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Lithuania Surpassed Its Russian Teachers

238 0
23.07.2026

Report No. 9R-598 is not an innocent historical disagreement. It is an official exoneration, manufactured by changing the rules of evidence to fit the result the state required.

When a document incriminates Kazys Škirpa, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre demands personal authorship, a signature, and direct attribution. When an anonymous newspaper report favors him, none of that is required. The antisemitic program issued by the organization he founded and led is broken up among subordinates so that none of it reaches the leader. An unsupported rumor that he opposed persecution is admitted as fact. Expulsion and confiscation are presented as moderation, because the written program had not yet demanded extermination.

The verdict chose the method. The method did not produce the verdict.

This is an indictment of the state institution that produced that result. It brings five charges: manipulation of evidence, fabrication of an American verdict, continued publication after notice, use of Lithuania’s Western institutional standing to export the falsehood, and intimidation of the researcher who documented it.

The method has a provenance. Lithuania learned it under Soviet occupation, and it now performs the technique with a polish the Kremlin never achieved.

Count one — the dual standard. The charge is not that the Centre weighed the evidence badly. It is that the Centre used one rule for inculpatory evidence and the opposite rule for exculpatory evidence, in a single document, at the same time.

Report No. 9R-598 does not conceal the antisemitic record. It prints it, then defeats it. The report reproduces the March 19, 1941 demand that Jews leave and surrender their property. It reproduces the March 24 objective of removing Jews and revoking the protection they had held since Grand Duke Vytautas. It reproduces the call to free Lithuania from the “yoke of Jewry.” Each text is then assigned to a different faction, so that none of it attaches to Škirpa, and each incriminating document is required to bear his personal signature before it counts. Then the standard inverts. An anonymous item in a Chicago Lithuanian newspaper, sourced to “last reports from Berlin,” is admitted as proof that Škirpa forbade the persecution of Jews, with no order, telegram, or signature behind it. Inculpatory documents required personal authorship. Exculpatory rumor required none. I set out the full analysis in “The Škirpa Report Cannot Stand.”

That is not source criticism. It is result-oriented adjudication. The Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing 32 Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, categorically rejected the report and named Škirpa’s antisemitism directly. The objection is not a private........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)