The Brazaitis Fraud

How Lithuania Used American Documents to Launder Holocaust History

Lithuania has never punished a single Holocaust perpetrator through its own courts. The Brazaitis file must be read within that setting. It is not a dispute about tone, emphasis, or memory. It is a documentary record of state falsification. A Lithuanian state institution took a narrow American administrative closure, converted it into a public claim of complete exoneration, repeated that claim in official correspondence and public media, extended its logic to another Holocaust-linked figure, and maintained the falsehood after repeated notice from lawyers, complainants, historians, and members of the United States Congress.

The significance of the file extends beyond Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis himself. The record establishes a method. American governmental paper was stripped of its actual legal meaning and repurposed as reputational cover for a Lithuanian political leader implicated in anti-Jewish regulation, segregation, expropriation, and support for a force later designated a “Responsible Agency” in the mass murder of Jews. The same fabricated American absolution was then inserted into the state’s treatment of Kazys Škirpa. When the United States objected, Lithuania did not correct the record. It persisted. That persistence is the point. It demonstrates that the issue was not misunderstanding. It was the preservation of a useful falsehood.

I. What the American Record Actually Did

The underlying American record was narrow, administrative, and conditional. The Immigration and Naturalization Service investigated allegations that from June 23, 1941 to July 12, 1941, during the life of the interim Provisional Government of Lithuania, Juozas Brazaitis, as Minister of Education and acting Prime Minister, and Jonas Šlepetys, as Interior Minister, were responsible for the issuance and enforcement of repressive edicts against the Jewish minority. INS Commissioner Leonard Chapman, Jr. reported that the agency had not elicited evidentiary information sufficient to continue, that further investigation appeared unwarranted, and that both men would therefore be removed from the active list of alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the United States. The same record stated that meaningful new information would reactivate the matter. Congressman Joshua Eilberg’s January 13, 1975 letter merely forwarded that administrative result to Stanley A. Gecys of the Lithuanian-American Community. It was not a trial, not a judgment, not an acquittal, and not a finding of innocence.[1]

The American file had no exculpatory value. It ended as an administrative closure after the INS review committee reported that it had found no substantive evidence with the tools and records then available, while also noting that Brazaitis could not be interviewed because hospitalization and death had removed the principal subject from the proceeding. The closure therefore did not clear him. It terminated an unfinished administrative matter, and it expressly reserved the right to reactivate the investigation if meaningful new evidence later appeared. Lithuania later converted that non-finding into a finding of innocence. That conversion was false.[2]

Even Eilberg’s broader cover language did not alter that legal result. His letter stated that the action was based on INS’s determination that there was no evidence of anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi activities, but the underlying Chapman letter remained a procedural communication reporting closure, not a judicial verdict. Lithuania later treated the broader phrase in the cover letter as though it overrode the legal posture of the underlying file. It did not. The file remained what it was: a closed administrative inquiry with no adjudicative force.[3]

The later American legal opinions removed any room for plausible confusion. Stuart Leviton wrote that the 1975 letter has little, if any, present meaning and cannot be used to conclude that Brazaitis or Šlepetys did not engage in wrongdoing. Gary Labin wrote that “exonerated” has a specific meaning in American legal discourse and that using it here was wholly misleading. Bryan Barnet Miller wrote that the Judiciary Committee was not a court, INS was not a judicial body, and inferring innocence from the 1975 letter was “preposterous.” Mark Bledstein wrote that the claim of “complete exoneration” was a misstatement of fact and added the point that matters for the Škirpa extension: extrapolating from the letter that anyone associated with Brazaitis was also “completely exonerated” had no legal validity. Lithuania received these analyses and maintained the claim anyway.[4]

II. The American Inquiry Was Compromised at the Level of Identification

The 1974 inquiry was not merely incomplete in law and evidence. It was compromised at the level of identification. INS circulated requests using Brazaitis’s original surname but misspelled it as Ambrozevicius, listed his birth year as 1899 instead of 1903, and gave his birthplace as Gudino, Lithuania, whereas the correct village spelling was Gudinė and he was born in the nearby town of Trakiškiai. Those defective identifiers appear to have tracked false identifying information associated with him after his 1944 name change, and they crippled any serious prospect of locating responsive evidence. A file built on that basis has no exculpatory value. Once those defects were exposed to the Government of Lithuania, continued reliance on that file as proof of innocence was not misunderstanding but intentional, considered, and deliberate deception. The file proves only that the American government, working with defective identifiers and without the later Lithuanian documentary record, did not develop enough usable information to continue an administrative case against a man who then died.[5]

The same notes indicate that the INS inquiry largely consisted of mailed requests for derogatory information to outside entities rather than a forensic review of Lithuanian records, most of which were then inaccessible in Soviet hands. One preserved description says the inquiry reached forty potential sources in the United States, Europe, and the Near East. Another notes a broader circle of addressees. The precise count does not change the point. This was not a deep archival inquiry conducted with the later Lithuanian record in hand. Lithuania later inflated the closure of this compromised and incomplete process into public American absolution.[6]

The preserved background materials also state that the INS query to the CIA described the subject as an alleged member of the communist party in Lithuania. That is not a marginal clerical irregularity. It indicates that the identifying and contextual frame of the inquiry was disordered. Lithuania later converted the closure of that disordered inquiry into a public American absolution.[7]

III. Why Brazaitis Mattered

The false American absolution was not being used to protect a minor functionary against peripheral allegations. It was being used to shield the acting prime minister of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government. The later documentary record, much of it published in Lithuania itself, made the historical problem unmistakable.

Congressman Brad Sherman’s September 25, 2019 letter assembled the decisive core. In 2001, LGGRTC historian Rytas Narvydas published the authentic minutes and decrees of the Provisional Government. Those records included the “Regulations on the Situation of the Jews,” signed by Brazaitis, which declared that Jews had exploited the Lithuanian nation economically for hundreds of years, had demoralized it, and under Bolshevism had developed their struggle against Lithuanian independence and the Lithuanian nation. The same published record included the minutes of the July 5, 1941 meeting in which Brazaitis and the Provisional Government approved requested funding for 824 members of the TDA Battalion and the concentration camp at Kaunas VII Fort. Between June 28 and July 6, the TDA Battalion murdered approximately 5,000 Jewish men and held many Jewish women and children at Kaunas VII Fort without food or water. The 2005 International Commission concluded that the Provisional Government approved segregating Jews, expropriating their property, and did not publicly dissociate itself from the murder of Lithuania’s Jews. It designated the TDA Battalion a “Responsible Agency” for the killings and treated the anti-Jewish regulations as the most comprehensive expression of the government’s official antisemitism.[8]

