by Grant Gochin
A Lithuanian state institution took an American administrative record, hardened it into an exoneration and published the result as a verdict of the United States. It has defended that claim since 2018. On August 19, 2026, ninety-nine days after Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told US Congress the wording had been corrected, the claim was still online in Lithuanian.
Everything that matters is in documents Lithuania itself has supplied.
What America Actually Decided
In 1974 the Immigration and Naturalization Service examined allegations concerning Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting head of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government, and interior minister Jonas Šlepetys. Commissioner Leonard Chapman reported that no information of an evidentiary nature had been elicited from the sources contacted; the names were removed from the active list and the investigations deactivated. He also said new meaningful information would reactivate the investigation.
That is an administrative inquiry, not an acquittal. There was no hearing, judge, cross-examination or finding of innocence. Šlepetys testified under oath. Brazaitis was never questioned; he was hospitalized after a fourth heart attack and died on October 24, 1974, before the INS reported.
The INS listed roughly seventy sources it contacted, including Jewish organizations, survivor groups, Yad Vashem, the Wiener Library, the Wiesenthal center and German document centers. No Lithuanian archive appears on the list. The INS’s source record therefore gives no indication that it had the Provisional Government’s archival files, including the Regulations on the Status of Jews signed by Ambrazevičius on August 1, 1941.
How an Inquiry Became a Verdict
The transformation happened in three steps.
Chapman: no evidentiary information elicited; investigation deactivated subject to reactivation.
Congressman Joshua Eilberg, writing in January of 1975 to Stanley Gecys of the Lithuanian-American Community: the actions were based on a determination that there was “no evidence” of anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi activity.
The Center for Reaserch on the Genocide and Resistance of the Lithuanian People, or LGGRTC, hereinafter Center, from 2018: complete exoneration and rehabilitation by the United States Department of Justice.
No American adjudication supporting that last proposition has been identified or produced. Eilberg’s letter was not a judgment. The INS did not “rehabilitate” Brazaitis. Yet the Center repeated the stronger claim in Letter No. 55R-21, on its website, in a court pleading, in Letter No. 14R-82, and again in a 2019 public statement.
This last 2019 statement is decisive on notice. It accurately recites the objection that the investigation ended after Brazaitis died and that he therefore had not been rehabilitated. Then it rejects the objection and republishes the rehabilitation claim. Whatever uncertainty could be claimed about the original 2018 wording, absence of notice is not available after that publication. It is also published in English on the Center’s own site. The claim of an American rehabilitation is therefore served to foreign readers in the language of the country whose Department of Justice is being invoked, and beneath it the Center displays the Eilberg letter as its proof. That letter does not contain the word rehabilitated.
Congress Corrected Them
The first official finding against the Center was Lithuania’s own. On February 2, 2018, the ombudsman of the Lithuanian parliament, or Seimas, found the Center had failed to observe the principle of transparency. It was in breach of a domestic standard on this file before the claim was two months old.
The Center was told repeatedly. Four American lawyers explained in 2018 that administrative closure was not exoneration. Representative Brad Sherman wrote to prime minister Saulius Skvernelis in 2019 and ambassador Audra Plepytė in 2021. Neither letter was answered. In March of 2026 Sherman wrote ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis, saying that administrative closure does not constitute exoneration under American legal standards and that no United States court, prosecutor or administrative body had cleared Brazaitis.
The Center’s response to the earlier congressional correction is revealing. In December of 2020 it told the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Sherman’s letter should be regarded as “the opinion of a politician,” not a new historical source or circumstance.
Put that beside the Eilberg letter. Congressional letterhead was authoritative when Lithuania could turn it into an exoneration. A congressman’s correction became merely political opinion when it cut the other way.
Then Lithuania Told Congress It Had Fixed the Problem
On May 12, 2026, deputy foreign minister Vidmantas Verbickas replied to congressman Sherman. He acknowledged that the “complete exoneration” formulation was legally inaccurate, expressed regret for the wording and recognized that administrative discontinuation is not formal judicial exoneration under US law. He also said the formulation had been corrected.
Whatever correction the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry had been told was made, was not visible on the two public pages concerning the matter. They remained live on August 6, August 12 and August 19. No corrected text, correction date, authorizing official or public statment has been identified. On August 19 I filed that record with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
I do not claim Verbickas knew the representation was inaccurate. His letter says the information came from the LGGRTC. The institutional problem survives either way. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry either verified a state institution’s public correction before writing to a member of Congress, or it did not.
The ministry was not encountering this dispute for the first time. The Center’s 2020 letter dismissing Sherman’s correction was addressed to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry itself.
