Truth Is a Crime in Lithuania |
Lithuania has weaponized criminal law to protect Holocaust perpetrators and prosecute those who name them. The mechanism is not theoretical. It is operational, documented, and expanding. This article constitutes public notice to the Government of Lithuania, the European Union, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and the Government of the United States that Lithuania is employing criminal law to suppress historical documentation concerning Holocaust perpetrators. The documentary record referenced herein has been repeatedly submitted to Lithuanian authorities. The absence of corrective action establishes institutional persistence.
On 26 February 2026, a Vilnius court convicted activist Erika Švenčionienė for denial or minimization of Soviet crimes. The case involved three defendants — Erika Švenčionienė, Kazimieras Juraitis, and Antanas Kandrotas — and resulted in a criminal penalty against Švenčionienė.1
The conviction established a legal fact: in Lithuania, statements about history can trigger criminal prosecution. Once criminal law enters the realm of historical interpretation, the rule of law imposes one basic requirement: consistency. Lithuania refuses to apply it.
Criminal Proceedings for Historical Speech
The Švenčionienė prosecution is part of a broader pattern.
Lithuanian prosecutors have initiated criminal proceedings against individuals accused of insulting national resistance figures or disputing official narratives about partisan leaders. Courts have opened cases against speakers accused of defaming resistance leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas and other figures central to Lithuania’s official historical narrative.2
One of those cases involves Artūras Fridmanas, a Vilnius-based real estate professional — and a United States citizen. Fridmanas was charged with criminal offenses for posts on Facebook that Lithuanian prosecutors characterized as denigrating the memory of Lithuanian partisan leaders and glorifying Soviet occupation.2 He is an American who expressed a historical opinion on a social media platform — and Lithuania opened a criminal case against him for it.
The prosecution of a U.S. citizen for Facebook commentary about contested history is not an internal Lithuanian matter. It is a direct challenge to the values Lithuania professes to share with its NATO and EU partners. The State Department has a responsibility to take note.
A separate case proceeded against Artūras Fridmanas in Vilnius District Court for alleged defamation of resistance leader Ramanauskas-Vanagas and alleged glorification of Soviet occupiers.3 In both instances, the criminal machinery of the Lithuanian state was directed not at those who murdered Jews, but at those who dared to question the men Lithuania has chosen to honor.
These proceedings establish a clear principle: historical speech can fall within the scope of criminal law in Lithuania — but only when it challenges the state narrative. Speech that rehabilitates Holocaust perpetrators faces no such jeopardy.
The Noreika Plaque Case
The murder of Jews is not an impediment to Lithuanian national hero status. In fact, so many murderers of Jews have been named national heroes of Lithuania that it appears to be a criterion for the designation.
Jonas Noreika — who signed orders confining Jews to ghettos, organizing their slave labor, confiscating their property, and petitioning for construction funds for a death camp — was honored with a commemorative plaque on the façade of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences library in Vilnius. His actions led directly to the murder of approximately 14,500 Lithuanian Jews, my own family included. His granddaughter, journalist Silvia Foti, has confirmed this documentary record in her own published writing.10
Noreika served as head of the Šiauliai district administration under Nazi occupation in 1941. Archival documents show that he signed orders confining Jews to ghettos and stripping them of property before they were murdered.
The tension between historical research and official narrative became visible in April 2019, when activist Stanislovas Tomas, a human rights lawyer, smashed the commemorative Noreika plaque during a livestreamed protest. Tomas reported his actions to police and waited to be arrested. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to three months in prison, and ordered to pay €2,242 in damages to the Vilnius City Mayor.11
Tomas could not have expected justice from the Lithuanian legal system. The law was not designed to reach him on equal terms. It was designed to silence him.