The archive preserves the regulations themselves. The August 1, 1941 “Regulations on the Status of Jews” are signed by J. Ambrazevičius and J. Šlepetys. They are not retrospective reconstructions. They are state paper. Lithuania later tried to make a thin American administrative closure outrank this direct Lithuanian record. That inversion is central to the fraud.[9]

The Lithuanian scholarly record pointed the same way. The January 21, 2010 memorandum by Česlovas Laurinavičius and Gediminas Rudis stated that the Provisional Government did not even minimally oppose the occupiers’ actions and itself contributed to pushing Jews from social life by preparing the shameful anti-Jewish regulations. The same memorandum recorded that Brazaitis had been awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis by presidential decree after his death. Lithuania thus conferred a state military honor on a political leader whose government signed anti-Jewish regulations and whose later memoir-writing sought to obscure that government’s role in establishing Nazi rule in Lithuania.[10]

The archive also preserves the Council of Ministers’ August 2, 1941 resolution on the return of bank-held valuables, explicitly excluding Jews and persons said to have acted against Lithuanian national interests. The same government later shielded by the fabricated American exoneration was making determinations about who would be excluded from restoration on ethnic and political grounds. That was not a passive body floating above events. It was an operating government making anti-Jewish decisions under its own authority.[11]

IV. The American Review Preceded the Real Record

Lithuania’s later falsification depended not only on misreading the American file, but on pretending that the American file was complete. It was not. Sherman’s 2019 letter stated directly that the key documentary record of the Provisional Government became available only later. In 1974, the relevant minutes, decrees, and regulations were in Soviet jurisdiction. The United States did not then have the documents later published in Lithuania, including the anti-Jewish regulations, the July 5 funding minutes, and related government records. The American closure therefore cannot honestly be treated as a merits determination reached after review of the full evidentiary record. It was reached before the core evidentiary record was available.[12]

The background materials sharpen the same point. They explain that INS confined itself to a narrow period, June 23 to July 12, 1941, and therefore did not reach the August 1 regulations. They also explain that the July 5 decision to fund the TDA Battalion and Kaunas VII Fort was not treated as an “edict” within the period under review. Lithuania later used that narrowness as if it were proof of legal thoroughness. It was not. It was simply limitation.[13]

V. The Provisional Government’s Broader Anti-Jewish Conduct

The July 5 funding decision and the anti-Jewish regulations were not isolated points. The preserved drafts and prosecutorial materials present a broader record of governmental anti-Jewish action.

The Provisional Government took ownership of property nationalized by the Soviets from Jews and Russians. It closed Jewish and Polish theaters. It authorized local administrations to distribute to ethnic Lithuanians the property of those who had left their homes, including clothing, undergarments, and other household goods. It forbade the consignment of retail stores to Jews. It forbade the return of nationalized ships to Jews. It excluded Jews from the return of bank accounts and the contents of safe deposit boxes and asserted the right to determine who counted as a Jew. These were distinctly Lithuanian acts of categorization, exclusion, and appropriation.[14]

The preserved drafts also state that on June 24, 1941, Brazaitis and other leading Lithuanian Catholic intellectuals edited the first issue of Į laisvę, steering public fury away from Lithuanian communists and toward Lithuanian Jews with the formulation that “Bolshevism and Jews are one and the same inseparable thing.” Those materials further state that the newspaper was distributed during the Vilijampolė pogrom. The later state defense of Brazaitis therefore involved a man placed at the center of both governmental and ideological anti-Jewish action.[15]

VI. Mackevičius, Bobelis, Bieliackinas, and von Pohl

The Mackevičius material destroys the later claim that the government stood outside the Jewish question in helpless innocence. In the preserved summaries of the archival memorandum, Justice Minister Mečislovas Mackevičius explained that the “Statute for the Jewish Situation” was drafted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, debated over time, shown to Jewish lawyer Professor Simanas Bieliackinas, translated into German, and presented by Colonel Bobelis to General von Pohl and SS officers. One SS officer then stated, in substance, that since the Lithuanians would not fully take care of the Jewish question, the Germans would do so. Whatever weight is assigned to every sentence in that memorandum, its relevance is straightforward: it places the Provisional Government inside the formulation, discussion, and transmission of anti-Jewish regulation.[16]

The same preserved material also quotes Brazaitis’s statement at the government’s final meeting that the government, lacking means of its own, could not positively influence the “excesses,” including the executions of Jews in Kaunas and the provinces. That statement is not exculpatory. It is an admission of knowledge. A government that knows mass murder is occurring while signing regulations, funding institutions, and continuing its own anti-Jewish measures is not innocent of the process it is helping structure.[17]

VII. State Canonization: Honor, Reburial, and Protest

The fraud did not arise in a vacuum. It was part of a broader state canonization project. The 2010 Lithuanian History Institute memorandum recorded that Brazaitis had been posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis by presidential decree. In 2012, the Lithuanian Prime Minister’s office funded the repatriation of Brazaitis’s remains from the United States to Lithuania, where he was reburied with state honors in Kaunas. This was not done in ignorance. It was done against a documented background.[18]

The reburial triggered open protest within Lithuania and outside it. The signed September 25, 2012 letter from Brad Sherman, Henry Waxman, and Howard Berman condemned the reburial with honors, identified Brazaitis as leader of the Provisional Government, tied that government to the Lithuanian Activist Front, quoted anti-Jewish incitement, and stated that the honor undermined efforts to recognize Nazi and collaborator crimes. The letter reported the pain and anger caused to Holocaust survivors and the wider Jewish community. Congress did not bless Brazaitis. It condemned his state canonization.[19]

The open letter published by Bernardinai.lt and signed by more than forty Lithuanian scholars, public figures, and intellectuals — including Tomas Venclova, Leonidas Donskis, Alfredas Bumblauskas, and Saulius Sužiedėlis — likewise objected to the reburial and argued that Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis could not evade responsibility for the acts of the Provisional Government. Lithuania’s later fraud therefore cannot be dismissed as good-faith misunderstanding in a country deprived of warning. Lithuanian scholars, American lawyers, Holocaust historians, complainants, and members of Congress all warned against the same distortion. The state persisted anyway.[20]

VIII. 55R-21: The First Formal State Falsification

LGGRTC letter no. 55R-21, dated February 26, 2018, is the first clear formal state falsification in the modern file. In its discussion of Kazys Škirpa, the Center stated that antisemitism in Škirpa’s and the Berlin Lithuanian Activist Front’s activity had been raised to a political level and might have encouraged part of Lithuania’s population to become involved in the Holocaust. That was the admission. What followed was the falsification. The Center then stated that after Škirpa’s arrest his duties were taken over by Juozas Brazaitis-Ambrazevičius, whose activity was investigated exhaustively by the U.S. Congress and INS in 1974, and that Brazaitis-Ambrazevičius was completely exonerated. It immediately added that Škirpa spent the last thirty years of his life in the United States without accusations from U.S. authorities. The structure matters: acknowledgment of dangerous antisemitic incitement, retreat into presumption language, insertion of the fabricated Brazaitis absolution, then extension of that implied absolution to Škirpa through his uncharged American residence.[21]

