Twenty-four documented modes by which Lithuanian state institutions distort, minimize, or invert the historical record of the Holocaust

On May 9, 2024, Artur Fridman stood at his grandfather Aron’s grave. Aron was a Jewish soldier of the Red Army who fought against Nazis. From the grave, Fridman published a Russian-language Facebook post questioning the heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Seventeen months later, the Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office filed a 220-page criminal indictment against him.

The same prosecutorial office, in the years before that indictment, three times refused to apply the same statute to Lithuanian state institutions publishing the public exoneration of documented Holocaust perpetrators. That asymmetry is the procedural pattern. The Selective Enforcement Index maps it across fifteen comparator pairs.

This catalogue maps what the apparatus protects.

Twenty-four distortion modes operate across the Lithuanian state apparatus. They organize into six structural categories. Each is documented in primary-source material. Each has drawn correspondence from foreign governments, US State Department reports, IHRA member-state reviews, or Lithuanian-language academic critique. Each persists. Together with the Index, the catalogue shows what Mr. Fridman was prosecuted for questioning, and what the Lithuanian state does not prosecute when its own institutions perform the same speech act in the opposite direction.

Structural Distortion

Institutional outputs that misstate the historical record.

Declaration of “unproven” against the documentary record. A state historical institution publishes a finding that a perpetrator’s Holocaust complicity is “unproven” notwithstanding signed orders, archival documentation, or contemporary witness testimony. The October 25, 2015 LGGRTC memorandum on Jonas Noreika titled Apie Joną Noreiką (Generolą Vėtrą) Vokietijos okupuotoje Lietuvoje declared his Holocaust participation “unproven.” Noreika signed the August 22, 1941 order establishing the Šiauliai district ghetto and orders distributing the property of murdered Jews. The primary record is documented at length by his own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, in Storm in the Land of Rain.

Reclassification of perpetrators as rescuers. A state historical institution rewrites a documented perpetrator as a rescuer of Jews. The Stancikas LGGRTC memorandum of December 17, 2019 reclassified Noreika as a rescuer. The reclassification was repudiated by the Dean of Vilnius University’s History Faculty and by Lithuanian History Institute head Alvydas Nikžentaitis. The reclassification doctrine was simultaneously promoted by sitting Member of the Seimas Arvydas Anušauskas, former head of the LGGRTC and subsequent Minister of National Defense, in two separate venues: a January 6, 2020 article in Lithuania Tribune and an extended Lithuanian-language version published on 15min.lt on December 20, 2019, as well as in an op-ed for LRT.lt referenced by LRT’s own English-language coverage. Anušauskas served as scientific editor of Viktoras Ašmenskas’s 1997 LGGRTC-published Generolas Vėtra, which heroifies Noreika. The fuller architecture of the Anušauskas record is documented in “Minister of Defense Arvydas Anušauskas,” Times of Israel, May 8, 2023. Izidorius Pucevičius and Jonas Semaška-Liepa, both unit commanders implicated in the murder of Lithuanian and Belarusian Jews, were similarly rewritten as “rescuers.”

Documentary fabrication of foreign exoneration. A state historical institution claims that a foreign government, court, or legislative body has formally exonerated a Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator, when no such exoneration exists. LGGRTC publicly stated that the US Congress had “completely exonerated” Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, Interim Prime Minister of the 1941 Lithuanian Provisional Government. Congressman Brad Sherman, Senior Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, dismantled the claim in correspondence dated September 25, 2019, May 25, 2021, and March 20, 2026. LGGRTC dismissed the first letter as “the opinion of a politician.”

Manufactured archival ambiguity. A state institutional director publicly characterizes definitive primary documents as fabrication, exaggeration, or partisan misreading. LGGRTC Director General Birutė Burauskaitė appeared on Lithuanian national television and dismissed Lithuanian guard service at the Majdanek extermination camp as “tales and stretching the facts.” Lithuanian auxiliaries served at Majdanek on the documentary record.

Rhetorical Distortion

Speech acts by state-affiliated figures that minimize, invert, or trivialize Holocaust crimes.

Inversion of victim and perpetrator. A state-affiliated speaker publishes the claim that Holocaust victims were themselves Holocaust perpetrators, inverting the documentary record of victimization. Valdas Rakutis, then Chair of the Seimas Commission for the Cause of Freedom and the National Historical Memory, published an op-ed on LRT.lt on January 27, 2021 — International Holocaust Remembrance Day inverting the Holocaust. The article fits the IHRA-listed distortion category of attempts to blame Jews for causing their own genocide.

The “humane” framing of mass murder. A state-affiliated speaker characterizes Nazi extermination methods as humane or comparatively merciful. Rakutis wrote in 2000–2001, while teaching at the Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania, in academic objection to a Holocaust education curriculum proposed by his colleague Eimantas Meilus, that gas chambers were “a very humane method of killing.”

Trivialization through rhetorical question. A state-affiliated speaker poses a rhetorical question about a marginal Holocaust scenario in order to imply that the broader category of complicity is overdrawn. In a November 12, 2020 interview on bernardinai.lt, Rakutis asked whether “a woman who washed SS shirts” had participated in the Holocaust. The interview was published under his name as a sitting MP and parliamentary historian. The Lithuanian Journalists’ Ethics Inspector’s Service did not act on a formal complaint.

