Three witnesses with nothing in common reached the same conclusion about Lithuania’s Holocaust record. So did the historians the Lithuanian state itself commissioned, the academy, the state’s own oversight council, and Yad Vashem. The state refuses all of them and protects the one institution everyone has repudiated. A NATO and EU member that will not trust its own archive is asking its allies to trust what it will not.

In 2005 the International Commission, a body created by the Lithuanian state, approved the conclusions of a study it had commissioned from the historians Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis on the persecution and mass murder of Lithuania’s Jews in 1941. The study still sits on the state’s website. In 2024 the same state indicted a Jewish citizen, Artur Fridman, in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, and built the case on the historical conclusions of a different state body that its own courts decline to review and that almost every qualified institution has repudiated. Three private people reached the Commission’s conclusion on their own, from positions that share nothing. The state answers them the way it answers its own historians, its own oversight council, and its own archive. It refuses.

A conclusion that survives a Jewish litigant, a Riga-born filmmaker, the granddaughter of the perpetrator, the academy, and the state’s own commission is not a grievance. It is the record. What Lithuania protects against that record is a single institution, and the protection now reaches the citizen who reads the documents correctly.

Three readings of one record

I filed forty-nine formal submissions to Lithuanian state bodies since 2015 and met refusal at each one; the architecture is in Verdict First, Reasoning Later. Eugene J. Levin, born in Riga, made his documentary on the Baltic Holocaust and published a four-part Times of Israel series, The Witness That Cannot Survive Cross-Examination, impeaching the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre on its own record. The state has never answered him. Silvia Foti read fund R-1099 of the Lithuanian Central State Archive and found her grandfather Jonas Noreika’s signature on a 1941 order routing property confiscated from Jewish families to the Reichskreditkasse, set out in What Lithuania Did With the Signature. Three vantages, one finding. None of the documents they read belongs to them. All of them belong to the state.

The consensus the state paid for

The witnesses did not invent a thesis. Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis set the events of 1941 out in The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941, a bilingual study published in Vilnius in 2006 whose conclusions the state’s own International Commission approved in 2005. Dieckmann’s two-volume Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 is the standard scholarly account. Rūta Vanagaitė, a Lithuanian writer born in Šiauliai, and Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote Mūsiškiai, published in English as Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust. When that book told Lithuanian readers the truth about complicity, the response was destruction: in 2017 Vanagaitė’s publisher withdrew and pulped her entire catalog, and PEN America condemned it. Sužiedėlis is a Lithuanian-American historian. Zuroff is a descendant of victims. Vanagaitė descends from the people who did the killing. They reached the place the three witnesses reached, and the place the state’s commission reached. The finding is not contested in the scholarship. It is contested only by the institution the state funds to contest it.

The institution the refusal runs through

That institution is the Genocide........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)