That was not loose phrasing. It was a state narrative operation. The Center embedded a fabricated American exoneration inside the Škirpa discussion as evidence in favor of another Holocaust-linked figure. Bledstein’s legal opinion later stated directly that such extrapolation had no legal validity. The Center did it anyway.[22]

IX. 14R-82: The Doctrine of the Fraud

The October 11, 2018 letter no. 14R-82 did more than repeat the falsehood. It formalized the theory by which the falsehood was to be treated as truth. In point 1, the Center asserted that suspicions, accusations, or investigations rejected or halted without proving culpability are equivalent to acquittal. In point 2, it treated the January 13, 1975 Eilberg letter as confirmation that Brazaitis had been investigated by the U.S. Congress and INS and “was exonerated.” It then went further and said Eilberg had indirectly apologized for the unfounded allegations against Brazaitis and Šlepetys, citing his hope that the document would relieve the two men and their friends from pressure and hopelessness caused by the accusations. It invoked the list of forty possible sources as reinforcement. This was not misunderstanding. It was a doctrinal construction: halted investigation equals acquittal; administrative closure equals exoneration; a courteous closing sentence equals apology.[23]

That doctrine is indefensible both legally and historically. Legally, executive-branch investigative cessation is not equivalent to judicial acquittal. Historically, the 1975 file was narrow, conditional, incomplete, and compromised by identification errors, while the later Lithuanian documentary record directly contradicted any innocence narrative. Yet this was the theory advanced by the institution charged with safeguarding historical truth. By October 2018, the state was no longer merely misstating an American document. It had adopted a false legal doctrine for converting administrative closure into innocence, non-adjudication into acquittal, and courtesy into apology.[24]

X. Public Propagation: Website, DELFI, and PR Defense

The falsehood did not remain confined to correspondence. In July 2018, the Center published a website statement asserting that Brazaitis’s activity had been thoroughly investigated and that he had been rehabilitated by the U.S. Department of Justice. In March 2019, DELFI carried the same line, stating that Brazaitis and Šlepetys had been investigated, that no proof of guilt had been found, and that they had been rehabilitated or removed from the suspect list after thorough investigation. At that point, the falsification was no longer administrative. It had become part of Lithuania’s outward-facing Holocaust narrative.[25]

The DELFI article did more than repeat the lie. It mounted a pressure-and-public-relations defense campaign. It cast documented criticism as “vulgar pressure,” presented the Center as a besieged guardian of truth, recast formal challenges as improper attempts to coerce historians, and then used that posture to defend the false claim of rehabilitation. The article did not answer the legal problem that the 1975 file was administrative and non-adjudicative. It did not answer the historical problem of the later Lithuanian documentary record. It replaced both with a rhetorical inversion: falsify the record, then stigmatize those exposing the falsification.[26]

The public posture also carried an intimidation component. The archived summary of legal actions states that the July 18, 2018 LGGRTC response, published publicly, implied that the research exposing these distortions could violate the Lithuanian Constitution and Criminal Code. The same institutional posture that falsified the historical record also suggested potential criminal exposure for those correcting it.[27]

XI. The DELFI Article as an Instrument of Holocaust Fraud

The DELFI article titled “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui” was not a neutral defense of institutional methodology. It was a public-relations intervention built around a false core claim: that Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis had been investigated in 1974 by the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and had been rehabilitated or completely exonerated. The prosecutorial record identifies that claim as untrue, states that the U.S. file was dropped after Brazaitis’s death, confirms that no decision of exoneration was ever issued, and adds that four U.S. attorneys concluded the phrase “completely exonerated” was being used inappropriately and erroneously. The article therefore did not merely repeat a contested interpretation. It repeated, amplified, and defended a falsehood that had already been challenged in writing.[28]

False Claim: Rehabilitation by the U.S. Department of Justice

The article’s central factual claim — that after comprehensive investigation Brazaitis and Šlepetys were rehabilitated because no evidence of criminal activity was found — was false. The prosecutorial complaint states directly that these claims did not correspond with reality, that the case was dropped after Brazaitis’s death, and that the Eilberg letter mentioned neither exoneration nor rehabilitation. The article repackaged administrative removal from an investigative list as rehabilitative adjudication. That was a false legal transformation and a false public statement.[29]

False Claim: The 14R-82 Doctrine Smuggled into Public Media

The article did not merely repeat “rehabilitation.” It advanced the doctrinal theory first formalized in 14R-82: that a halted investigation without proven culpability is equivalent to acquittal, and that Eilberg’s letter indirectly apologized for the unfounded allegations. The December 12, 2018 Ombudsman filing stated that this claim was “clearly untrue,” that the investigation stopped because Brazaitis died, and that the Center was using the claim to advocate for Brazaitis personally. By publishing this doctrine in national media, the Center converted an internal falsification into a public one. The 14R-82 theory — halted investigation equals acquittal, administrative closure equals exoneration, courteous closing sentence equals apology — was given national reach through the DELFI platform.[30]

False Frame: Scholarly Victimhood

The article’s opening move was deceptive. It framed the dispute as an effort to force the Genocide Center to evaluate painful Lithuanian history not by historiographical methods or historical facts but by the wishes of private individuals. That inverted the actual posture of the dispute. The challenge was not that the Center refused private wishes. The challenge was that it converted an American administrative closure into a fabricated American absolution and then made that fiction public. The December 12, 2018 filing stated the real issue: the Center was suppressing facts, presenting historical circumstances in a way meant to preserve the “good reputation” of Škirpa and Brazaitis, and painting a favorable picture of both men. Framing documentary criticism as an attack on historiography was a misdescription of the controversy from the first paragraph.[31]

The article also positioned the Center as the victim of falsehoods, smears, and pressure. That was projection. The relevant record shows that the Center itself repeatedly published the claim that Brazaitis was exhaustively investigated, completely exonerated, and rehabilitated by U.S. institutions. The institution accused of repeating a falsehood until it became normalized was, on the record, the institution that had done exactly that.[32]

Hypocrisy on Public Pressure

The article complained that media commentary and public pressure attempted to influence proceedings, while the Center itself had gone to the press through this very article to defend its position publicly. That is asymmetric rule-setting: public pressure is improper when critics use it and proper when the Center uses it. A state institution that uses national media to propagate a false historical claim and then objects when critics respond through the same media has forfeited any claim to procedural neutrality. The article presented the Center as standing above the fray while actively fighting within it.[33]

