Lithuania’s public broadcaster has produced a near-perfect specimen of Holocaust distortion. It does not deny that Lithuania’s Jews were murdered. It arranges its words so the victims stay visible while their Lithuanian killers vanish.

The LRT/BNS article, “Lithuania to mark Occupation and Genocide Day,” opens by honoring those who died for the country’s independence, then summarizes the occupations of 1940 to 1944. Read the grammar.

On June 15, 1940, the article says, Soviet soldiers “attacked” a Lithuanian border post and “killed” Aleksandras Barauskas. The Soviets then “used over 150,000 troops to occupy Lithuania.” They “imprisoned, killed, or deported” more than 23,000 people. The perpetrators are named. The verbs are active. The acts are attributed.

Then the article reaches the Holocaust: “During the subsequent Nazi occupation in 1941 and 1944, over 29,000 people were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps, and approximately 240,000 were killed, including almost the entire Jewish population.”

Suddenly nobody kills anyone. The Jews “were killed.” By whom? The sentence does not say.

Then the article returns to Soviet rule, and agency returns with it. Once the Soviets reoccupied Lithuania, people “were arrested” and “deported.”

This is not careless writing. It is exact. The murders sit “during” the Nazi occupation, close enough to make the reader assign them to Germany, but the sentence never identifies who carried out the killing on Lithuanian soil. It names the occupation. It gives a death toll. It concedes that almost the entire Jewish population was destroyed. It withholds the perpetrators. That is Holocaust distortion.

A genocide without a subject

Holocaust denial says the Jews were not murdered. Holocaust distortion admits they were murdered and then manipulates who is responsible.

The record is not uncertain. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that Lithuanians carried out violent anti-Jewish riots before and immediately after German forces arrived, that German Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliaries began murdering Lithuania’s Jews together in June and July 1941, and that German forces and their collaborators killed the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews, most within the first six months of the occupation. The Museum is explicit that the Einsatzgruppen acted “together with Lithuanian auxiliaries.” In one village it describes, armed Lithuanian collaborators rounded up Jews, forced them to dig trenches and undress, and delivered them to the killing........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)