The 96.4% Accountability
No Lithuanian has served punishment for murdering Jews. Every state honor is the substitute
1. The number.
Before the German invasion in June 1941, approximately 220,000 Jews lived in Lithuania within its 1941 borders.[1] Of those, 212,000 were murdered, a destruction rate of 96.4 percent, the Zuroff–Vanagaitė calculation in Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust.[2] The European Jewish Congress and the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s own Holokaustas Lietuvoje 1941–1944 m. cite approximately 95 percent for the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry as such, with 195,000 to 196,000 victims.[3] Yad Vashem records the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry as the highest percentage in occupied Europe. USHMM, the World Jewish Congress, and the United States Department of State use approximately 90 percent against a broader 1941 denominator of approximately 250,000 Jews physically present in Lithuania, including Polish refugees.[4] The denominators differ. The conclusion does not. Whether the destruction rate is stated as 90, 95, or 96.4 percent, no Lithuanian has served punishment for any of those murders. Reading the Lithuanian Holocaust Numbers sets out the denominator architecture in full.[5]
The killing was not industrial. It was face-to-face. In the pits at Paneriai. In the forests outside Telšiai, Kaunas, Šiauliai, Žagarė. In Kaunas, violence began before full German takeover and continued during the last week of June 1941 under German occupation, including the Lietūkis Garage massacre and killings at the Seventh Fort. Karl Jäger’s report of 1 December 1941 tabulated 137,346 victims in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone in fewer than six months; a 2025 recalculation by Antonia Tejeda Barros gives 137,448, of which 135,392 were Jewish.[6] The 121 signed survivor testimonies in the Koniuchowsky collection, held by Yad Vashem and YIVO and running to 569 pages, record named Lithuanian neighbors at named killing sites in 171 named towns.[7] Silvia Foti’s Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare records the same architecture from inside the family of one of its operational figures.[8]
2. The accountability record.
No Lithuanian has served punishment under Lithuanian law for the murder of Jews. None.
Independent Lithuania has had thirty-six years since 1990 to act. The Soviet-era trials of the 1940s through the 1960s are not a substitute. They were not Lithuanian state actions, and they were politically constructed by an occupying power whose primary objective was the suppression of Lithuanian nationalism, not the prosecution of antisemitic murder. Post-1990 Lithuania inherited the archives, the survivor testimonies, the Jäger Report, the Lithuanian Security Police rosters, the property registers documenting expropriation. The state opened the archives, established the Genocide Centre, and adopted a body of memory legislation. It has used none of these instruments to punish a single Lithuanian for the murder of Jews.
Lithuania’s record is not slow. It is empty.
3. The substitution.
Where accountability is absent, a state requires another mechanism for closing the question. Lithuania chose elevation. Even where the visible honors have receded under public pressure, the institutional defense of the record persists.
Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis served as acting prime minister of the Provisional Government that endorsed the Regulations on the Status of Jews in August 1941.[9] His remains were repatriated from the United States with full state honors in May 2012. Jonas Noreika signed the order confining the Jews of Šiauliai to a ghetto in August 1941, a documentary record set out in Silvia Foti’s Storm in the Land of Rain.[10] The Šiauliai plaque has since been removed and the school named for him has closed; the Genocide Centre continues to defend his record after seven Lithuanian court rulings on the matter. Kazys Škirpa, head of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Berlin, drafted the November 1940 program calling for Jewish removal from Lithuania.[11] FBI File No. 40-HQ-82592 documented the United States record on Škirpa; the file was furnished to Lithuania and state recognition proceeded. A Vilnius street/alley once bore his name and was later renamed. The Genocide Centre’s classification of him as not-a-collaborator stands. Juozas Krikštaponis, whose unit’s role in the murder of Jews in Belarus in 1941 is documented in archival records cited repeatedly in U.S. Department of State International Religious Freedom reporting,[12] retains a monument in Ukmergė District that the United States government has formally requested be removed. Lithuania has refused.
These are not anomalies. They are the system. Lithuania’s Holocaust Honor System enumerates the broader census.[13]
4. The asymmetry.
The same legal architecture that insulates honored perpetrators is mobilized against Jews who name them.
