Lithuania’s problem is no longer merely what its historians conclude. It is what the state does to evidence that produces the wrong conclusion.

There are many ways for a state to falsify history.

The crudest is to destroy the evidence.

A more sophisticated state does not need to.

It can promote the evidence that supports the national story. It can retire evidence that threatens it—not necessarily by suppressing the document, but by degrading the witness, changing the evidentiary standard, or describing the record in a way that makes the inconvenient part disappear.

And once the resulting historical narrative has acquired institutional authority, the state can weaponize it against those who refuse to accept it.

Promote. Retire. Weaponize.

Lithuania has now supplied an unusually clear demonstration of all three.

I published the underlying documentary record in Lithuania Changed the Testimony. The documents concern Jonas Noreika, Aleksandras Pakalniškis and the murder of the Jews of Plungė in 1941.

The significance of the episode, however, is larger than Noreika.

It shows us the method.

Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has spent years defending the conclusions its national narrative requires.

That defense requires historical evidence. Some of it comes from precisely the kinds of sources that Lithuania has elsewhere treated as problematic: Soviet interrogations, Soviet criminal files, recollections recorded years after the events, and postwar testimony.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about using those sources.

A Soviet interrogation is not automatically false because a Soviet institution produced it. A memoir is not automatically true because its author wrote it in America. Historical evidence has to be tested against provenance, context, corroboration, internal consistency and the rest of the available record.

But the test has to remain the same when the evidence changes direction.

Consider the Centre’s determination on Kazys Škirpa.

Lithuania did not merely tolerate favorable evidence. In reaching that determination, the Centre relied on a favorable proposition it did not disclose: that the United States government had comprehensively investigated Juozas Brazaitis and completely exonerated him.

The Seimas Ombudsman recorded the Centre’s admission that it had considered these undisclosed extenuating circumstances, and found a transparency defect. Weeks later, LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21 placed the same supposed American exoneration into the official defense of the Centre’s historical position.

In May 2026 Lithuania’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs conceded that “complete exoneration” was legally imprecise, and that the termination of an administrative........

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