they inverted extermination into “rescue,” there were no rescued Jews to confirm the lie.

What followed was not a handful of false claims, but a cultural pattern.

In decades of direct engagement, every Lithuanian I have........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)