by Grant Gochin
A Lithuanian university published the contradictory wartime record in 2005. The Centre was told, and kept publishing.
Vilnius University Press published the wartime record in 2005. Thomas Remeikis assembled the American Legation dispatches from Stockholm and the Lithuanian material carried inside them; the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University appears on the imprint, and the introduction is signed Chicago-Vilnius, 2004. 1 Twenty-one years later the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania cannot describe the Lithuanian material in those documents as Soviet, inaccessible, or newly discovered in a foreign archive. That matters now, because the Centre is the state body expected to supply historical authority in the prosecution of Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius charged over a Facebook post. Its disclosure conduct in that case is set out in Show the File.
Publication establishes availability. It does not prove that a particular official at the Centre read this volume. The correspondence set out below establishes something different and harder: the Centre received direct documentary challenges to the historical claims it went on publishing, and answered them.
Introduction Already Involved in Memory Politics
Remeikis wrote that the collection contained “the earliest information about the Jewish holocaust in Lithuania.” 2 Six pages later the same introduction described Lithuanian wartime strategy as cooperation with the Germans, at least to some degree, to prevent Soviet reoccupation and to avoid a “Soviet holocaust of 1940–1941.” 3 The word that names the annihilation of the Jews is used again for the Soviet occupation. The equalizing use of Holocaust vocabulary was in a Vilnius University Press publication in 2005. I set out the doctrine to which it belongs in The Dilution of Death.
The taxonomy is more explicit than the vocabulary. The introduction’s table of anti-German opposition places “Communist Party, Soviet partisans, Jewish underground” in a single row and labels the orientation “Moscow controlled.” The text then calls that combination the only “system rejective” group and repeats that it was “all controlled by Moscow.” 4 The table places the Jewish underground outside the nationalist resistance categories, groups it with the Communist Party and the Soviet partisans, and files its orientation under Moscow.
The same introduction lists “N. E. Sūduvis,” identified as the pseudonym of Juozas Brazaitis, chairman of the 1941 Provisional Government, among the authors of notable works on resistance to German rule. 5 Remeikis also organized his own account around “The Politics of Passive Resistance,” a category he defined as opposition containing both collaborative and oppositional components, and he asked where cooperation with the enemy ended and servility began. 6 He explained that the documents reached Stockholm through Lithuanian networks, and that some couriers held official positions in Lithuania and could travel to Germany as functionaries in German service. 7 Resistance and administration were not sealed compartments. That framing was published by a Lithuanian university press. It is neither a Soviet pamphlet nor a foreign accusation.
Documents Already in Vilnius
The volume did not only supply framing. It printed the underlying documents. The Lithuanian Activist Front’s own memorandum states that approximately 170,000 Jews had been murdered after nine months of occupation, explains their annihilation through German economic and Germanization policy, and then describes Lithuanian intellectuals as the “second part” of the same plan. 8 An underground circular asks what right the Germans have to seize the property of Jews and “aliens,” and answers that it “is all part of the general wealth of the Lithuanian nation and the Lithuanian State.” 9 A September 1943 nationalist statement tells a German general that the June insurgents had acted according to a plan previously formulated in concurrence with the German Army, acknowledges that Jewish annihilation is still continuing, and says: “We will not mention here.” 10 An October 1943 declaration tells Allied and neutral governments that most of the more than 200,000 people killed under German occupation were Jews, and counts those deaths into Lithuania’s proportional national losses. 11 The March 1944 Baltic declaration retains the Soviet losses and applies the language of future extermination to what the Red Army might bring; on the surviving printed pages, the earlier German-period Jewish figure does not appear. 12 I set out that chain in We Will Not Mention Here, and the unresolved 1943 Lithuanian claim of repeated protests against mass murder in Produce the Protest. None of it had to be rediscovered in a foreign archive in 2026.
