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........

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