Linguistic euphemism for the Holocaust. State institutional language refers to the Holocaust through neutral or evasive terms that omit perpetrators, victims, or the Jewish identity of the murdered. “Events of 1941,” “the dramatic period,” “the difficult years” recur across institutional documents. The terminological evasion is structural rather than incidental.

III. Commemorative Distortion

State honor practices that monumentalize Holocaust perpetrators.

State monuments for documented perpetrators. State or municipal authorities erect or maintain monuments honoring individuals documented in archival material as Holocaust perpetrators. A monument to Juozas Krikštaponis stands in Ukmergė District. Krikštaponis commanded a unit in the Impulevičius battalion that murdered tens of thousands of Jews in 1941, including relatives of former Israeli President Shimon Peres. The US State Department’s 2021 International Religious Freedom Report records that Ukmergė District municipal government continued to resist removal despite a Foreign Ministry letter in May 2021.

Street names commemorating Holocaust dates. State or municipal authorities name streets after dates or individuals tied to the Holocaust against Lithuanian Jews. A central Vilnius street bears the name June 23rd Street, marking the date of the Lithuanian Activist Front-organized 1941 Kaunas pogrom. The pogrom murdered Lithuanian Jews before German forces fully entered Kaunas.

Posthumous military promotion of perpetrators. A presidential decree posthumously promotes a documented Holocaust perpetrator to senior military rank. Juozas Krikštaponis was promoted posthumously to the rank of Colonel by Lithuanian presidential decree on October 31, 2002. The decree post-dated the documentary record of his Holocaust unit command.

State-honored reburial of perpetrators. Remains of documented Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators are repatriated and reinterred with state honors decades after the events. Brazaitis, signatory of orders establishing the first concentration camp on Lithuanian soil, was repatriated and reburied with state honors in 2012. Kazys Škirpa, founder of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Berlin in November 1940 and architect of the LAF’s 1941 eliminationist manifestos, was repatriated and reburied with national honors.

Plaque reinstallation as performative defiance. After a state or municipal authority removes a plaque honoring a documented Holocaust perpetrator, activists reinstall an unauthorized replacement openly and with media presence. Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius removed the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences plaque to Noreika on July 27, 2019. An unauthorized replacement was reinstalled on September 8, 2019. US Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Cherrie Daniels publicly warned that glorification of Holocaust collaborators in Lithuania promotes antisemitism.

Legal and historical frameworks that license the structural and commemorative practices.

Genocide Equalization Doctrine. State legal and historical doctrine treats Soviet repression of Lithuanian partisans as equivalent in legal character to Nazi-era genocide of Jews, embedding the equivalence in criminal statutes and institutional mandates. The dual mandate of the LGGRTC covers both Soviet “genocide” of Lithuanian partisans and the Holocaust under one institutional roof. Lithuania’s Article 100 expansion has been litigated in Vasiliauskas v. Lithuania (Grand Chamber 9–8, October 20, 2015) and Drėlingas v. Lithuania (Chamber 5–2, March 12, 2019, with dissents from Judges Motoc and Ranzoni).

Weaponization of partisan memory. State institutional memory positions Lithuanian partisans as the central historical figures of the twentieth century while Holocaust commemoration is treated as derivative or secondary. The Seimas Commission for the Cause of Freedom and the National Historical Memory operates as the parliamentary memorialization vehicle. Ramanauskas-Vanagas is the canonical figure. State commemoration scales for partisan memory exceed Holocaust commemoration scales by an order of magnitude.

Suppression of postwar anti-Jewish violence. State historical narrative omits or minimizes postwar Lithuanian violence against Jewish returnees, rescuers, and survivors during the partisan period of 1944–1949.

Canonization of compromised partisan figures. State commemoration elevates a partisan figure to national hero status while archival evidence of compromise is institutionally minimized. LGGRTC letter No. 13R-645, September 2, 2025, in the prosecution case file in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, acknowledges that Ramanauskas-Vanagas was the subject of a Soviet security services recruitment contact in January 1945, under the codename “Džūkija.” Archival references: Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas, f. K-41, ap. 1, b. 205, l. 19; Personal file No. 3957; archival No. 21797. Ramanauskas-Vanagas remains the canonical figure.

Enforcement-Asymmetry Distortion

Selective application of speech-criminalizing statutes that protects state-aligned distorters and prosecutes critics.

Selective non-prosecution of state-aligned distorters. The same statute that criminalizes public approval, denial, or gross trivialization of Holocaust crimes is not applied when the speaker is a state institution or a state-aligned official. Three formal applications under Article 170-2 §1 against LGGRTC for the Noreika materials were refused by the Vilnius Public Prosecutor (August 2018, September 2018, November 2019). The February 22, 2021 Vilnius District Prosecutor’s declination of the Rakutis IHRD investigation reasoned that both Article 170 §2 and Article 170-2 §1 “can only be committed by direct intention.”