Škirpa: The Centre Goes Back and Says It Again
The Centre’s 2015 treatment of Kazys Škirpa concluded that the Lithuanian Activist Front program proposed solving the Jewish problem not by genocide but by expulsion. 13 I set out that document and its uses in The Škirpa Report Cannot Stand. Nine years later the Centre returned to the question. Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E), “Dėl Kazio Škirpos asmenybės,” dated June 25, 2024 and authored by Alfredas Rukšėnas, concludes that Škirpa did not betray the independent Lithuanian state, that he sought ways to restore its independence and undo the consequences of the Soviet occupation of 1940, and that he was therefore not a collaborator. The Centre published it on its own website on August 8, 2024. 14
On August 23, 2024, the Council of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing thirty-two Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, categorically rejected Report No. 9R-598 by its reference number. It cited the International Commission established by the President of Lithuania, which had recognized the activity of the Lithuanian Activist Front and the Provisional Government under Škirpa as antisemitic, and rejected the report’s effort to distance Škirpa from the TDA battalion and the mass murders at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas. 15 The original report remains publicly available from LGGRTC.
Nineteen years after Vilnius University Press printed the Front’s own wartime memorandum and a separate Lithuanian nationalist statement recording a plan formulated “in concurrence with the German Army,” the Centre returned to Škirpa and again produced an exculpatory assessment.
Brazaitis: Notice, Refusal, Concession, and the Page That Stayed Up
On February 2, 2018, Seimas Ombudsman Augustinas Normantas found my complaint against the Centre well founded in Pažyma No. 4D-2017/1-1558/3D-317 and recommended that the Director reconsider and give a clear, reasoned answer to every question, with a copy to the Ombudsman. The Centre’s compliance was Letter No. 55R-21 of February 26, 2018, which stated that the activities of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis had been exhaustively investigated by the United States Congress and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and that he had been “completely exonerated.” Letter No. 14R-82 of October 11, 2018 continued the same account and characterized Congressman Joshua Eilberg’s transmittal letter as an indirect apology for unfounded allegations. 16
The American document underneath the claim is a letter of January 13, 1975 transmitting an Immigration and Naturalization Service notification that Brazaitis had been removed from the active investigation list. He had died on October 24, 1974. No judicial proceeding occurred and no court issued a finding. The record is set out in The Brazaitis Fraud.
The Centre was then told, in sequence and in writing. My Ombudsman filing of December 12, 2018 named both letters and attached four independent opinions from members of the United States bar, each concluding that “exonerated” was a misstatement of fact. In September 2019 Congressman Brad Sherman wrote to Prime Minister Skvernelis asking Lithuania either to produce credible references for the exoneration or to retract the claim. He received no response. In a letter to me dated December 22, 2020, reference Nr. 14R-2020-11-26, the Centre answered that Sherman’s letter was “to be seen [in this context] as the opinion of a politician, but not as a new historical source or a new circumstance of historical events.” Sherman quoted that sentence back to Lithuania’s Ambassador in Washington in his letter of May 25, 2021, asking whether he should regard it as the Government of Lithuania’s official response.
Lithuania eventually conceded. On May 12, 2026, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Vidmantas Verbickas acknowledged that the “complete exoneration” formulation was legally imprecise, expressed regret for the wording and accepted that administrative discontinuation is not formal judicial exoneration under United States law. Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis transmitted that response to Congressman Sherman the following day.
The concession did not reach the Centre’s website. As of July 15, 2026, its published page still stated that Brazaitis had been rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice. The preserved capture of that page records the wording; the live page remains at genocid.lt, and the Lithuanian Jewish Community reproduced and translated the same notice in 2019. I photographed it again on July 15, 2026, and it was unchanged. 17 Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told a member of the United States Congress that the formulation was wrong. The Centre left it posted.
Same Institution, Same Pattern
This is not confined to these two files. In April of 2019 the chairpeople and recent chairpeople of the expert working groups and committees of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance expressed grave concern over the Centre’s justification of Jonas Noreika’s wartime conduct, cited documentary evidence of his role in the ghettoization of Jews and the expropriation of Jewish property, and measured the Centre’s treatment against IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. The wider record of disputes over Noreika, Škirpa, the June uprising and the national-memory architecture is set out in What Lithuania Calls Heritage, Membership by Violation and The Ministry of Memory.
The Centre whose Škirpa conclusion was restated in 2024, and whose Brazaitis page survived its own government’s correction, is the institution now expected to supply historical authority in a criminal prosecution over speech about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The conflict is set out in The Prosecution of Artur Fridman and Where Was Vanagas in 1941?.