Straw-Man Accusation

The article advanced a straw-man accusation, suggesting that critics were trying to claim Lithuanians rather than Germans conceived and began the Holocaust. That was not the issue. The actual issue was whether the Provisional Government approved anti-Jewish measures, funded the TDA Battalion and Kaunas VII Fort, and failed to dissociate itself from mass murder. The article evaded the real charge by substituting an easier and more extreme one.[34]

Suppression of the Later Lithuanian Record

The DELFI article did not merely fail to mention the anti-Jewish regulations, the July 5 funding of 824 TDA members and Kaunas VII Fort, the women and children held there without food or water, and the International Commission’s designation of the TDA Battalion as a “Responsible Agency.” It defended “rehabilitation” in a way that depended on keeping those later facts out of the frame. The article’s theory of American absolution could not survive contact with the Lithuanian documentary record. That record was therefore excluded. The omission was not an oversight. It was structural. The false American exoneration could appear plausible only if the reader never encountered the evidence that the same institution’s own historian, Rytas Narvydas, had published in 2001.[35]

Documentary Theater

The article also used documentary theater. It reproduced the American documents as if their mere display settled their meaning. But the dispute was never about whether the documents existed. It was about whether the Center’s interpretation of them was false. The December 12, 2018 filing directly addressed that move, stating that the Center’s arguments were based on the congressional letter and other documents “accessible by the Center,” but that facts were being suppressed and the material used tendentiously. The article substituted visual authority for legal meaning. It presented documents and assumed the audience would accept the Center’s reading without examining the underlying legal posture. That was another deceptive move in a sequence of deceptive moves.[35]

Intimidation

The public posture also carried an intimidation component. The archived summary of legal actions states that the July 18, 2018 LGGRTC response, published publicly, implied that the research exposing these distortions could violate the Lithuanian Constitution and Criminal Code. The same institutional posture that falsified the historical record also suggested potential criminal exposure for those correcting it. In practical terms, that is a two-part state method: publish the lie, then pressure those who challenge it.[27]

The Capstone

The December 12, 2018 filing stated, in light of the September 25, 2012 congressional letter condemning the reburial and the full documentary record, that the Center was “actively and volitionally, promulgating a lie and thus violating one of the most important tasks defined in the Center’s regulations, namely, the restoration of historical justice.” That conclusion was not rhetorical. It was drawn from the sequence of documented false statements, their persistence after correction, and their use across multiple platforms. The DELFI article was one of the instruments by which the false American absolution was defended, normalized, and wrapped in the language of institutional dignity. It belongs in this file as evidence of conscious institutional fraud after notice.[28]

XII. Formal Notice: The State Was Told Repeatedly

Formal notice came early and often. On March 16, 2018, a complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman challenged LGGRTC’s use of the Eilberg material in the Škirpa analysis and stated that no official investigation by Congress or INS had produced an exonerating decision for Brazaitis. It explained that there is a significant difference between stopping a case and a finding of not guilty.[36]

On December 12, 2018, a further Ombudsman filing addressed both 55R-21 and 14R-82. It stated that the Center was using the congressional material to preserve the “good reputation” of both Brazaitis and Škirpa, that it had painted a favorable picture of both men, and that 14R-82 treated the halt of the investigation as proof of lack of guilt and read Eilberg as indirectly apologizing. The filing also attached the four American legal opinions rejecting the exoneration claim. By that point, the state had been told in plain language, by multiple routes, that its reading was false.[37]

The November 15, 2019 public-prosecutor complaint then stated the matter with maximum precision. It identified the falsehood across three vehicles — 55R-21, the website posting, and the DELFI article — and said those claims did not correspond with reality because the American case ended after Brazaitis’s death and the Eilberg letter mentioned neither exoneration nor rehabilitation. It also quoted the 55R-21 Škirpa passage and made explicit that the fabricated Brazaitis exoneration had been used inside the Škirpa discussion. By late 2019 the state had been notified repeatedly, in writing, that its narrative was false.[38]

The November 26, 2020 demand for removal of the false claim then stated again that there is an enormous difference between exoneration and dropping a case because of the suspect’s death and lack of evidence; that the state was publishing tendentious disinformation to the public; and that the false public statements should be removed. That document also recorded that Sherman had already confirmed the falsity of the exoneration claim in 2019. The state was on notice, and then on notice again.[39]

XIII. Congress Was Not Silent

The September 25, 2012 congressional letter is the first decisive American answer to Lithuania’s later mythology. Sherman, Waxman, and Berman wrote to Prime Minister Kubilius to condemn the reburial of Brazaitis with honors, identify him as leader of the Provisional Government, tie that government to the Lithuanian Activist Front, quote anti-Jewish incitement, and state that the honor undermined efforts to recognize Nazi and collaborator crimes. Congress did not bless Brazaitis. It condemned his state canonization.[40]

Sherman’s September 25, 2019 letter then narrowed the issue into a direct charge of documentary misuse. It identified 55R-21, 14R-82, 14R-53, and the March 2019 DELFI article as sources of the false exoneration claim and demanded either specific and credible references for the supposed exoneration and rehabilitation or a public retraction for the misstatement of facts and misuse of U.S. congressional documents. It also reintroduced the later evidentiary record: the anti-Jewish regulations, the July 5 funding decision for 824 TDA members and Kaunas VII Fort, the detention of women and children without food or water, and the International Commission’s designation of the TDA Battalion as a “Responsible Agency.” The letter therefore did two things at once. It denied the exoneration claim as a matter of American governmental meaning, and it demonstrated why the later historical record made the claim impossible on the merits.[41]

In 2021, Sherman wrote again after receiving no official response to the 2019 letter. He recorded that LGGRTC had reduced his earlier warning to “the opinion of a politician,” and he asked whether that should be regarded as the official response of the Lithuanian government. That exchange fixes the diplomatic meaning of the file. Lithuania was not merely wrong. It treated a member of the United States Congress correcting the misuse of U.S. documents as though his correction were irrelevant to the meaning of those same documents.[42]

In 2026, Sherman wrote again, this time to Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis. The letter states that no U.S. court, prosecutor, or administrative body ever issued a determination clearing Brazaitis of responsibility for actions undertaken during his tenure in the Provisional Government; that administrative closure does not constitute exoneration under U.S. legal standards; and that if Lithuania cannot provide relevant references, its institutions should correct prior public statements that misrepresent the official position of the U.S. government. Fourteen years after the 2012 condemnation and seven years after the 2019 dismantling, the United States still had to tell Lithuania that it had not exonerated Brazaitis.[43]

