Lithuania’s favorite defense is chronological. The Germans came. The occupation began. The machinery of extermination followed. Therefore, whatever happened to the Jews in Lithuania, belongs to Germany. That defense collapses before the record even reaches the main killing phase.

Months before the German occupation had settled into administrative form, Lithuanian political actors had already articulated the anti-Jewish program in their own words. In March 1941, the Lithuanian Activist Front’s “Instructions for the Liberation of Lithuania” declared that “it is very important on this occasion to get rid of the Jews,” called for a “stifling atmosphere” against them, and stated the goal of “eliminating” Jews from Lithuania. (The Lithuanian Government says that the call for “elimination” was an “incident” of antisemitism!) The LAF was not an obscure cell. It was founded by Kazys Škirpa, Lithuania’s former ambassador to Germany, and it operated as the principal political vehicle for anti-Soviet resistance abroad. That was not a battlefield improvisation. It was ideological preparation. It was political intent.

Saulius Sužiedėlis is careful on an important point. He rejects the crude myth that thousands of Jews were murdered across the Lithuanian countryside before Germans even arrived on the scene. But he does not rescue Lithuania with that clarification. He explicitly notes that instances of spontaneous violence were reliably recorded, that Lithuanian police and administrative structures accepted the German lead and at times acted on their own, and that Lithuanian police units supplied the majority of the killers in the destruction of provincial Jewry and at major killing sites such as Paneriai and the Ninth Fort. He also destroys two of the most comforting evasions in Lithuanian public memory: the perpetrators were not “a tiny rabble of misfits and lowlifes,” and those who refused to kill generally were not punished for refusal, while officials who left their posts rather than continue their duties generally were not punished either. Choice remained. Agency remained.

That matters because it strips away the three principal alibis still doing work in Lithuanian memory politics. First, that anti-Jewish violence was merely imported. Second, that participation was confined to a marginal social fringe. Third, that everyone involved was compelled. The scholarship does not support any of those claims. It supports something worse: a real field of Lithuanian decision-making, Lithuanian participation, Lithuanian opportunism, and Lithuanian ideological readiness inside the German assault.

The early record is already enough to end the fairy tale. In Jurbarkas, German orders to compile lists of Communists and Jewish men were followed by arrests carried out with local Lithuanian police participation, theft of valuables, humiliation of Jews, and murder. In Darbėnai, local Lithuanian partisans rounded up Jews for transfer, the men were selected and shot, and the women and children were confined and tormented. In and around Kaunas, the Seventh Fort killings were recorded as executions carried out by Lithuanian partisans under German direction and orders, while the Provisional Government was informed that the “massive liquidation of the Jews” would cease only in the sense of changing form and moving into ghettoization. This was not passive observation by a helpless society. It was collaboration in motion.

Christoph Dieckmann’s reconstruction points in the same direction. Independent paramilitary formations were absorbed into auxiliary police structures. Local police, auxiliaries, administrators, and beneficiaries were drawn into a system that was not only about killing, but also about seizure, labor exploitation, and advantage. The destruction of Lithuanian Jewry was not some abstract German event taking place above Lithuanian society. It moved through Lithuanian hands, Lithuanian offices, Lithuanian units, Lithuanian streets, and Lithuanian opportunities.

That is why Lithuania needs to answer questions it has spent decades evading. Where was Ramanauskas in June and July 1941? Where was Noreika? What was Škirpa directing from Berlin? What were Brazaitis and the Provisional Government doing in Kaunas while Jews were being marked, humiliated, isolated, robbed, and murdered? These are not hostile inventions imposed from outside. These are Lithuania’s own chosen heroes and canonized figures. If the state insists on elevating them as moral exemplars, then the state bears the burden of proof. It must publish the Holocaust-era due-diligence file for each one. It must show what was investigated, by whom, on what evidence, to what standard, with what dissent. No file, no burden met. No burden met, no defensible canonization.

That is one of the reasons I applied for the position of Director General of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Not because I expected to be appointed, but because the application itself forced a public test. If the files exist, an incoming director could release them. If the investigation was conducted, a new director could publish it. If the record is clean, transparency costs nothing. I applied to expose those files and correct that record. Lithuania will never appoint someone willing to do that. That refusal is the answer to the question it claims has already been resolved.