Of roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania in June 1941, about 212,000 were murdered. Lithuania has the highest murder rate of Jews in Europe. The Lithuanian state has not punished any Lithuanian for those murders.
None of this is an accusation against Lithuanians. It is an account of what LGGRTC published, what it was told, and what it left published afterward. LGGRTC has had no right to behave as though the national story began after these pages. It cannot call this a foreign discovery. Vilnius University Press printed the evidence in 2005.
Footnotes
1 Thomas Remeikis, comp. and ed., Lithuania under German Occupation 1941–1945: Despatches from US Legation in Stockholm (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press / Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, 2005), title and publication pages; Introduction, p. 10, signed ‘Chicago-Vilnius, 2004.’
2 Remeikis, Introduction, p. 4.
3 Remeikis, Introduction, p. 10.
4 Remeikis, Introduction, pp. 9–10, table ‘Principal Political Parties and Resistance Groups Involved in the Anti-German Opposition’ and accompanying prose.
5 Remeikis, Introduction, p. 5.
6 Remeikis, Introduction, pp. 6–9.
7 Remeikis, Introduction, pp. 5–6.
8 Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, 19 December 1942, pp. 181–182.
9 Remeikis, Desp. No. 1244, p. 190.
10 Remeikis, Desp. No. 2680, 13 January 1944, pp. 554, 556 and 559.
11 Remeikis, Desp. No. 2502, 29 November 1943, pp. 503–504.
12 Remeikis, Desp. No. 3052, 22 March 1944, pp. 592–595. The printed volume marks a page missing after p. 595.
13 LGGRTC, “Dėl Kazio Škirpos veiklos Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais” (2015), file 201510_skirpa_pazyma01.pdf, listed in the Centre’s own 2015 archive at https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/2750/a/. Later scholarship dates the note to October 2015. No LGGRTC reference number has been identified for this document.
14 Alfredas Rukšėnas, “Dėl Kazio Škirpos asmenybės (istorinė-archyvinė pažyma),” LGGRTC Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E), 25 June 2024, posted 8 August 2024, https://www.genocid.lt/UserFiles/File/Titulinis/2024/20240808_skirpa_pazyma.pdf; copy also hosted by the Lithuanian Jewish Community at https://www.lzb.lt/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240808_skirpa_pazyma-1-1.pdf. Quoted passages as reported by LRT, “Tikrasis Škirpos veidas: didvyris ar antisemitizmui pasidavęs kolaborantas,” September 15, 2024.
15 Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community, statement on LGGRTC Report No. 9R-598 (9.6E), 23 August 2024; English translation posted 26 August 2024 at https://www.lzb.lt/en/2024/08/26/lithuanian-jewish-community-statement-on-genocide-centers-newest-report-on-kazys-skirpa/. The Lithuanian original is issued over the Community’s Council; the English version is signed by its Executive Board. The statement quotes Saulius Sužiedėlis, chair of the Nazi Crimes Subcommittee of the International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania, that the commemoration honors a man who led an organization which promoted violence against Lithuanian citizens of other ethnicity and incited antisemitism, and that this is founded on historical facts, sources and documents.
16 Seimas Ombudsman Augustinas Normantas, Pažyma No. 4D-2017/1-1558/3D-317, 2 February 2018; LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21, 26 February 2018; LGGRTC Letter No. 14R-82, 11 October 2018; complaint to the Seimas Ombudsman, 12 December 2018, naming both letters and attaching four American legal opinions; LGGRTC letter to the author, 22 December 2020, ref. Nr. 14R-2020-11-26; Rep. Brad Sherman to Ambassador Audra Plepytė, 25 May 2021; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vice-Minister Vidmantas Verbickas, response of 12 May 2026, transmitted by Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis to Rep. Sherman on 13 May 2026. Each document is hyperlinked in the text.
17 LGGRTC published response, https://genocid.lt/centras/lt/2969/a/. The page was captured and preserved on July 15, 2026; the Lithuanian Jewish Community reproduced and translated the same notice on August 22, 2019. The preserved capture is the durable source for the wording quoted here.