Approximately thirty legal actions have been filed in Lithuanian courts seeking judicial review of state institutions that have falsified the Holocaust record. None has reached the merits. Each was dismissed on procedural grounds: standing, statute, or the classification of the contested material as a non-justiciable “informational act.” The classification places the institution’s outputs outside the jurisdiction of any Lithuanian court while the same outputs supply the historical interpretation that prosecutors invoke against Lithuanian citizens in unrelated proceedings. The institution is shielded from review. Its conclusions are enforceable. Citizens who disagree with those conclusions are answerable in criminal court. This is Mode Two of The Diplomatic-Cover Catalogue.[14] The Procedural Dismissal Catalogue records the architecture in detail.[15]
Mode Six operates in parallel. Lithuania articulates one standard at the European Court of Human Rights, that genocide encompasses Soviet anti-partisan operations against Lithuanians, and refuses to apply genocide doctrine domestically to Lithuanians who participated in the murder of Lithuanian Jews. The Selective Enforcement Index documents the asymmetry.[16] The principle is exported. At the border, it is withdrawn.
5. The Drėlingas inversion.
In Drėlingas v. Lithuania, the ECtHR accepted Lithuania’s Article 7 argument because Lithuanian courts had treated the anti-partisan operation as an attack on a significant part of the Lithuanian national/ethnic group.[17] The case did not create a general European rule that “political and social groups” fall inside the 1948 Genocide Convention. Lithuania nevertheless obtained Strasbourg approval for an expansive genocide theory in the Soviet-partisan context, while refusing any comparable domestic accountability for Lithuanians involved in the murder of Jews.
The same state that secured genocide doctrine for the prosecution of one Soviet operative refuses to apply that doctrine to a single Lithuanian perpetrator of the Holocaust. The inversion is documented in Lithuania’s Genocide Inflation.[18] By inflating the genocide of Lithuanians, Lithuania has diluted the genocide of Lithuania’s Jews. The 96.4 percent figure becomes, in the Lithuanian legal framework, smaller in significance than partisan losses one and two orders of magnitude lower. That is the answer the legal apparatus has produced to the absence of accountability for Jewish murder: an official genocide of which Jews are no longer the priority.
6. The rescuer inflation.
In January 2026, the Lithuanian government adopted an Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, Xenophobia and Hate, comprising 157 measures.[19] The plan was developed within Lithuania’s official historical-memory and cultural policy architecture. The government announcement does not identify punishment of Holocaust perpetrators as a measure. The 157 measures concern education, monitoring, training, commemoration, and rescuer recognition. None addresses the punishment of perpetrators. The Fridman prosecution, active in Lithuanian courts at the moment of adoption, is not mentioned.
A state that cannot stabilize the record of guilt inflates the record of virtue. Unknown Rescuers, Unreliable Custodians documents the asymmetry.[20] Rescuer counts expand under official auspices while the perpetrator census remains untouched. Manufactured rescuers do not balance unpunished murderers. They confirm the substitution. The 157 measures function not as remediation but as the diplomatic surface on which the substitution is presented to foreign capitals.
7. The unanswered claim.
The 96.4 percent figure is not a memorial statistic. It is the size of the unanswered claim against the Lithuanian state.
Lithuania has had thirty-six years to convert that claim into accountability, to identify and punish even one Lithuanian who participated in the murder of Lithuanian Jews. Lithuania converted the claim into honors. The honors are the answer the state has chosen to give. Foreign governments, courts, ministries, and Jewish institutions extending recognition to Lithuanian state memory work extend recognition to that answer.
8. The demand.
One demand, stated forensically.
Name a single Lithuanian who has served punishment under Lithuanian law for the murder of Jews.
The state cannot. Until it can, every state-honored Lithuanian Holocaust-era figure is the substitution that closes the unanswered claim. Every diplomatic meeting that does not raise the question, by Mode One, Mode Three, Mode Five, Mode Nine, or Mode Ten of The Diplomatic-Cover Catalogue, accepts the substitution as the answer. Every honor renewed without a prior answer is the state’s position, restated.
9. The hosts.
A Jewish organization that platforms Lithuanian state revisionism after notice places itself against the Jewish interest it claims to defend. They lend a Jewish communal stage to the institutional defenders of an unanswered claim. They invite Lithuanian state actors into rooms filled with their donors and their community leaders. When they proceed after notice, after the file has been delivered to them in writing, they cannot later claim ignorance. They proceed knowing what the record contains and choosing to host the people who curate the substitution anyway. The murdered are not represented in those rooms. The hosts are. The Lithuanian state delegation is. The donors are. The community leaders are. Stand in front of a murdered Jewish child of Lithuania and explain that conduct. Stand in front of one of the children of Paneriai or the children of the Kovno Ninth Fort and explain why the institutional defenders of the men who organized those murders were given a Jewish communal stage and a sympathetic Jewish audience. There is no defensible answer. On this question, those organizations do not represent Jewish concerns. On this question, those organizations represent the opposite of what they exist to defend.
