A state can keep a Holocaust museum and defend a man whose signature sits on a 1941 order concentrating Jewish people into a ghetto, and Lithuania does both without apparent strain. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius runs a permanent exhibition on the murder of the country’s Jewish people. In the same years, an official research centre has defended the wartime record of Jonas Noreika, an anti-Soviet partisan hero named in the paperwork of the Siauliai district in the summer of 1941. Acknowledgement in general, exculpation in particular: the two are held together, and held calmly.
A shortage of heroes
The condition underneath is a century that changed hands too often. Soviet occupation in 1940, German occupation from 1941 to 1944, then the Soviets again until independence at the start of the 1990s. The anti-Soviet suffering was not invented: mass deportation and killing ran for decades, and a state rebuilt after 1990 needed usable heroes to stand on. It found them in the Forest Brothers, the partisans who fought the returning Soviets, and in named resistance figures of the 1940s.
Underneath those figures sits the other occupation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the Germans murdered about ninety per cent of Lithuania’s Jewish people, one of the highest rates in Europe, that detachments of the Einsatzgruppen together with Lithuanian auxiliaries began the killing in June and July 1941, and that Lithuanians carried out violent riots against Jewish people both shortly before and immediately after the German arrival. Yad Vashem puts the Jewish population at roughly 220,000 when Germany invaded in June 1941, and about 200,000 of them were killed, most by the end of that year. The two histories do not sit side by side so much as overlap in particular people. Some of the material a national story is built from also touches the summer of 1941.
Certifying the past
That overlap is managed, where it is managed, by an institution. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre is a state body charged with studying the crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations. It issues the findings that certify who counts as a hero of the resistance, and it has become the focus of a charge that it minimises collaboration. Its defenders put the same fact the other way, that it holds a line against a foreign campaign to smear the nation’s dead. Both descriptions fit its position. The centre sits exactly where the two histories cross, and an institution placed there produces findings that read as history and function as adjudication.
A signed order
Jonas Noreika, who went by the codename General Vetra, is honoured as a hero of the anti-Soviet resistance. A signed order of 22 August 1941 ties him to concentrating the Jewish people of the Siauliai district into the Zagare ghetto and to the disposal of Jewish property. His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, set out the documentation in The Nazi’s Granddaughter (2021). Grant Gochin, a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish people, sued the research centre to overturn its conclusions about Noreika and lost. On 2 April 2020 the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the suit on jurisdictional grounds and ordered him to pay 950 euros in costs. The ruling settled who may decide the question, not what Noreika did.
The centre’s own 2015 report is where the shape is clearest. It concluded that Noreika “nedalyvavęs žydų masinėse naikinimo operacijose” (“did not take part in mass extermination operations”), while conceding that the Nazis “pavyko įtraukti […] į su žydų izoliavimu susijusių reikalų tvarkymą” (“succeeded in bringing […] into the administration of affairs connected with the isolation of Jews”). Isolation conceded, extermination denied: the dispute lives in that distinction, and it arrives as an administrative sentence rather than a slogan, which is part of what makes it hold.
Books off the shelves
The pattern is not confined to a courtroom. Our People, by Ruta Vanagaite and the Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff (2016), broke a domestic taboo on local participation in the killing. In late October 2017 the publisher Alma Littera recalled all of Vanagaite’s books after she raised questions about the partisan leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, the chief executive calling her statements incompatible with the values of the publishing house. A recall is a commercial decision, not a prosecution, which is the point. The narrative is not kept by the state alone. It is kept by institutions that decide they know where the line runs.
Even-handed on paper
At the edge sits a memory law. Article 170-2 of the Criminal Code, in force since 2010, criminalises the public condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of crimes committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against Lithuania or its inhabitants, where the conduct is also threatening or abusive or disturbs public order. The statute is even-handed in its wording. The one prosecution to reach a courtroom is not: it turns on the approval of Soviet crimes and the denigration of the partisans, not on the Nazi crimes the same law also names.
In March 2026 the Vilnius District Court opened the case of Artur Fridman, charged with public approval of Soviet crimes and defamation of the memory of the dead, over a Facebook post said to have called the partisans “forest bandits” and Ramanauskas-Vanagas a “pseudo-hero”. He denies the charge. Advocates for Fridman, among them Gochin, describe the same prosecution as a man tried for honouring his Jewish grandfather, a Red Army veteran, and attach to it a 220-page indictment and travel restrictions.
Mixed messages
A tidy version would call this denial, and it would be wrong. Lithuania apologised at the level of the head of state, when President Brazauskas addressed the Knesset in 1995. It funds the Jewish museum and its Holocaust exhibition, set up an international commission on the two occupations in 1998, and has prosecuted collaborators: Aleksandras Lileikis was charged before his death in 2000, and Kazys Gimzauskas was convicted in 2001 of taking part in the Nazi killing of Jewish people. The record is mixed rather than closed.
The Soviet occupation is not a pretext either. The partisans faced a real occupier, and their victimhood is not a story the state made up. What the case turns on is a collision of two true things: a people genuinely brutalised by the Soviets, some of whose heroes were also present at the murder of their Jewish neighbours. A person persecuted by one occupier could be a perpetrator under the other, and both facts hold only when neither is allowed to cancel the other.
There is an external hand on the scale as well. Russia has long used Baltic wartime collaboration as a weapon against the Baltic states, which raises the cost of an honest reckoning and makes any Lithuanian who attempts one, easy to caricature as doing Moscow’s work. That is part of the condition the country reads its past inside, not an excuse for the reading it settles on.
Design or difficulty
Whether this is design or difficulty is the question the material did not close (yet). The Noreika record, with its careful administrative distinction held across a court case, leans towards something deliberate. The wider picture, museum and commission and prosecutions set against the recalls and the memory law, looks more like a small nation holding two incompatible truths under pressure and managing the strain case by case. The evidence leans one way in the sharp instance and the other in the aggregate, which is why this reads as selective narrative control rather than denial: a past acknowledged whole and defended in its parts.