In “The Impossibility of Ignorance,” I argued that Lithuania asks the world to believe Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas did not know what was happening around him in 1941, and then criminalizes those who refuse to accept that fiction. This second article asks a different question: from what company did Lithuania elevate him?

In November 2018, the Seimas formally recognized Ramanauskas-Vanagas as the “Head of the Lithuanian State, which was fighting the occupation.” Two years later, Lithuania’s defense minister placed him in the Heads of State Pantheon and called him “a role model for the new generation of Lithuania’s officers and soldiers.” Once a parliament and defense establishment confer that level of honor, the burden shifts to the state to show what Holocaust-era due diligence it conducted before conferring it. What file was reviewed? By whom? On what date? Under what standard? Lithuania has never published an answer.

The Soviet Union was a criminal regime. Its occupation, deportations, executions, imprisonments, and repression are matters of record. There can be no redemption or forgiveness for those crimes. Nothing here softens that judgment. But a truthful condemnation of Soviet crimes gives Lithuania no license to launder Holocaust-linked figures, criminalize scrutiny, or turn official narrative into legal doctrine. Lithuania manages history through fear, selective enforcement, and protected falsehoods, reproducing the coercive memory politics it condemns in Russia and Belarus.

That burden matters because Ramanauskas-Vanagas does not stand alone. He stands inside a Lithuanian hero system that has repeatedly collapsed under scrutiny.

Take Jonas Noreika. Lithuania honored him as an anti-Soviet hero and national model. His own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, later concluded publicly that he was not a hero but a war criminal. That matters not because family confession is superior to archival work, but because her investigation destroyed the protected legend from inside the family itself. Lithuania did not answer Noreika with a clean file. It answered him with honors, then defended the honors until the record broke through.........

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