XIV. The Extension to Kazys Škirpa

The use of the fabricated Brazaitis absolution inside the Škirpa file matters because it reveals the broader function of the fraud. The state did not merely invent one false American clearing. It attempted to treat that invented clearing as disinfectant for another compromised figure. The original 55R-21 letter inserted the fabricated Brazaitis exoneration directly into the Škirpa discussion. The State Department draft preserved in the archive then described the maneuver plainly: Lithuania extrapolated the 1975 letter about Brazaitis to Kazys Škirpa as well. Bledstein’s opinion had already stated that such extrapolation had no legal validity. The state nevertheless did it. The false absolution was not an isolated error. It was a reusable laundering device.[44]

XV. Intimidation of Truth-Seeking Critics

The documentary record was not defended by rebuttal. It was defended by pressure. The author of the litigation and archival challenges was not treated as a historian whose evidence had to be answered, but as a target whose credibility had to be degraded. Published accounts describe the Lithuanian state and associated political actors portraying him as an enemy of the state, as “trash,” and as a hostile or foreign agitator because he exposed the falsehoods underlying their Holocaust narrative. That pattern matters. It shows that the defense of the Brazaitis fraud did not stop at documentary manipulation. It extended into public stigma, delegitimization, and intimidation directed at the person exposing the record.[45]

This point warrants emphasis. A democracy committed to rule of law answers documentary challenge with documentary answer. It does not respond to archival evidence with personal degradation, insinuations of criminality, or a public-relations campaign casting the challenger as an improper threat. When state institutions or state-aligned actors answer in that fashion, they signal that the vulnerability lies not in the critic’s rhetoric but in the official narrative itself. The intimidation is evidentiary. It reveals that the state regarded the exposure of the fraud as dangerous enough to require more than rebuttal.[46]

The same institutional culture is visible in the public posture of LGGRTC itself, which was described not as a guardian of historical truth but as a guardian of erasure: an institution preserving a preferred national narrative through selective omission, apologetic framing, and retaliatory rhetoric toward those who challenged it. In this file, the falsification of history and the intimidation of the truth-teller were not separate phenomena. They were parts of the same state project.[47]

XVI. The Legal Character of the Record

The record does not support a reading of this matter as negligence. It establishes deliberate falsification after notice.

The state knew the 1975 American material was an administrative closure, not an acquittal. It converted that closure into “complete exoneration.” It repeated the falsehood in 55R-21. It embedded the same falsehood into the Škirpa discussion. It stated a doctrine in 14R-82 by which halted investigations were treated as equivalent to acquittal and courteous cover-letter language was treated as apology. It propagated the falsehood publicly through genocid.lt and DELFI. It received legal opinions rejecting the claim. It received formal complaints rejecting the claim. It received congressional letters rejecting the claim. It then maintained the claim. That sequence is not interpretive drift. It is sustained state fraud.[48]

The significance of that fraud exceeds the Brazaitis file itself. A state archive or memorial authority that knowingly falsifies foreign legal records to cleanse Holocaust-linked figures does more than lie in one case. It forfeits the presumption of reliability for the rest of its official historical production wherever national honor and Holocaust responsibility intersect. Lithuania’s dedication to this falsehood was extreme. It was willing to elaborate legal theories, mount public-relations defenses, stigmatize critics, ignore direct American correction, and risk the credibility of its relationship with the United States — its principal security guarantor — rather than surrender a lie useful to its Holocaust narrative. That conduct is not merely ideological. It is proof that the state’s official historical record, where it touches Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust, must be treated as compromised until independently verified. A government that falsifies the meaning of an ally’s documents to launder Holocaust history destroys the credibility of its own official history in every adjacent field.[49]

The question raised by this record is therefore not merely why Lithuania lied in one case. It is what the lie was preserving. The answer is visible on the face of the file. The false American absolution protected a state-honored political leader, shielded the reputation of the Provisional Government, and supplied derivative cover for Škirpa. The intensity of the state’s effort — legal, institutional, and public-relations — shows that the issue was not peripheral to the official national narrative. It was structurally important to it. That is why so much was risked to maintain so little truth.[50]

XVII. Betrayal of the American Relationship

This record is not only a Holocaust-history issue. It is a bilateral-trust issue. Lithuania did not simply lie about its own past. It enlisted the prestige of the United States government in that lie. It borrowed American institutional legitimacy for a domestic nationalist narrative and persisted after the American side objected. That conduct is not marginal to an alliance. It goes directly to reliability.[51]

The betrayal lies in the mechanism. A supposed ally took U.S. congressional and executive-branch paper, assigned it a meaning the United States itself later rejected, used that invented meaning to shield a political leader implicated in anti-Jewish persecution and support for a force responsible for mass murder, and then ignored correction. A government that does this on a matter so documented cannot demand strategic trust as though documentary bad faith were irrelevant to alliance management. It is evidence of unreliability.[52]

Conclusion

The file is complete enough to state the conclusion directly.

The United States did not exonerate Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Lithuania claimed that it did. The claim was false. Lithuania used that false claim in official correspondence, in public communication, and in the state’s treatment of Kazys Škirpa. It maintained the claim after repeated notice from lawyers, historians, complainants, and Congress. It tied that falsification to the protection of a political leader whose government signed anti-Jewish regulations, approved funding for the TDA Battalion and Kaunas VII Fort, and was later assessed by the International Commission as complicit in the segregation, expropriation, and murder process directed against Lithuania’s Jews. Lithuania did not misunderstand the American record. It falsified it. It did not merely fail to correct an old error. It maintained a profitable lie after correction arrived. That is the Brazaitis fraud.[53]

Addendum: What the Brazaitis Fraud Reveals

A personal statement by Grant Arthur Gochin

The Brazaitis case is one file. It is not the only one. The same Lithuanian state institutions that fabricated an American exoneration for Brazaitis applied the same methodology to Jonas Noreika, to Kazys Škirpa, and to the broader record of Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. Burauskaitė’s LGGRTC rewrote the history of Jonas Noreika and many others, systematically converting documented perpetrators into state-honored national heroes. Her successor, Arūnas Bubnys, has been aware of that falsified record and has never revoked it. By maintaining what he inherited without correction, he owns it. The Brazaitis fraud is a specimen, not an anomaly. It represents a systematic, decades-long effort by the Lithuanian government to falsify the historical record of the murder of 96.4% of Lithuanian Jews — the highest murder rate in Europe. The question is no longer whether the fraud occurred. The documentary record establishes that beyond dispute. The question is what that fraud has done to everyone it has touched.

What does this mean for the Lithuanian population?

