On August 16, 1941, Į laisvę published a feature titled “Grąžinkim garbę Senamiesčiui” — “Let us restore honor to the Old Town.” It was not a German paper translated for local use. It was a Lithuanian-language newspaper, published by Lithuanians, edited by Lithuanians, for Lithuanians. Contemporary research identifies Į laisvę as a publication of the Lithuanian Activist Front, produced in Kaunas by Lithuanian propagandists and editors. The first issue appeared on June 24, 1941, before the Germans had entered Kaunas. This page matters precisely because it shows what Lithuanian society was saying to itself in Lithuanian, in its own voice, at the very moment Lithuanian Jewry was being murdered.

The article’s message is unmistakable. Kaunas Old Town, it says, had been degraded, dirtied, and dishonored by Jews. Now, with Jews gone, it could finally breathe again, be cleaned again, become properly Lithuanian again. The piece does not read like panic. It reads like relief. It does not read like horror. It reads like civic renewal. A society does not publish that kind of article in the language of deodorizing, beautifying, and moral restoration unless the disappearance of Jews is already being normalized as a public good.

While Į laisvę was telling its readers that the Old Town could finally breathe again, a Jewish child was choking on its own blood on a Lithuanian street. While the article celebrated the city becoming cleaner, Jewish women were being raped in Lithuanian detention sites. While the editors wrote about restoring honor, a Jewish man who had fought for Lithuanian independence was being beaten to death by the men he had fought beside. The newspaper was not published in ignorance of what was happening. It was published because of what was happening.

Jewish men who had served in the Lithuanian army — who had bled for the country that gave them citizenship — were dragged from their homes by men they had served alongside. They were beaten with rifle butts. They were stripped. They were starved in holding pens while their former comrades watched, smoked, and waited. That was Lithuania’s answer to Jewish patriotism.

Before the bodies were cold, Lithuanians moved into Jewish homes. They took the furniture. They wore the clothing. They slept in the beds. They cooked in the kitchens. They called it “inheritance” — as though the homes of murdered families were a bequest rather than the proceeds of slaughter. The prophet Elijah’s words to King Ahab belong here: “Hast thou murdered, and also taken inheritance?” Lithuanians murdered their Jewish neighbors and then inherited their property, and they used the language of lawful succession to describe the act. And they read Į laisvę over breakfast in those stolen kitchens and agreed that the Old Town had never looked better.

The Germans did not teach Lithuanians to hate Jews. The Lithuanian Activist Front was broadcasting anti-Jewish incitement before the Germans arrived. Lithuanian mobs were murdering Jews in Kaunas garages before the first Einsatzkommando officer set foot in the city. The Nazis did not create what happened. They permitted it. The German invasion removed the constraint that had prevented Lithuanian antisemitism from becoming exterminatory. It allowed Lithuanians to act on what they already were. When the political order collapsed, the facade collapsed with it. What emerged was not German. It was Lithuanian. The murders were Lithuanian. The hands were Lithuanian. The hatred was Lithuanian. The Germans simply opened the door.

Lithuania has never punished a single one of the killers.

That betrayal has a direct descendant in the present, and it is directed at the United States of America. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre fabricated a false claim that the United States Congress had “completely exonerated” Juozas Ambraževičius-Brazaitis, acting prime minister of the 1941 Provisional Government that signed anti-Jewish regulations and funded the TDA Battalion that murdered approximately 5,000 Jewish men. The claim was false. It inverted the meaning of official United States governmental documents. Congressman Brad Sherman wrote to Lithuania three times — in 2019, 2021, and again on March 20, 2026 — demanding correction. Lithuania dismissed the first letter as “the opinion of a politician.” It ignored the second. It has not answered the third. Three letters. Three demands. Three silences. The country that murdered the child now cannot be troubled to answer the country that protects it.

Today, Lithuania describes the murder of 96.4% of its Jewish population — the highest murder rate in Europe — by saying it “lost” its Jews. Lithuania did not “lose” its Jews. They were murdered. The word “lost” is Lithuania’s present-day continuation of the same project that Į laisvę began in August 1941: the project of making the murder of Jews linguistically comfortable. In 1941, the newspaper called it restoring honor. Today, the state calls it loss. Both formulations serve the same purpose: to remove Lithuanian hands from the act.

Jews who have absorbed Lithuania’s language — who call the Lithuanian perpetrators merely “collaborators” and say Lithuania “lost” its Jews — have been twisted by decades of Lithuanian falsification into participants in a form of Holocaust revisionism. Calling Lithuanians “collaborators” assigns the primary role to the Germans and reduces Lithuanian perpetrators to junior partners in someone else’s crime. Lithuanians murdered Jews with their own hands, on their own initiative, in their own communities, before the Germans had consolidated operational control. Calling that “collaboration” is diminishment. Saying Lithuania “lost” its Jews erases the murderers from the sentence entirely. The effect is Holocaust revisionism, no different in function from the antizionists of today who erase Jewish history, deny Jewish suffering, and rewrite the record to serve a political agenda.

The time for lies is over.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered, including almost the entirety of my own family. The murdered deserve the truth, and it is up to us to give it to them, because the Lithuanians have proven over and over that they will not.

The difference between 1941 and today is that America is not defenseless. America has Congress. America has alliance leverage. The Jews of Lithuania in 1941 could do nothing. We in America can do something. And we must not tolerate a state that treats the United States Congress as irrelevant while depending on the United States for its survival within NATO.

That is not confusion anymore. That is indictment — then, and now.

This is an excerpt. The full article with footnotes and documentary sources is published at https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/the-true-face-of-lithuania

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