Comparing Europe’s Prosecution of Perpetrators — and Lithuania’s Low Ranking

When people ask me where to place Lithuania on the European map of Holocaust prosecution, I tell them that it is one of the lowest. I tell them about my own file of refused requests to label my grandfather a perpetrator, not a hero. The state honors that placed my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, in the national pantheon remain in force. I have asked that they be retracted. Lithuania has refused because that is their pattern of denial.

Europe Chose Accountability

Across postwar Europe, every state with blood on its hands made a choice. Germany built the most sustained prosecution system in modern legal history and is still convicting camp guards in their 90s. Soviet Poland tried 673 Auschwitz personnel and ran the Majdanek trials from 1944 to 1981. France purged after liberation, then reopened the cases for Klaus Barbie and Paul Touvier when the witnesses were old. The Netherlands and Belgium worked through tens of thousands of collaboration cases.

The Exception: Lithuania

Then there is Lithuania. The country where my grandfather operated. The country with the highest Jewish destruction rate in Europe. 96.4 percent of the Jewish population was murdered. Most of them in pits, at the edge of their own villages, by Lithuanian hands.

One Conviction, No Punishment

In the 35 years since independence, that country has produced one Holocaust conviction. It produced that conviction only because the United States dragged it to the bar.

Kazys Gimžauskas was deputy head of the Vilnius Saugumas. The US Office of Special Investigations identified him, stripped him of citizenship for concealing his role in mass murder, and sent him home to Lithuania in the early 1990s. Lithuania declined to prosecute. The Wiesenthal Center........

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