Lithuania’s criminal law governing historical speech is deployed exclusively in one direction. Private individuals who question official narratives about Holocaust-era figures face prosecution. State institutions that promote and protect those same figures face no consequence whatsoever — because Lithuanian law does not reach them. The LGGRTC — a state body — publicly defended Noreika in Lithuanian court proceedings, asserting that archival evidence of his crimes was insufficient or inadmissible. That institution faces no criminal exposure for promoting a documented genocidal mass murderer as a national hero. The Lithuanian government’s defense of Noreika is the only case of a national government going to court to defend their good reputation of a genocidal mass murderer.
The asymmetry is structural, not incidental. The law is written to protect the narrative of the state. It criminalizes deviation from that narrative by private citizens while mandating institutional silence about the actual historical record. When Tomas destroyed the plaque, the Vilnius municipality restored it within ten days. The same city that prosecuted Tomas for property damage used public funds to reinstall a monument to a man who organized the murder of many thousands of Jews. No official faced any censure for that decision.12
The pattern extends beyond Noreika. Laws enacted to protect historical memory are applied exclusively to suppress inconvenient history.11
Tomas himself stated the position plainly: Lithuania’s post-Stalinist culture operates on the same foundational principle as Soviet governance — absolute belief in a single correct answer, enforced by state power. The political system differs. The mechanism does not.
The Brazaitis Narrative
The same pattern of state-sanctioned historical fabrication governs the case of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting prime minister of Lithuania’s Provisional Government in 1941.
Lithuanian state institutions have repeatedly asserted that Brazaitis was “completely exonerated” by the United States. The claim refers to a 1970s investigation conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. That investigation ended when Brazaitis died. It was administratively closed without a hearing or judicial findings. There was no verdict. There was no exoneration.
Documents published decades later — including the minutes of the Provisional Government — show policies adopted during that period ordering the persecution of Jews. Members of the United States Congress have previously questioned these claims in formal correspondence with Lithuanian authorities.
The claim of U.S. exoneration is a fabrication. An administrative file closure is not a legal finding of innocence. Congress knew it. Scholars know it. Lithuania repeats it anyway because the state institution whose function it is to determine historical truth — the LGGRTC — is not accountable to historical truth. It is accountable to a national mythology that requires its mass murderers to be heroes.
Official Accusations Against Critics
Lithuania’s state historical institution — the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC) — has publicly accused critics of its historical narratives of engaging in disinformation and potentially violating constitutional principles. The Centre has threatened me directly with both criminal and constitutional charges for countering its Holocaust frauds. Statements published by the Centre have warned that criticism of figures such as Noreika or Brazaitis may expose critics to legal consequences under Lithuanian law. Primary archival documents contradicting the official narrative have been submitted repeatedly to Lithuanian institutions, including the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, prosecutors, and courts. They have been ignored.4
The London-based Centre for the Documentation of Antisemitism and international Holocaust accountability organizations have documented the systematic nature of Lithuania’s institutional resistance to historical accountability. The pattern is not the result of bureaucratic error. It is the product of deliberate institutional design: protect the narrative, silence the critics, prosecute the witnesses.
The implication of Lithuania’s institutional posture is unmistakable: questioning the official narrative about Holocaust-era figures creates legal risk. When criminal law intersects with historical fraud in this way, academic inquiry itself becomes a crime. That is not an accident. It is the intent. Lithuania practices Stalinism.
Institutional Silence
In early 2026, the Lithuanian government publicly advertised a vacancy for Director General of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. On February 22, 2026, I submitted a formal application proposing institutional reforms designed to align the Centre’s work with documentary historical evidence and international Holocaust remembrance standards.5
To date, no substantive response has been received. I therefore submitted a supplemental application on March 6, 2026, sending it to the following email addresses so there could be no deniability of receipt: taryba@genocid.lt arunas.bubnys@genocid.lt evaldas.gelumbauskas@genocid.lt, centras@genocid.lt, media@genocid.lt, kristina.burinskaite@genocid.lt
The absence of any response is not an oversight. If Lithuanian authorities believed the institution’s historical conclusions were supported by documentary evidence, they would welcome scrutiny. They do not, because the conclusions are not supported. The structural mechanism mirrors the Soviet model in which the state determined permissible historical interpretation and enforced it through criminal law. Lithuania adopted that instrument, redirected it, and institutionalized it.6789
I expect only deceptions from the Committee selecting a candidate to lead LGGRTC. A European legal review should be foreseen.
