by Mingailė Jurkutė, chief historian, Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania

The current director of the Genocide Center is trying to give the impression all that is happening are just internal department disputes, depot against depot, one faction of historians against another, or maybe historians vs. museum specialists, or maybe even brave, ambitious and mobile visionaries of the new administration against the academics at a small bureaucratic institution who long for stagnation and a light work-load. This is a terrific and naked lie.

Center historians are productive and their academic production and other specific Center production, for example, writing brief–barely two pages long–and exact findings of history, which often require examining just as much material as for an article in the normal academic format. And they want reform, they are proposing reforms themselves. This story is a very successful technique when you want misconstrue and hide what is going on, for example, as Soviet ideologues went to extremes to explain the partisan war was really a class war, or a civil war, and in any case… an internal social dispute.

But I want to return the real players (the sides) to center stage, because they are getting lost due to the noise, agitation and intentional mud-slinging (of which an example is the letter the administration drafted to defend the administration, not without pressure from direct bosses to staff to sign on in telephone calls made outside working hours, forcing employees to arrive in person at the workplace to sign in the midst of the pandemic).

by G. Jaruševičiūtė, ELTA

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda criticized scandalous statements on the Holocaust by Conservative MP Valdas Rakutis. He said he regretted people with such great political responsibility sometimes make these sorts of statements painful to the families of Holocaust victims.

“It’s really a regretful misunderstanding made on this very important commemorative day when we all again bow and stand in memory with the victims, the Jewish people during World War II. And it’s a shame that we sometimes hear these kinds of speculations by people with great political responsibility which cause further pain to relatives of the victims, and pain to our partners,” president Nausėda said at a press conference at the Office of President.

He expressed hope the correct conclusions would be drawn from Rakutis’s statements.

“I hope the conclusion will be drawn that this person’s opinion, specially that of Mr. Valdas Rakutis, in no way expresses the opinion of the party, the parliamentary faction or the parliament. I think there have been sufficient comments made and denials issued from the head of the party, but still we apologize for the lack of understanding and request no hurried conclusions be made,” the president said.

Full report in Lithuanian here.

Following International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) has launched an issue education initiative to ensure all 535 members of the United States Congress learn about the ongoing Holocaust revisionism campaign perpetrated by the Lithuanian government.

“The Republic of Lithuania is engaged in a cynical, dishonest, and morally bankrupt campaign to deny and distort facts about the Holocaust. Facts supported by indisputable evidence, which proves that Lithuanians engaged in Holocaust crimes on a massive scale,” said Dillon Hosier, CEO at ICAN.

“The Lithuanian government not only hides the criminal histories of Holocaust perpetrators but adds insult to injury by bestowing their highest national honors to those who are proven murderers of Jews,” Hosier concluded. “If the Lithuanian government is able to effortlessly lie about history’s greatest crime, then it begs the question: what won’t they lie about?”

On three separate occasions dating back to February 26, 2018, the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania (LGGRTC) falsely claimed that the United States Congress and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) “completely exonerated” Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis for culpability in the murder of Jews in Lithuania. In response to inquiries and objections from senior members of Congress about these false claims, Lithuania responded that these members of Congress were “just politicians” and that their opposition has no merit.

ICAN’s initiative to educate Congress about Lithuania’s campaign to deny and distort certain facts about the Holocaust will be launched alongside the publication of “The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal” written by Silvia Foti, available on March 9, 2021.

(JTA)–The U.S. ambassador to Lithuania has accused a senior Lithuanian lawmaker of distorting the history of the Holocaust and blaming Jews for it.

Robert Gilchrist, who took up the post in February last year, made the charge following a speech Wednesday by Valdas Rakutis, a member of the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, and chairman of its commission on historical memory.

“There was no shortage of Holocaust perpetrators among the Jews themselves, especially in the ghetto self-government structures,” Rakutis said in the speech, which took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “We need to name these people out loud and try not to have people like them again.”

Rakutis also said that two wartime collaborators with Nazi Germany, Kazys Škirpa and Jonas Noreika, were not to blame for the fact that more than 95% of Lithuanian Jewry was murdered, mostly by locals and often by followers of the two leaders.

The speech prompted rare recrimination from the U.S. ambassador as well as from advocates who monitor anti-Semitism in the region.

“It is shocking that on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, of all days, a member of Seimas should espouse distortions regarding Holocaust collaborators in Lithuania and shamefully seek to accuse Jews of being the perpetrators,” Gilchrist wrote on Twitter under the official account for the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius.

Efraim Zuroff, director of Eastern European affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement: “Rakutis has clearly demonstrated that he is totally unsuited to head the Seimas committee on national memory, unless lying about Lithuanian history is the main requirement for the post.”