Lithuania’s Supreme Court treated death as a procedural endpoint, not exoneration. Its Genocide Centre turned an unfinished U.S. administrative record into rehabilitation, reused the claim for Škirpa, and recycled its authority through Europe.

On October 27, 2016, fifteen judges of the Lithuanian Supreme Court dealt with a dead defendant. Vytautas Vasiliauskas had died on November 7, 2015, after the European Court of Human Rights found an Article 7 violation in his genocide conviction. The plenary annulled the earlier judgments and terminated the reopened case because the accused was dead. In the same decision, it expressly confirmed that the rule in Lithuanian case law treating the partisans as a significant part of the Lithuanian national or ethnic group “remains relevant and continues to be followed.”[1]

The same decision identified the defect in the old conviction: the original proceedings had treated the victims as members of a separate political group and had not established the protected-group element required by international genocide law. Correcting that violation would have required changing the charge, which could not be done against a dead accused. Death ended the proceeding. The doctrine adopted in Drėlingas six months earlier stayed in force.

Nearly forty-two years earlier, Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis had died before U.S. immigration authorities could question him. The Lithuanian Universal Encyclopedia (VLE) gives his death as November 28, 1974, in South Orange, New Jersey. Lithuania’s state memory institution later converted the unfinished American administrative record into “complete exoneration.” By February 2018, sixteen months after the Vasiliauskas plenary, LGGRTC Letter No. 55R-21 was applying the opposite evidentiary rule to Brazaitis.

The Genocide Centre invented a different rule

The Immigration and Naturalization Service had been examining allegations concerning Brazaitis and Jonas Šlepetys. Brazaitis was never questioned. On December 27, 1974, Commissioner Leonard F. Chapman, Jr. reported that the sources contacted had produced no information of an evidentiary nature, that further investigation appeared unwarranted, that both names had been removed from the active list, and that the investigations had been deactivated. He also wrote that new sources would continue to be queried and that the investigations could be reactivated if meaningful information emerged. The documents are reproduced in Lithuania’s May 2026 package to Representative Brad Sherman.

Chapman did not identify Brazaitis’s death as the formal ground for deactivation. His letter records the evidentiary assessment and preserves reactivation. No American court adjudicated the allegations.

The Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) converted that record into a legal conclusion the United States had not issued.

Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as a presumptively reliable historical authority. In my assessment, its publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history. Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a historical claim merely because it has been published by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Any material proposition originating with the LGGRTC must be independently verified against primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship before it is relied upon. Until such........

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