Selective Enforcement
The pattern documented above satisfies the classic definition of selective enforcement. Lithuania prosecutes speech that challenges its official historical narrative while refusing to investigate state institutions that promote demonstrably false historical claims.
This asymmetry violates the basic rule that criminal law must apply equally to all actors — citizens and institutions alike. Where enforcement occurs only in one direction, the law functions not as justice but as censorship. That is the doctrine of selective enforcement. It is what Lithuania practices.
Lithuania’s laws governing historical speech were originally enacted to protect the memory of crimes committed during Soviet occupation. That purpose was legitimate. Its application has been corrupted.
During the Soviet era, authorities treated certain historical narratives as unacceptable and punishable. The political systems differ. The structural mechanism — state authority determining which historical interpretations are legally permissible and prosecuting those who deviate — is identical. Lithuania adopted the Soviet instrument and redirected it. Instead of protecting Soviet heroes from criticism, it now protects Lithuanian Nazi collaborators from exposure.
When the state claims authority to punish historical speech, the boundary between historical inquiry and criminal liability becomes the state’s to draw — and it draws that boundary to protect itself, not to protect truth. Selective enforcement of criminal law against disfavored viewpoints is recognized in democratic legal systems as a form of viewpoint discrimination.
The Question Now Facing Lithuania
Lithuania is a member of both the European Union and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Both institutions emphasize confronting Holocaust distortion and protecting historical integrity. Both institutions are funding a member state that criminalizes Holocaust accountability while institutionally protecting Holocaust perpetrators.
The prosecution of a United States citizen — Artūras Fridmanas — for expressing a historical opinion on social media transforms a domestic dispute into an international matter involving the protection of American civil liberties abroad. It is a test of whether Lithuania’s stated commitments to democratic values are enforceable or decorative.
Lithuanian law is not a defense of historical accuracy. It is a mechanism for enforcing a fraudulent single narrative. IHRA must expel Lithuania from membership. The European Union must condition its continued funding on compliance with Holocaust documentation standards. And the United States government must formally protest the criminal prosecution of its citizen for the act of telling the truth. The European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression under Article 10 and prohibits discriminatory enforcement under Article 14. Criminal prosecution for historical interpretation, applied selectively to protect a state narrative while shielding state institutions from equivalent scrutiny, raises serious questions under both provisions. Lithuania is a signatory. It is in violation. Democracies confront their history. Systems that criminalize it do not.
1 LRT, “Vilnius court convicts pro-Russian activist for denying Soviet crimes,” lrt.lt
2 Delfi, criminal case against Artūras Fridmanas for defaming Ramanauskas-Vanagas, delfi.lt
3 m.diena.lt, Arturas Fridmanas trial for partisan defamation, m.diena.lt
4 Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, public statement regarding critics, genocid.lt
5 Grant Arthur Gochin, “Formal Application,” grantgochin.substack.com
6 Grant Arthur Gochin, “Selective Justice in Lithuania,” Times of Israel, timesofisrael.com
7 Grant Arthur Gochin, “A Job Posting Exposes Lithuania’s Holocaust Problem,” Times of Israel, timesofisrael.com
8 Grant Arthur Gochin, “An Institution Advertising for Fraud,” Times of Israel, timesofisrael.com
9 Grant Arthur Gochin, “Applying for a Job Nobody Should Ever Want,” Times of Israel, timesofisrael.com
10 Grant Arthur Gochin, “An Institution No One Honest Can Defend,” grantgochin.substack.com
11 Stanislovas Tomas, “Destroying a Nazi Plaque and My 3 Months of Prison,” Times of Israel, blogs.timesofisrael.com
12 LRT, “Vilnius removes plaque for anti-Soviet partisan and accused Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika,” lrt.lt