The citizens of Lithuania have been comprehensively deceived by their own government for more than thirty years. Since the restoration of independence in 1990, the Lithuanian state has honored Holocaust-linked figures with state reburials, presidential military decorations, street names, and school names. It has told its citizens that these men were patriots and heroes. It has told them that the United States confirmed their innocence. None of that was true. The post-1990 Lithuanian government honored Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis with the Order of the Cross of Vytis and a state reburial with full honors. It honored Kazys Škirpa. The question that Lithuanian citizens must now answer is what, precisely, was being honored. Brazaitis headed a government that signed anti-Jewish regulations mandating yellow badges, funded a battalion that murdered 5,000 Jews, and was assessed by Lithuania’s own International Commission as complicit in segregation, expropriation, and mass murder. Škirpa founded an organization whose stated program called for the elimination of Jews from Lithuanian soil. In the context of 1941 — with mass murder of Jews already underway across the region, with the LAF collaborating with Nazi Germany, with the language of purging and elimination saturating the political environment — that formulation was an obvious statement of extermination. To recontextualize it as a call for relocation requires stripping the words of the time, the place, and the killings that immediately followed. The LGGRTC’s own 55R-21 letter acknowledged that this antisemitism was raised to a political level and might have encouraged Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust. What were the honors for? Why were these records not disqualifying?

The Lithuanian population now faces a reckoning that its government has deferred for decades. Every Lithuanian who was taught in school that these men were national heroes was taught a lie. Every Lithuanian who believed the state’s claim that the United States had exonerated Brazaitis was told a fabrication. The damage to Lithuanian society from this deception is not abstract. It has shaped how an entire nation understands its own history, its relationship to its murdered Jewish neighbors, and its moral standing in the world. A society built on falsified history cannot know itself. It cannot make sound judgments about its present because it has been denied the truth about its past.

There has been extensive press coverage of this matter over many years. The documentary record is publicly available. Lithuanian scholars protested the reburial in 2012. The U.S. Congress has written four times. Four American attorneys issued legal opinions. Formal complaints have been filed with the Seimas Ombudsman and the Lithuanian Public Prosecutor. The question of whether the Lithuanian public bears some measure of responsibility for the persistence of this fraud is unavoidable. At what point does a population that has access to the facts but does not demand correction become complicit in the state’s deception? That is not a question I can answer for Lithuanians. It is a question Lithuanians must answer for themselves.

What does this mean for Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė and Arūnas Bubnys?

Burauskaitė, as General Director of the LGGRTC, signed the letters that fabricated the American exoneration, extended it to Škirpa, and maintained it after repeated correction. She rewrote the history of Jonas Noreika and many other documented perpetrators, converting them into state-honored figures through selective omission, apologetic framing, and outright falsification. She holds national honors and receives a state pension. Her institutional frauds have caused documented damage to Lithuania’s international credibility, to its relationship with the United States Congress, and to the historical record of the murder of 96.4% of Lithuanian Jews — the highest murder rate in Europe.

Arūnas Bubnys succeeded Burauskaitė at the LGGRTC. He is aware of the falsified historical record she established. He has not revoked it. He has not corrected the false claims about Brazaitis. He has not corrected the rewritten histories of Noreika or the others. By maintaining without correction what he inherited, he has made it his own. A successor who inherits a known fraud and preserves it is not an innocent bystander. He is a participant.

The question is straightforward: why have Burauskaitė’s honors not been withdrawn? Every day those honors remain in place is a day the Lithuanian state confirms that fabricating Holocaust history on an official platform carries no consequence. That is not a neutral institutional outcome. It is a signal — to Lithuanian citizens, to the international community, to Holocaust survivors and their descendants — that Lithuania values the preservation of a comfortable national narrative more than it values truth. If Burauskaitė’s conduct does not disqualify a state official from national honors, then national honors in Lithuania have no relationship to integrity, and the institution that grants them has no credibility left to protect.

What does this mean for Jewish-Lithuanian relations? For Israel-Lithuania relations? For U.S.-Lithuania relations?

Jewish-Lithuanian relations cannot advance while the Lithuanian state maintains fabricated records about the murder of 96.4% of Lithuanian Jews. There is no foundation for reconciliation built on falsified history. The survivors and descendants who carry that history are owed a truthful accounting, not a state-manufactured narrative designed to protect the reputations of the men who helped structure their persecution.

Israel-Lithuania relations are affected for the same reason. Lithuania has presented itself to Israel as a partner in Holocaust remembrance. That presentation is hollow if Lithuania simultaneously maintains fabricated American absolutions for Holocaust-linked figures and prosecutes citizens who question state-favored historical narratives.

The U.S.-Lithuania relationship is the most directly damaged. Lithuania took the paper of the United States government, reversed its meaning, published the reversal on state platforms, and maintained it after the United States Congress told Lithuania repeatedly that the claim was false. It then dismissed a sitting U.S. Congressman as offering merely an “opinion.” A NATO ally that fabricates the legal positions of the United States for purposes of Holocaust deception and treats congressional correction with contempt has created a trust deficit that extends beyond the historical file. If Lithuania misrepresents U.S. governmental positions on a matter this well-documented, what other representations can be taken at face value?

A gift to Lithuania’s enemies

Lithuania has created its own strategic vulnerability. Russia and Belarus — Lithuania’s principal adversaries — now possess a documented record showing that a NATO member state has been embedded in systematic historical fraud and cannot be trusted even by its closest allies. Lithuania has handed its enemies a weapon they did not need to fabricate, because Lithuania fabricated it for them. Every false claim the LGGRTC published, every congressional letter Lithuania ignored, every correction it dismissed is now available to any adversary seeking to undermine Lithuania’s credibility within NATO, within the European Union, and within the broader international community. A state that lies to its allies about matters of documented historical record has created its own Achilles heel. Russia does not need to invent disinformation about Lithuanian institutional dishonesty. Lithuania provided the evidence itself.

That is not a theoretical vulnerability. It is an operational one. Any diplomatic confrontation, any contested NATO decision, any moment of alliance stress can now be accompanied by the documented fact that Lithuania fabricated American governmental positions, maintained those fabrications after correction, and treated the correcting state’s representative with contempt. Lithuania’s enemies will use that record. The only question is when.

What does this say about professional academia and Holocaust organizations?

I am not a professional historian. I am not a lawyer. I am a concerned citizen of both the United States and Lithuania. The fact that I — working without institutional support, without academic appointment, without the resources of a major Holocaust organization — had to spend years and significant personal expense to establish facts that should have been obvious to any competent professional institution is itself an indictment.

Professional academia has known about the Provisional Government’s record for decades. The Laurinavičius-Rudis memorandum was written in 2010. The International Commission issued its conclusions in 2005. Rytas Narvydas — a historian employed by the LGGRTC itself — published the incriminating Provisional Government minutes in 2001. The documentary record was available. The professional historians who had access to it did not, with rare and honorable exceptions, mount the sustained public challenge that the record demanded. Why did I — as a non-historian and non-lawyer — have to do this work? Why did the institutions whose professional mandate is the preservation of Holocaust truth not do it? What does it say about the state of Holocaust scholarship and institutional accountability that a private citizen had to work so hard, so long, and at such personal cost to establish facts that were sitting in publicly available archives?