One further detail belongs in front of any American reading this. To support its position the ministry attached six pages of American documents to its letter to Congress. One of them was the Chapman report, which states that the investigation was deactivated, subject to reactivation on new information. Lithuania sent Congress the contradiction inside its own evidentiary package: the ministry said the problem had been corrected while the American document it supplied still described deactivation subject to reactivation.
The Threat Came with the Claim
The Center did not merely defend the supposed American rehabilitation. On the same public page it warned that the research challenging its findings might violate Lithuania’s constitution and criminal code.
That matters. A state memory institution was preserving an unsupported American verdict while invoking criminal law against research contesting it. The warning was not abstract; it was attached to the dispute itself.
The surrounding enforcement record makes the warning harder to dismiss. Algimantas Dailidė was denaturalized in the United States after the government proved his Saugumas service and arrests of Jews; after returning to Lithuania he served no punishment. Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jew, meanwhile has a criminal hearing scheduled for August 26 under Article 170-2 § 1 over Holocaust-era historical speech. The cases are not legally identical. The contrast is institutional: criminal-law machinery exists for historical speech while the Center’s unsupported claim of an American rehabilitation remains uncorrected.
An Institution That Cannot Be Corrected
The obvious response is that this is an administrative failure and administrative failures get fixed. In this case every avenue has been tried, and every one closed.
The Centre will not correct itself. It has had the objection in precise legal terms since 2018, printed it in its own publication in 2019, rejected it, and continued to publish.
Oversight does not reach it. The Seimas ombudsman found a transparency breach in February of 2018. The finding changed nothing.
The prosecutor cannot reach it. The 2019 complaint was refused on a question of intent, not on the accuracy of the claim.
The courts do not reach it, and this is the part Lithuanians should look at the hardest. When the Center’s products were challenged, its own lawyers argued, and the Vilnius District Administrative Court accepted, that those outputs are essentially informational, create no rights or duties, carry no appeal procedure and fall outside judicial review. The Center won that argument. It now shelters behind it against everyone.
The government does not reach it. A ministerial letter to a foreign legislator is not an administrative act and cannot withdraw an instrument issued by a separate legal person. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry conceded this legal defect to the US Congress in May of 2026 and the letters still stand, unwithdrawn and unreissued.
Direct demand does not reach it. A
formal administrative demand of July 17, 2026, for withdrawal, correction and reissue of Letters Nos. 55R-21 and 14R-82 has drawn no response of any kind. Not a refusal. Not an acknowledgment of receipt. Not a request for further time.
And the Seimas could not even seat a director. On June 11, 2026 it rejected the nominee proposed to lead the Center, twenty-eight votes to forty-three with eighteen abstentions.
Set these down together and the conclusion is not rhetorical, it’s arithmetical. A statement about the acts of the United States, published by a Lithuanian state body, conceded by Lithuania’s own foreign ministry to be legally imprecise, has no identified mechanism for remedy anywhere inside the Republic of Lithuania. Not voluntary correction. Not oversight. Not prosecution. Not judicial review. Not ministerial intervention. Not direct demand.
What remains is the Lithuanian parliament’s legislative power. The Center was created by statute. The Seimas can reform it through statute. In this regard dissolution and reconstitution are no longer punitive proposals; they are the credible way to build a corrective mechanism where none presently exists.
What the Center Costs Lithuania
I want to be careful here, because this is an argument for Lithuania rather than against it.
The damage does not confine itself to one institution, it moves into everything the Center touches, and the Center touches a great deal.
It has compromised Lithuanian scholarship. When the Center published its 2024 report on Kazys Škirpa, Lithuanian historians said so publicly. As LRT reported in September of 2024, Saulius Sužiedėlis stated that no corresponding prohibition on persecuting Jews has been found in primary archival sources or memoirs; Simonas Jazavita questioned the chronology; Valdemaras Klumbys criticized the report’s source selection as leaning toward exoneration. The dispute is internal to Lithuanian historical scholarship, not an accusation imported from abroad. I set out the documentary problems with that report in an open letter to the Center’s Council, and the report itself is public.
It has compromised the courts. The doctrine which shields the Center from review was manufactured in the Center’s own pleading. A state research body may publish historical determinations under the authority of the state while its own litigation position places those determinations outside the ordinary machinery of administrative appeal and judicial review.
It has compromised the criminal law. An institution unable to defend its sourcing pointed to the constitution and the criminal code in the same breath as the disputed claim. This is the environment in which a Lithuanian Jew now faces a hearing over historical speech.
It has compromised Lithuanian diplomacy. This is the clearest instance. The Foreign Ministry wrote to the United States Congress on the Center’s information, and what the Centre supplied was not true. Lithuania’s diplomatic word was spent on the Centre’s error. That cost falls on Lithuanian diplomats who had nothing to do with it, and it will fall on them again the next time Vilnius needs Washington to take a written assurance at face value.
