This article constitutes a bill of indictment. The defendant is the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania — (LGGRTC) — a state institution whose historical conclusions now carry the force of criminal law. The charge is serial institutional fraud. The evidence is the Centre’s own record.

The question is not whether the LGGRTC has made errors. Errors are correctable. The question is whether an institution that has issued demonstrably false historical conclusions on case after case — and has never voluntarily corrected a single one — retains any presumption of credibility when it issues its next conclusion. The answer is no. And that answer has direct consequences for the criminal prosecution of Artur Fridman.

Each fraud follows an identical pattern: the LGGRTC issues a conclusion protecting a Lithuanian national figure from Holocaust accountability. The conclusion is contradicted by documentary evidence. The Centre does not correct it.

Here is the rap sheet.

Count One: Jonas Noreika — Declared Innocent, Then Declared a Rescuer

In 2015, the LGGRTC concluded that Jonas Noreika was not involved in the mass murder of Jews. Noreika signed orders establishing the Šiauliai ghetto and expropriating Jewish property. Approximately 14,500 Jews were murdered under his authority. In December 2019, the Centre went further and claimed Noreika had organized “a Jew rescue network” — based on a report compiled by a geologist serving as the Centre’s data protection officer. No rescued Jews were identified. Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission rejected the finding. Silvia Foti, Noreika’s own granddaughter, published Storm in the Land of Rain documenting how her grandfather organized the murder of Jews. The LGGRTC maintained its position. The LGGRTC asserts Noreika knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing — and simultaneously claims he was secretly rescuing Jews. From what? Himself?

Count Two: Jonas Noreika — Constitutional Absurdity

The Lithuanian government declared that Noreika is constitutionally entitled to the presumption of complete innocence because he was never convicted during his lifetime. By that standard, neither Hitler nor Stalin can be called criminals. The LGGRTC also argued that Noreika did not understand the purpose of the ghettos he ordered established. Lithuania does not apply this standard uniformly: the writer Cvirka, also never convicted, was declared a Soviet collaborator. The presumption protects only Lithuanian perpetrators of crimes against Jews. It does not protect collaborators with the Soviet Union.

Count Three: Brazaitis — “Exonerated by the United States”

Lithuanian state institutions repeatedly asserted that the United States had “completely exonerated” Juozas Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis, acting prime minister of Lithuania’s Provisional Government in 1941. The claim referred to a U.S. immigration investigation that ended when Brazaitis died. An administrative file closure is not exoneration. Congressman Brad Sherman exposed this fabrication in letters to Lithuania’s prime minister and ambassador. A sitting member of the United States Congress told Lithuania it was lying. Lithuania has not corrected the claim.

Count Four: Škirpa — “Not a Collaborator”

In a June 2024 report, the LGGRTC concluded that Kazys Škirpa was not a Nazi collaborator. Škirpa founded the Lithuanian Activist Front, whose published materials called for the “elimination of Jews from Lithuania.”

Count Five: Semaška — Murderer Maintained as Hero

Colonel Jonas Semaška was Chief of the 7th and 13th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalions, both responsible for Holocaust crimes including murdering the Jews of Vinitsa in Ukraine. President Adamkus awarded him national honors. Semaška’s defense: as battalion chief, he did not know what his soldiers were doing. He did not see them murdering Jews. He did not hear them. He did not notice thousands of Jewish civilians suddenly missing. The LGGRTC eventually admitted that Semaška took part in the Holocaust — but only after German records identified him as a perpetrator. Left to its own judgment, the Centre maintained the fiction.

That defense — that the commanding officer did not know, did not see, did not hear — will appear again in this article.

Count Six: Pucevičius — Murderer Rewritten as Rescuer

Izidorius Pucevičius murdered Jews in Šeduva — the ancestral town of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Lithuania declared him a hero and rewrote him as a rescuer.

Count Seven: Majdanek as “Tales”

The former Director General of the LGGRTC dismissed Lithuanian guard service at the Majdanek extermination camp on national television as “tales and stretching the facts.” As Eugene Levin has documented in his articles at Part 1 and Part 2, the guards watched trailers of Jewish corpses pass through the gate, smelled the smoke of burning bodies, and heard a Strauss waltz played to mask the sound of machine guns murdering eighteen thousand Jews. Three successive directors across eleven years never corrected her statement.

Count Eight: Jakubauskas — Ghettos as “Relatively Safe”

Burauskaite’s successor was so openly dishonest that universities and the Lithuanian Institute of History refused to cooperate with his leadership. The Seimas fired him within a year. Among his claims: that ghettos were “relatively safe for Jews.”

Count Nine: Institutional Threat

In 2018, the LGGRTC published a public threat against a Holocaust accountability researcher — an act without precedent at any comparable institution in the European Union.

Nine counts. Nine documented instances of institutional dishonesty. Not one voluntary correction. When the LGGRTC issues a historical conclusion, the documented record establishes that the conclusion must be assumed false unless independently verified by sources outside Lithuanian state control.

Lithuania simultaneously maintains two positions that cannot coexist. It claims that Lithuanians were often rescuers of Jews — that the nation’s character was one of righteous protection. It also claims that Lithuanian commanders in the areas where Jews were being murdered knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. Noreika — rescuer who did not know what ghettos were for. Semaška — battalion chief who did not notice his soldiers murdering thousands. If these men knew nothing about the murder of Jews, what exactly were Lithuania’s rescuers rescuing Jews from?

These are not sophisticated lies. They are crude, internally contradictory, and insulting to everyone expected to believe them. Lithuania does not expect these claims to withstand scrutiny. It expects them never to receive scrutiny. That the lies are so brutish makes the insult worse: Lithuania assumes the world is too indifferent or too stupid to notice.