[1]Yad Vashem, “Murder of the Jews of the Baltic States,” recording approximately 220,000 Jews in Lithuania at the German invasion in June 1941. The 208,000 reconstruction is the Lithuanian statistical figure for 1 January 1941; see Arūnas Bubnys, ed., Holokaustas Lietuvoje 1941–1944 m. (Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, 2011), Introduction.
[2]Efraim Zuroff and Rūta Vanagaitė, Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), giving 212,000 of 220,000 Lithuanian Jews under Nazi occupation murdered. See also Efraim Zuroff, “Addressing Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe,” Jerusalem Post, 31 July 2025; Zuroff, “Lithuania promotes a false Holocaust narrative,” Jerusalem Post, 14 January 2021.
[3]European Jewish Congress, “Lithuania,” (95 percent of Lithuanian Jewry murdered, the highest percentage in Europe); Bubnys, Holokaustas Lietuvoje 1941–1944 m., Introduction (195,000–196,000 victims; 5–10 percent survival). For the English-language summary, Arūnas Bubnys, The Holocaust in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944 (Vilnius: Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2019; updated 2020).
[4]USHMM, “Lithuania,” Holocaust Encyclopedia (approximately 90 percent murdered; 250,000 by 1941 with refugee influx); World Jewish Congress, “Community in Lithuania,” (about 90 percent); United States Department of State, “Lithuania,” JUST Act Report to Congress (90 percent).
[5]Grant Gochin, “Reading the Lithuanian Holocaust Numbers,” Substack, 29 April 2026.
[6]Karl Jäger, Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen (the Jäger Report), 1 December 1941, Bundesarchiv, traditional total 137,346. Antonia Tejeda Barros, “The Jäger Report: An Invaluable Source of the Efficiency of Einsatzkommando 3 (Einsatzgruppe A),” Historiografías, revista de historia y teoría 29 (June 2025): 94–130, DOI 10.26754/ojs_historiografias/hrht.12057, recalculates the total at 137,448 (135,392 Jewish, 2,056 non-Jewish). The Jäger Report covers only the Einsatzkommando 3 zone and ends 29 November 1941; it is not a complete Lithuanian Jewish victim count.
[7]Leyb Koniuchowsky, The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews, 121 signed survivor testimonies, 569 pp., 1948. Yad Vashem and YIVO archival holdings.
[8]Silvia Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare (Regnery History, 2022), publisher listing.
[9]Provisional Government of Lithuania, Žydų padėties nuostatai (Regulations on the Status of Jews), August 1, 1941. Lithuanian Central State Archive (LCVA), f. R-1444.
[10]Order of Šiauliai District Chief Jonas Noreika, August 22, 1941, confining the Jews of Šiauliai to a ghetto. LCVA, f. R-1099. See further Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain.
[11]Kazys Škirpa, Lithuanian Activist Front program, Berlin, November 1940. LCVA. FBI File No. 40-HQ-82592 documents the United States record on Škirpa; the file was furnished to Lithuania and state recognition proceeded.
[12]United States Department of State, International Religious Freedom Reports on Lithuania, including the 2024 report, documenting the Krikštaponis monument and the United States’ formal request for its removal.
[13]Grant Gochin, “Lithuania’s Holocaust Honor System,” Substack.
[14]Grant Gochin, “The Diplomatic-Cover Catalogue,” Substack, April 2026.
[15]Grant Gochin, “The Procedural Dismissal Catalogue,” Substack, April 2026.
[16]Grant Gochin, “The Selective Enforcement Index,” Substack, April 2026.
[17]Drėlingas v. Lithuania, application no. 28859/16, European Court of Human Rights, judgment of March 12, 2019, HUDOC.
[18]Grant Gochin, “Lithuania’s Genocide Inflation,” Substack.
[19]Government of the Republic of Lithuania, “Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, Xenophobia and Hate,” 157 measures, adopted January 2026.
[20]Grant Gochin, “Unknown Rescuers, Unreliable Custodians,” Substack.