Prosecution of critics under the same statute. The statute that exempts state-aligned distorters is applied against critics whose speech challenges state heroization. Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen, was indicted on October 30, 2025 under Article 170-2 §1 and Article 313 §2 for the Facebook post described above. The state’s response to a single graveside post by a Jewish citizen on a date of acute Jewish family-memory significance is the comparator.

Procedural dismissal of accountability claims. Lithuanian courts dismiss Holocaust accountability lawsuits on procedural standing grounds without reaching the merits, foreclosing any judicial determination of the underlying historical claims. Approximately thirty legal actions filed against Lithuanian state institutions over Holocaust accountability have been dismissed on procedural grounds without merits review. The pattern is consistent across cases, courts, and years.

Dismissal of foreign correction as politically illegitimate. When a foreign government official or institutional authority documents Lithuanian distortion, the state institution rejects the correction as politicized. LGGRTC dismissed Sherman’s September 25, 2019 letter as “the opinion of a politician.” Subsequent letters from Sherman in 2021 and 2026 received no substantive institutional response. Ambassador Audra Plepytė did not reply to Sherman’s May 25, 2021 letter.

Institutional Distortion

Operational practices that perpetuate the apparatus across time.

The “rescuer” inflation. State institutional discourse emphasizes the small number of Lithuanian Righteous Among the Nations as numerically representative of population behavior, while suppressing the documented scope of Lithuanian-perpetrator participation. The documented mortality rate of Lithuanian Jewry approached 96.4 percent. The institutional ratio between rescuer commemoration and perpetrator documentation does not match the demographic record.

Institutional rotation of distorters. A state-affiliated official who steps down from one commemorative chair under pressure is reappointed to another commemorative chair. After the January 2021 IHRD article scandal, Rakutis stepped down from the Seimas Commission for the Cause of Freedom and the National Historical Memory chairmanship under party and diplomatic pressure but kept his Seimas seat. On April 8, 2025, by a vote of 111, the Seimas confirmed him as chair of the Commission for Lituanistics Traditions and Heritage Memorialization. The full architecture of the Rakutis case is documented in The Rakutis Standard.

LGGRTC monopoly and institutional dysfunction. A single state institution operates as the authoritative voice on Lithuanian Holocaust history. On March 22, 2026, LRT reported that the Seimas-established external expert council overseeing LGGRTC had formally notified parliamentary leadership that it could not communicate with LGGRTC leadership and that its recommendations were being ignored. Council member Algis Vyšniūnas described the institution as de jure a research center, de facto a bureaucratic institution. The full account of the council’s findings is set out in the Selective Enforcement Index.

How the Modes Interlock

The categories interlock. Structural modes produce the institutional output. Rhetorical modes amplify it through state-affiliated speech. Commemorative modes monumentalize the figures whose Holocaust complicity the structural modes have softened. Doctrinal modes legalize the equivalences the commemorative modes presume. Enforcement-asymmetry modes shield the apparatus from criminal-statutory sanction. Institutional modes perpetuate the operators across time.

A single distortion event typically traverses multiple modes. The Noreika file activates four: the October 2015 LGGRTC “unproven” memorandum (mode 1), the December 2019 Stancikas reclassification as rescuer (mode 2), the September 2019 unauthorized plaque reinstallation (mode 13), and the three Article 170-2 §1 prosecutorial refusals (mode 18). The Rakutis file traverses five modes across twenty-five years: inversion on International Holocaust Remembrance Day (mode 5), the “humane” framing of gas chambers (mode 6), the rhetorical-question trivialization (mode 7), the prosecutorial declination (mode 18), and the parliamentary reappointment (mode 23). The Brazaitis file traverses three: the LGGRTC fabrication of U.S. congressional exoneration (mode 3), the 2012 state-honored reburial (mode 12), and the absence of any Article 170-2 §1 investigation into the LGGRTC fabrication (mode 18).

The catalogue is not abstract. Each mode corresponds to acts the state has performed and to documents the state has published or refused to publish. The Index documents the procedural pattern. This catalogue documents the substantive content the apparatus protects.

What the Catalogue Records

Lithuania’s Holocaust history is not historically contested. The documentary record is overwhelming and consistent. It is preserved in Lithuanian-language scholarship, in German archival material, in US State Department International Religious Freedom Reports, in the Koniuchowsky Archive of 121 signed survivor accounts, in Yad Vashem and YIVO holdings, in Foti’s Storm in the Land of Rain, and in the indictments and correspondence catalogued above. What is contested is whether the Lithuanian state will dismantle the distortion apparatus or continue to operate it. The state has the institutional capacity to reverse each of the twenty-four modes. It has done none of these. It has reappointed, recommemorated, reinstated, and reindicted in the opposite direction.

Lithuania has not punished any Lithuanian, through its own courts, for participation in the murder of Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust. The same Lithuania has filed a 220-page indictment against a Jewish Lithuanian citizen for a Facebook post questioning the heroization of a state-canonized figure whose Soviet recruitment is acknowledged in the state’s own institutional records. The catalogue records the apparatus. The Index records the asymmetry. The record stands.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)