That presumption now applies to Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas.

The Case of Ramanauskas-Vanagas

The LGGRTC’s position: Ramanauskas-Vanagas had no connection to the murder of Jews. In 2018, the Seimas formally recognized him as a head of the Lithuanian state. His remains were reinterred with full state honors, President Grybauskaite presiding, diplomats from thirty countries attending.

Lithuania’s own official biographies place Ramanauskas in Druskininkai in June 1941 as the leader of a self-defense unit. His memoirs state: “During the days of liberation from the Bolshevik occupation I commanded a partisan unit in the area surrounding Druskininkai and in that town.”

As I have documented, the evidentiary record for that area and time period is not empty. Archival material from the Lithuanian Special Archives, cited by journalist Evaldas Balčiūnas and drawing on the published work of the LGGRTC’s own current director, documents shootings and ghetto establishment in Druskininkai in July 1941. The Simon Wiesenthal Center warned the Seimas against honoring him. Lithuania elevated him anyway.

Lithuania has produced no record showing that Ramanauskas protected Jews, objected to anti-Jewish violence, or punished those who took part. No Lithuanian court has ever examined his wartime role. The LGGRTC provides the sole institutional basis for his exculpation.

Now recall Count Five. Semaška. Battalion chief. The defense: he did not know what his soldiers were doing. He did not see them murdering Jews. He did not hear them. That defense was false. Even the LGGRTC eventually admitted it.

The defense now offered for Ramanauskas-Vanagas is structurally identical. He commanded a unit. Jews were being confined, shot, and murdered in his area of operations. The LGGRTC asserts he knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing.

That assertion comes from the institution that declared Noreika innocent, declared Noreika a rescuer, fabricated an American exoneration of Brazaitis, called Škirpa not a collaborator, maintained Semaška’s innocence until external records forced an admission, and dismissed Majdanek as “tales.”

On what basis should anyone believe this institution about Ramanauskas-Vanagas?

The Fridman Prosecution

Artur Fridman visited his grandfather’s grave on May 9, 2024, and posted on Facebook raising historical questions about Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Lithuania restricted his movement and filed criminal charges under Case No. 02-2-00512-24. The prosecution rests on LGGRTC historical conclusions treated as the legal standard against which Fridman’s speech is judged.

The indictment’s own evidence exposes the fraud. Among its cited documents is LGGRTC letter No. 13R-645, acknowledging that Ramanauskas was recruited by Soviet security services in January 1945 under the codename “Dzūkija.” Lithuania is prosecuting a citizen for raising a historical question that its own documentation partially answers in his favor.

As Michael Kretzmer has documented, the Fridman prosecution is the structural inverse of the Eichmann trial: Israel put a Nazi bureaucrat on trial and exposed the system he served. Lithuania has put a Jewish citizen on trial and exposed the system that prosecutes him.

The nine counts documented above are not isolated failures. They are the output of a system designed to produce exactly these results. The Government of Lithuania exercises full sovereign authority over the LGGRTC’s publications and representations. Notice of mischaracterization has been delivered through formal Congressional correspondence, through written legal analyses, through direct submissions to Lithuanian prosecutors, and through Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission. Where authority to correct exists and notice has been provided, continued repetition of a corrected claim ceases to be interpretive disagreement. It becomes institutional maintenance of a known falsehood.

Lithuania is a member of the European Union and of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It has publicly affirmed commitments to promote accurate Holocaust education, combat Holocaust denial and distortion, uphold factual integrity in representations of the Shoah, and encourage historical research grounded in documentary evidence. Under the IHRA framework, Holocaust distortion includes the misrepresentation, minimization, or selective reframing of documented historical facts in a manner that alters responsibility, obscures agency, or converts administrative participation into narratives of innocence without evidentiary basis. That is a description of the LGGRTC’s institutional function.

Lithuania’s procedural defense — that the LGGRTC’s outputs are classified as “informational acts” and therefore not subject to judicial review — does not convert mischaracterization into fact. Procedural insulation is not evidentiary validation. A conclusion that cannot be challenged in court is not a conclusion that has survived challenge. It is a conclusion that has been placed beyond accountability. The same institution whose findings are immune from judicial review now provides the evidentiary basis for criminal prosecution. That is not a legal system. That is a closed loop in which the state produces the “truth,” immunizes it from scrutiny, and prosecutes citizens who contradict it.

Before the Holocaust, Lithuania had approximately 220,000 Jews. Approximately 96.4% were murdered — the highest rate in Europe — carried out overwhelmingly by Lithuanian neighbors. Lithuania has never punished a single Lithuanian through its own courts for participation in the murder of Jews. Zero murderers punished. One Jew prosecuted.

As I have documented separately, Holocaust fraud is legally mandated in Lithuania. The system is not broken. It is functioning exactly as designed. Legal legitimacy is not possible within a structure built to produce predetermined conclusions and to criminalize those who challenge them.

Why should anyone believe Lithuania? The record answers the question. No one should. Not on Noreika. Not on Brazaitis. Not on Škirpa. Not on Semaška. Not on Majdanek. Not on Ramanauskas-Vanagas. And not on Artur Fridman.

If Lithuania cannot tell the truth about events from eighty-five years ago — events documented in its own archives, exposed by its own historians, contradicted by its own Presidential Commission — and if those lies pervade every level of government, every court, and every state institution, then no statement Lithuania makes about any subject should be considered credible. Lithuania shows us its lies constantly. It shows us through its courts, its prosecutors, its state historians, and its criminal indictments. A state that lies systematically about the murder of 96.4% of its Jews has forfeited the right to be believed about anything.’

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)