But here is what makes Lithuania’s hero canon not merely negligent but dishonest. The process by which these figures were elevated did not weigh their conduct toward Jewish citizens at all. Jewish victims did not enter the calculation. The question was never “What did this man do while Jews were being murdered around him?” The question was only “Did this man resist the Soviets?” That is not an oversight. It is a selection system designed to produce heroes without moral scrutiny — and it has performed exactly as designed. Lithuania does not honor these men despite an incomplete record. It honors them because the record was never consulted. Lithuania does not care about its murdered Jewish citizens unless their memory can be instrumentalized for diplomatic advantage or deployed to advance a political agenda. The commemorations, the ceremonies, the annual displays of grief — these are not acts of conscience. They are acts of utility. And the proof is in the hero canon itself: the state built an entire national pantheon without once asking what its honored figures did to the Jews who lived beside them.

The dishonesty extends outward. Lithuania commemorates rescuers abroad with ceremonies, monuments, and diplomatic speeches. It presents rescuers as though they represented Lithuanian society. They represented 0.04% of it. The state remains silent about the other 99.96%. At the same time, the men it places in its national pantheon come from the very milieu that produced not rescue but participation. Lithuania honors perpetrators as heroes and presents rescuers as representative. Both claims are false, and the state knows it. The rescuer ceremonies are not remembrance. They are diplomatic staging designed to preempt the question that the hero canon cannot survive.

None of this diminishes the criminality of Soviet rule. The Soviet occupation, its deportations, its executions, its imprisonments, and its systematic repression of Lithuanian sovereignty are matters of documented historical record that require no qualification. I have said this before and I will say it as many times as required: those who resisted Soviet tyranny deserve recognition, and I support their cause. But that recognition cannot function as a blanket. It cannot be draped over every figure of military age from the 1940s as though anti-Soviet credentials were a substitute for moral inquiry. Where was each man during the genocide? What did he do? What did he refuse to do? If Lithuania will not answer those questions before placing a man in the national canon, then the canon is not a record of honor. It is an instrument of avoidance.

And that is why Artur Fridman matters.

Fridman is not a side story. He is the test. Lithuania has chosen criminal process against a Jewish citizen for forcing into view the unresolved conflict between its hero cult and the destruction of the Jews who lived around those heroes. He did what Lithuania’s institutions refused to do. He asked the forbidden question in plain language: what were these men doing while Lithuanian Jewry was being destroyed, and why are they still beyond scrutiny? A confident democracy would answer that question with archives, investigation, and publication. Lithuania answered with prosecution.

So yes, the question now has to be turned back on the state. If Lithuania can elevate unvetted anti-Soviet figures into the national pantheon despite missing or undisclosed Holocaust-era due-diligence files, despite the absence of documented protest on behalf of Jewish citizens, despite the record of local participation before and during the main killing phase, then on what moral basis does it criminalize the man who points to that contradiction? By any honest civic standard, Fridman has shown more democratic courage than the institutions pursuing him.

Lithuania wants foreigners to believe that the Holocaust arrived from outside and that Lithuanian honor remained fundamentally intact. The record does not support that. Before the German occupation had even hardened into stable rule, Lithuanian actors had already supplied ideology, atmosphere, lists, arrests, humiliation, robbery, auxiliaries, and blood. That does not make Germany less guilty. It makes Lithuania’s excuses less defensible.

For external consumption, Lithuanian diplomats tell Americans and Israelis how much Lithuania values its Jewish history and how deeply it mourns the Jews murdered by Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators — always in that order, always with “collaborators” last, always without specifying that the collaborators were Lithuanian. For Lithuanians, the state elevates Holocaust perpetrators into its national pantheon.

To the world, Lithuania commemorates rescuers as though they represented Lithuanian society. They represented 0.04% of it. Lithuanian diplomats remain silent about the other 99.96% or blame it on Nazis and Soviets. The Soviets did not commit genocide against Jews. Lithuanians together with Nazis, did. But facts are not a component of the Lithuanian discourse.

By the end of the Holocaust, 96.4% of Lithuania’s Jews had been murdered. They were citizens, neighbors, taxpayers, doctors, teachers, craftsmen, the elderly and the sick, housewives, children and newborns. Not one of them was weighed in the balance when the state decided which men deserved national honor. Their murders were not treated as a disqualifying factor. Their murders were not considered as a factor at all. Lithuania built a national memory in which the Jewish dead do not count and the living are prosecuted for counting them.

In Lithuania, no one was punished for murdering Jews. Now, a Jew is being prosecuted for posting about it. Lithuania’s institutions will call that a coincidence. The record calls it a pattern — one that began before the Germans even arrived. And why should a state that never seriously examined that question, that showed no sign of caring what the answer would mean for its hero canon, and that, when exposed, responded with historical fraud and misuse of legal process, be trusted now? There is zero precedent for trusting it in this field. It has not earned the benefit of the doubt in the past, and it has done nothing to suggest it deserves the benefit of the doubt in the future.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)