The major Holocaust organizations — the institutions whose mission is to preserve the truth of the Holocaust and to resist its distortion — did not intervene at the level or with the persistence that this fraud required. The question I ask is not whether those organizations care about Holocaust truth. It is whether their institutional structures are capable of sustaining the kind of prolonged, adversarial, document-intensive challenge that is necessary when a state — not a fringe group, but a state — commits itself to falsification. The Brazaitis fraud was not hidden. It was published on a government website. It was repeated in official correspondence. It was defended in public media. It persisted for years after formal notice. If that is not enough to trigger a sustained institutional response, then the question of what those institutions are for becomes urgent.

What does it mean for the world that facts can be so easily rewritten?

The Brazaitis fraud is a case study in the fragility of historical truth. A state institution took a document, changed its meaning, published the changed meaning as fact, and maintained it for years against all correction. The tools required to accomplish that were not sophisticated. They were bureaucratic persistence, institutional authority, and the assumption that most people would not read the underlying documents. The tools required to expose it were years of effort, significant expense, legal counsel in two countries, and the willingness to endure personal attack, stigmatization, and implied criminal threat.

That asymmetry is the lesson. Falsifying history is cheap. Correcting it is expensive. States that commit themselves to historical fraud can sustain that fraud far longer than individuals challenging it can sustain the challenge. If the international community does not develop mechanisms to hold states accountable for documented historical falsification — not merely through diplomatic discomfort but through real institutional and alliance consequences — then every historical record is vulnerable to the same treatment. What Lithuania did to the Brazaitis file, any state can do to any file. The precedent, if it stands uncorrected, is that a government can fabricate any legal positions of its allies, use that fabrication to launder any subject it chooses, ignore correction, and face no consequence. That precedent destroys the foundation of any national alliance, because there can be no trust between states when one of them has demonstrated a willingness to falsify the other’s governmental record and maintain that falsification after notice. Trust, once shown to be misplaced on a matter this documented, cannot be presumed on any other matter.

History must be our guide. The purpose of truthful historical accounting is not to punish the present for the sins of the past. It is to ensure that the lessons of the past are available to the future. When a state falsifies that record, it does not merely dishonor the dead. It removes the lessons that their suffering was supposed to teach. Every falsified document, every fabricated exoneration, every laundered reputation makes it easier for the next atrocity to find willing hands, because the record of the last one has been erased or softened or made to seem less real than it was. Falsifying history teaches bad lessons. It leads to repeats of history.

I want the best for both the United States and Lithuania. I want Lithuania to succeed as a democracy and as an ally. But success built on a falsified foundation is not success. It is a structure waiting to collapse. The path forward for Lithuania is not the path of maintaining comfortable lies. It is the path of truth. That path is harder. It is also the only one that leads anywhere worth going.

Disclaimer

I am not a professional historian and I am not a lawyer. I am a concerned citizen of both the United States and Lithuania. The statements in this addendum represent my personal observations, opinions, and analysis based on the documentary record assembled over many years of research. Every factual claim in the main article is supported by documentary evidence cited in the endnotes, including official correspondence from the United States Congress, letters from the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, legal opinions from admitted members of American bar associations, archival documents from Lithuanian state repositories, and published findings of Lithuania’s own International Commission. Where I characterize the conduct of institutions or individuals, I do so based on that documentary record and in the exercise of my right to comment on matters of public concern. I welcome correction supported by evidence. I want a truthful accounting of history as a lesson to the world that this should never happen again, and that history should be our guide. Falsifying history teaches bad lessons and leads to repeats of history.

Endnotes

[1] Grant Arthur Gochin, “Not in our name,” The Times of Israel, December 5, 2019, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/not-in-our-name/; Brad Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019, 2. Kongresmeno Brad Sherman laiškas Ministrui pirmininkui - 2019-09-25.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/2.-Kongresmeno-Brad-Sherman-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2019-09-25.pdf; Letter no. 55R-21.doc, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc; Brad Sherman, “Letter to Ambassador Audra Plepytė,” May 25, 2021, Congressman Sherman to Ambassador Plepyte, Letter Response.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf.

[2] Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019; Letter no. 55R-21.doc; Sherman, “Letter to Ambassador Audra Plepytė,” May 25, 2021.

[3] 1. 1975 m JAV.pdf, public copy at https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/1975-letter.pdf; Brazaitis - INS document.pdf.

[4] Stuart L. Leviton, letter to Grant Arthur Gochin, November 27, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Leviton.pdf; Gary D. Labin, letter to Grant Arthur Gochin, December 5, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Labin.pdf; Bryan Barnet Miller, letter to Grant Arthur Gochin, November 29, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Miller.pdf; I. Mark Bledstein, letter to Grant Arthur Gochin, December 6, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Bledstein-letter.pdf.

[5] Grant Arthur Gochin, research memorandum prepared for Congressman Brad Sherman identifying INS identification defects (misspelled surname, incorrect birth year, incorrect birthplace), working document on file with author.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Grant Arthur Gochin, research memorandum on CIA query identifying Brazaitis as “alleged member of the communist party in Lithuania,” working document on file with author.

[8] Brad Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/2.-Kongresmeno-Brad-Sherman-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2019-09-25.pdf.

[9] 5. Žydų padėties nuostatai LCVA-f1075-a2-b5-l54A.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/5.-Zydu-padeties-nuostatai-LCVA-f1075-a2-b5-l54A.pdf.

[10] Brazaitis scans.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-scans.pdf.

[11] Grant Arthur Gochin, memoranda prepared for Congressman Brad Sherman and the U.S. Secretary of State documenting the Provisional Government’s broader anti-Jewish conduct, including closure of Jewish theaters, property expropriation, and the Council of Ministers’ August 2, 1941 resolution excluding Jews, working documents on file with author.

[12] Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019.

[13] Gochin, research memorandum for Congressman Sherman, on file with author; Sherman, Letter to PM Skvernelis, September 25, 2019.

[14] Gochin, memoranda for Congressman Sherman documenting the Provisional Government’s anti-Jewish legislative program, working documents on file with author.

[15] Brazaitis Letter.docx; Brazaitis communication 3-16-18.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-communication-3-16-18.pdf.

[16] Gochin, memoranda for Congressman Sherman and the U.S. Secretary of State documenting the Mackevičius testimony, the Bobelis-von Pohl exchange, and the drafting of the “Statute for the Jewish Situation,” working documents on file with author.