It has compromised Lithuania’s standing abroad. The Lithuanian Jewish Community, on behalf of thirty-two Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, rejected the Center’s 2024 report outright. IHRA’s own expert chairpeople had already published a statement of grave concern about the Center in 2019. The Center also exports the problem: a municipality in France was invited to unveil a commemorative plaque on the strength of credentials the Center supplied.
It also damages the thing the Center exists to protect. Lithuania has a real and terrible twentieth-century history of Soviet occupation, mass deportation, killing and repression, and it has the right to let the world hear about it. An institution which spent eight years defending a fabricated American verdict is the worst possible custodian of those claims, because it teaches foreign governments to discount whatever it says. Lithuanians who care about the deportations should want this Center closed more urgently than I do. It is cheapening their credibility.
The Alliance Question
The United States stations substantial forces in Lithuania. The rotation which arrived in October of 2025 brought two battalions of the 1st Cavalry Division with Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Paladin howitzers, to facilities Lithuania built for them at Pabradė. NATO’s Article 5 turns Lithuanian sovereignty into an American security obligation.
Set that against this record. A Lithuanian state institution attributed to American institutions a verdict they never issued. Congress corrected the attribution. The Center dismissed the correction. Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry eventually conceded the legal defect, told Congress the wording had been corrected, but the dispted claim remained public.
If a representation this easy to verify required eight years, four American legal opinions, repeated congressional correspondence and an IHRA filing, what standard of verification should Washington apply to Lithuanian assurances that cannot be checked with one click?
Reliability is not a subject-matter quality. It does not switch off for the past and switch on for defense procurement, intelligence sharing, sanctions compliance or export controls, where Washington necessarily takes Vilnius at its word and cannot inspect the underlying record. Nothing here suggests bad faith across the Lithuanian state. It does suggest that where a state institution has been shown to be wrong and has not corrected itself in eight years, and where no domestic mechanism can compel it to, an assurance from that quarter is a starting point for verification rather than a substitute for it.
The response to documentary challenge has not been confined to the Center. In February of 2025 Lithuania’s then-defense minister Laurynas Kaščiūnas publicly called me a Russian agent. I am an American citizen, and the documents in question are held in Lithuanian archives. A minister of an allied government utilized Moscow’s own instrument and aimed it at a citizen of the Alliance’s guarantor. This is a second ministry, and it’s the same reflex.
That is the Alliance issue. Not whether every Lithuanian institution is dishonest, not whether every Lithuanian official shares in this sort of conduct by the Center: the question is what confidence an ally should extend to an official representation once a documented correction failure of this kind exists.
This is also not an accusation against Lithuanians as a people. More than forty Lithuanian scholars and public figures objected when Brazaitis was reburied with honors in 2012. The dispute is with the state institutions which create, defend and refuse to correct the record.
IHRA Warned Lithuania
In 2019 IHRA’s own expert chairpeople expressed grave concern about the same Center’s treatment of Jonas Noreika and described the Center’s text as part of a series of attempts to rehabilitate his reputation. They urged Lithuania and the Center to acknowledge and condemn his wartime activities. No act satisfying that request has been identified in the record before me. The apparatus these men served was itself seized in the coup of July of 1941, and the impunity has been continuous since.
The Brazaitis file therefore is not an isolated quarrel over a word. It is evidence about how the same state memory institution handles inconvenient documentary correction, seven years after being told.
What Lithuania Can Do
The immediate remedy is simple. Correct the two public pages with dated notices. Withdraw and reissue Letters Nos. 55R-21 and 14R-82. Tell representative Sherman exactly what the American documents say. Identify the supposed correction the Foreign Ministry said existed. Notify every institution that received the false attribution.
None of that requires Lithuania to accept my view of Brazaitis. It requires Lithuania to state American law and American fact accurately.
The structural remedy is harder to state and harder to avoid. Every corrective route inside Lithuania has been tried on this file and every one has failed. What remains is the authority who created the institution. The Seimas should dissolve the Genocide and Resistance Research Center, transfer its archives and staff to a body constituted under a new statute, and write into that statute the things the present Center lacks: a published correction procedure with fixed deadlines, outputs which are subject to administrative and judicial review, a duty to answer written correction demands, and independent academic oversight with foreign members. Lithuania would lose nothing it should want to keep.
Washington should do something equally simple: verify independently. A close ally deserves cooperation, but cooperation does not require credulity.
The American record did not exonerate Brazaitis. Lithuania’s state institution turned it into an exoneration anyway, defended it after notice and left it published after Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told Congress it had been corrected.
That is not a dispute about 1941. It is a present-day test of whether an American ally corrects a false statement after it is caught.