How Lithuania filed in court the defense Adolf Eichmann raised before he was hanged

Adolf Eichmann was not executed because he invented the cog defense. He was executed because that defense failed. In Jerusalem, he claimed he had not made policy, had only carried it out, and was “merely a little cog in the machinery” of destruction. The court rejected the escape route. It convicted him, sentenced him to death, and Israel hanged him on June 1, 1962.

On February 28, 2019, the State of Lithuania filed the same legal escape route in court. Its lawyer wrote it on letterhead. Its taxpayers paid for it. The state has not retracted it. The English translation is public. The Lithuanian original is public too.

The defendant was the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, the LGGRTC. The plaintiff was the descendant of Lithuanian Jews murdered at Lithuanian hands. The state-funded defense, filed by attorney Liudvika Meškauskaitė, argued that Jonas Noreika — Lithuanian state-honored figure, district chief, signatory of orders consigning Jews to ghettos in the Šiauliai district where they were then shot — “could not have possibly understood” that his orders would lead to Jewish deaths. He was, the filing held, “yet another cog caught in the Nazi machine.”

The Lithuanian taxpayer funded the filing. State revenues paid the attorney’s fees. The instruction came from inside Lithuania’s own institutional apparatus. The product is a public document of the Republic of Lithuania, signed on letterhead, advancing on the state’s behalf the courtroom theory the world rejected at Jerusalem in 1961.

The historians the state deployed alongside the filing were Alfredas Rukšėnas and Arūnas Stančikas. Their conclusions did the work the IHRA standard identifies as Holocaust distortion: they moved culpability away from a named local administrator and into abstraction, pressure, context, and machine. Their state-paid conclusions became the evidentiary base on which Lithuania’s legal position rested.

The factual claim that Noreika “could not have possibly understood” fails against his own signature. Beginning in August 1941, as Šiauliai district chief, he signed the orders establishing the Žagarė ghetto and consigning Jews of the Šiauliai region to it. He signed orders for the inventory and confiscation of Jewish property. Those orders are collected and analyzed in the Noreika inquiry submitted to LGGRTC. The Jäger Report entry for Žagarė records the massacre of October 2, 1941: 633 Jewish men, 1,107 Jewish women, and 496 Jewish children. Total: 2,236. Many of them were the same people his orders had assembled.

Six weeks later, Lithuania’s own International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes supplied the answer. Its Sub-commission for the Holocaust stated that Noreika personally signed the August 22 and September 10, 1941 orders for the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews of the Šiauliai District; that the victims those orders had assembled were murdered in the killing operations of summer and fall 1941; and that LGGRTC’s exculpatory treatment of him was “utterly unacceptable.” The same statement rejected the obedience-to-orders premise and noted that no ranking Lithuanian official is known to have been punished for refusing anti-Jewish German directives. Lithuania had written notice from its own Presidential Commission, a body on which LGGRTC’s own director sits. It preserved the filing anyway.

Noreika’s antisemitism predated his German-period authority. His 1933 pamphlet called for the economic and social removal of Jews from Lithuanian life. He then held administrative authority over a district in which approximately 8,000 Jews were murdered........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)