[17] Gochin, memorandum documenting Brazaitis’s statement at the Provisional Government’s final meeting acknowledging knowledge of executions of Jews, working document on file with author.

[18] Brazaitis scans.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-scans.pdf.

[19] September 2012 Letter to Lithuanian Prime Minister.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/3.-Kongreso-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2012-09-25.pdf.

[20] 8. “Atviras laiškas dėl J. Ambrazevičiaus-B...kilmingo perlaidojimo - Bernardinai.lt”.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/8.-Atviras-laiskas-del-J.-Ambrazeviciaus-B.kilmingo-perlaidojimo-Bernardinai.lt_.pdf.

[21] LGGRTC, Letter Nr. 55R-21, February 26, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc; Complaint to the Lithuanian Public Prosecutor, November 15, 2019, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Complaint-to-Public-Prosecutor-English.pdf.

[22] Mark Bledstein, Bledstein-letter.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Bledstein-letter.pdf.

[23] 14R-82.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/14R-82.pdf.

[24] LGGRTC, Letter Nr. 14R-82, October 11, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/14R-82.pdf; Gochin, research memorandum for Congressman Sherman, on file with author.

[25] 2. LGGRTC atsišaukimas 2018-07-19 - www genocid lt.pdf; DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019, https://www.delfi.lt/news/ringas/politics/lggrtc-genocido-tyrimo-centras-nepasiduos-vulgariam-spaudimui-80566671; Brazaitis - Public Prosecutor - English.pdf.

[26] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Genocide Center - Public Prosecutor.pdf.

[27] Grant Gochin, “Summary of legal actions 5/10/15–6/22/20,” https://grantgochin.com/summary-of-legal-actions-5-10-15-6-22-20/; 2. LGGRTC atsišaukimas 2018-07-19 - www genocid lt.pdf.

[28] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Genocide Center - Public Prosecutor.pdf; Complaint to Public Prosecutor - English.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Complaint-to-Public-Prosecutor-English.pdf.

[29] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Letter_Ombudsman_Brazaitis_20180316-1.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter_Ombudsman_Brazaitis_20180316-1.pdf.

[30] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Genocide Center - Public Prosecutor.pdf.

[31] Letter no. 55R-21.doc; 14R-82.pdf; DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019.

[32] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019.

[33] Genocide Center - Public Prosecutor.pdf; Complaint to Public Prosecutor - English.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Complaint-to-Public-Prosecutor-English.pdf.

[34] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; 1. 1975 m JAV.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/1975-letter.pdf.

[35] DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Genocide Center - Public Prosecutor.pdf.

[36] Letter_Ombudsman_Brazaitis_20180316-1.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter_Ombudsman_Brazaitis_20180316-1.pdf; Brazaitis communication 3-16-18.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-communication-3-16-18.pdf.

[37] 20181212_Letter_Brazaitis_Ombudsman_GC.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/20181212_Letter_Brazaitis_Ombudsman_GC.pdf; Brazaitis-Skirpa-compressed.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-Skirpa-compressed.pdf; Stuart Leviton, Leviton.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Leviton.pdf; Gary Labin, Labin.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Labin.pdf; Mark Bledstein, Bledstein-letter.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Bledstein-letter.pdf; Bryan Barnet Miller, Miller.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Miller.pdf.

[38] Complaint to the Lithuanian Public Prosecutor, November 15, 2019, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Complaint-to-Public-Prosecutor-English.pdf; Brazaitis – Public Prosecutor – English version on file with author.

[39] On-Brazaitis-Exoneration_Grant-Arthur-Gochin_Nov-26-2020.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/On-Brazaitis-Exoneration_Grant-Arthur-Gochin_Nov-26-2020.pdf; Brazitis-Nov-2020-1.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazitis-Nov-2020-1.pdf; Del-Ambrazeviciaus-Brazaicio-isteisinimo-GG-2020-11-261.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Del-Ambrazeviciaus-Brazaicio-isteisinimo-GG-2020-11-261.pdf; Lydrastis_G.Gochin-s1127.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Lydrastis_G.Gochin-s1127.pdf.

[40] September 2012 Letter to Lithuanian Prime Minister.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/3.-Kongreso-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2012-09-25.pdf.

[41] Sherman Letter on Brazaitis.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/2.-Kongresmeno-Brad-Sherman-laiskas-Ministrui-pirmininkui-2019-09-25.pdf.

[42] Congressman Sherman to Ambassador Plepyte, Letter Response.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf.

[43] Brad Sherman, “Letter to Ambassador Gediminas Varvuolis,” March 20, 2026. Copy on file with author; public URL pending issuance.

[44] LGGRTC, Letter Nr. 55R-21, February 26, 2018, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc; Grant Arthur Gochin, diplomatic briefing memorandum prepared for the U.S. Department of State documenting Lithuania’s extrapolation of the fabricated Brazaitis exoneration to Kazys Škirpa, working document on file with author.

[45] Grant Arthur Gochin, “Criminal, trash, and enemy of the state,” The Times of Israel, June 12, 2020, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/criminal-trash-and-enemy-of-the-state/.

[46] Grant Gochin, “Summary of legal actions 5/10/15–6/22/20,” https://grantgochin.com/summary-of-legal-actions-5-10-15-6-22-20/; DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019.

[47] Grant Arthur Gochin, “The guardian of the erased,” The Times of Israel, January 10, 2026, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-guardian-of-the-erased/.

[48] Letter no. 55R-21.doc, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc; 14R-82.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/14R-82.pdf; DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Leviton, Labin, Bledstein, Miller PDFs; Congressman Sherman to Ambassador Plepyte, Letter Response.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf.

[49] Sherman, Letter to PM Skvernelis, September 25, 2019; Sherman, Letter to Ambassador Plepytė, May 25, 2021, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf; Sherman, Letter to Ambassador Varvuolis, March 20, 2026, copy on file with author.

[50] Gochin, memoranda for Congressman Sherman and the U.S. Secretary of State, working documents on file with author; Laurinavičius and Rudis, Memorandum, January 21, 2010, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Brazaitis-scans.pdf; LGGRTC, Letter Nr. 55R-21, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc.

[51] Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019; Congressman Sherman to Ambassador Plepyte, Letter Response.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf; Brazaitis Letter 2026 Final.docx.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Sherman, “Letter to Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis,” September 25, 2019; Letter no. 55R-21.doc, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Letter-no.-55R-21.doc; 14R-82.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/14R-82.pdf; 2. LGGRTC atsišaukimas 2018-07-19 - www genocid lt.pdf; DELFI, “LGGRTC. Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui,” March 8, 2019; Congressman Sherman to Ambassador Plepyte, Letter Response.pdf, https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response.pdf.