Posted on 07/27/2008 12:37:48 PM PDT by Grzegorz 246
A judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Lithuania has led to accusations that the small Baltic state is trying to distort the history of World War II.
The row follows investigations by the country's prosecutor into whether the former partisans - Holocaust survivors now in their 80s - themselves committed war crimes.
Israel has denounced the inquiry as scandalous and refused to allow one of the main potential witnesses to be questioned. Britain's foremost World War II historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, told the BBC he was "deeply shocked" by the investigation, which he called "perverse".
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which works to track down Nazi war criminals, claims it is part of an attempt to establish a "false symmetry" between atrocities committed against Jews and atrocities allegedly committed by them.
And the dispute has now led to a tense meeting between the Lithuanian prime minister Gediminas Kirkilas and American Jewish leaders.
'Punitive action'
At least four former fighters have now been questioned or are being sought for questioning. All deny any wrongdoing, and so far the main evidence appears to be memoirs written by former partisans themselves.
The row began to develop last September when the Lithuanian prosecutor for war-crimes and crimes against humanity asked to talk to Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad about his experiences as a 16-year-old boy, after he had escaped from a Nazi-run ghetto in Lithuania and joined the Soviet-led resistance force in the forest.
Dr Arad, 81, is former head of Israel's Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem.
He was not informed what provoked the inquiry, but the prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevicius, told the BBC he was investigating the killing of at least one civilian in a raid by partisans on Girdenai, a village in eastern Lithuania in 1944.
In his book, The Partisan, first published in English in 1979, Dr Arad described how his brigade was ordered to mount a "punitive action" against villagers who, he wrote, were armed by the Germans and had shot partisans attempting to requisition food.
Dr Arad described how houses were burned. But he denies involvement in the killing of any civilians.
He has said he is willing to be interviewed by Lithuanian journalists, but not by the police. "I don't trust them," he said. "The case has no basis. It is trying to falsify events. And I don't want to be part of this play."
Rewriting history?
Dr Arad, like other former partisans, insists that joining the Soviet-led resistance force was effectively his only means of staying alive in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.
Historians say that about 95% of the country's Jews - 200,000 people - were killed by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators. This is probably the highest proportion in Europe.
Under Lithuanian law, any citizen can initiate an inquiry into wartime crimes, and Dr Arad believes the inquiry into his record is revenge for expert evidence he gave at the trial in the United States of a former Lithuanian Nazi collaborator accused of involvement in the killing of Jews.
"I think they use my case as a general intention to rewrite history," he said, "to show that Jews are not the only victims."
Lithuania's deputy foreign minister Jaroslavas Neverovicas told the BBC that Dr Arad was wanted as a witness, not a suspect.
But the case has undone painstaking work by the government a few years ago to establish an international commission of historians tasked with examining the crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in Lithuania, and attempting to draw up a definitive version of highly controversial events.
One aim was to reconcile differing assessments, inside and outside Lithuania, of the extent of Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust.
Sabotage
Dr Arad, seen as a key Israeli scholar, was originally persuaded to join the Commission only after the personal intervention of Lithuania's president. But he has now withdrawn, at least until the case is dropped, as has Britain's representative, Sir Martin Gilbert.
"The Commission was one of the best things that happened in post-Soviet Lithuania," the deputy foreign minister, Mr Neverovicas, said. "It's unfortunate that such an episode appeared. But when the accusation happened, our prosecutor's office could not sit still, it had to investigate."
The government-appointed head of the commission, however, believes that its work has been deliberately sabotaged by nationalist forces who want to lead Lithuania away from the European mainstream.
Conservative member of parliament Emmanuelis Zingeris, Lithuania's leading Jewish politician, who was one of those at the forefront of the country's campaign to break away from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, said:
"Someone has tried to dismantle this carefully-built bridge between Lithuania, Israel, America and world historical opinion. And it's a real tragedy.. a highly counter-productive move against Lithuanian liberal values, against all our shared values with NATO and EU countries."
For the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the world's main Nazi-hunting organisation, the investigation of Jewish partisans is part of a wider attempt by Lithuania to improve its international image by rewriting the history of World War II.
"The participation of so many Lithuanian volunteers in the mass murder of Jews is a very sensitive subject," says Efraim Zuroff of the centre's Jerusalem office. "However if it emerges that there were Jews who committed crimes against Lithuanians, that would blunt the shame that Lithuanians feel in response to their World War II crimes."
"The Holocaust obfuscation, distortion and deflection going on in Lithuania should be a very serious cause of concern in the EU and Nato," he added.
"I think what is happening in Lithuania and elsewhere throughout Eastern Europe is far more serious than the phenomenon of Holocaust denial which has never penetrated mainstream European society."
Dr Zuroff describes independent Lithuania's record in prosecuting Nazi war criminals as a "miserable failure". Since 1991, it has prosecuted three Nazi collaborators - and 24 people accused of crimes against humanity or genocide under the Soviet regime.
Totalitarian
The country has its own judicial definition of the word "genocide", wider than that used by the United Nations.
It includes attempts to wipe out particular social as well as ethnic groups, and can therefore potentially be used to prosecute Soviet crimes as well as Nazi ones.
Many non-Jewish Lithuanians argue they were subject to a form of genocide because the Soviet Union attempted to destroy the nation's intellectual elite through mass deportations to Siberia, the fight against anti-Soviet guerrillas, and other forms of persecution.
As for Nazi collaborators, the government says most were prosecuted in Soviet times, whereas the task of finding Soviet collaborators could only begin after independence.
Deputy foreign minister Neverovicas says Lithuania is being even-handed in investigating both totalitarian regimes and is right to be spearheading efforts in the European Parliament to make Western Europeans more aware of Soviet crimes.
But his government is clearly embarrassed by the still-widening investigation of the partisans.
This spring prosecutors questioned 86-year-old Fania Brantsovskaya, who still lives in Lithuania, about the role her partisan brigade played in an alleged massacre of 38 civilians in the village of Kaniukai in south-eastern Lithuania in January 1944.
Mrs Brantsovskaya insists she was not present during the raid and has now also been told that she is not a suspect.
Nevertheless the prime minister Mr Kirkilas was so concerned about the possible impact of the case on Lithuania's relations with America's influential Jewish community that he invited her to tea before his trip to New York.
Lithuania insists, however, that the judiciary works independently of the government, and the inquiry continues.
An eye for an eye makes the hole world blind. Yes, I know that's a quote from lefty-par-excellance Gandi, but he does have a point there. Many terrible things were done during that time frame by all sides; there must come a point to put aside the grievances of the past and more forward.
Is promoting the idea of moral equivalency between Nazi horrors and Jewish resistance better or worse than outright Holocaust denial? You decide.
bump for later
The whole thing has the smell of Pootsie and the old Communists trying to stir the pot, which under Lithuanian law looks easy.
A very revealing statement. He apparently thinks "real history" would show or should show that Jews were the only victims.
Any casual student of the period knows this is incorrect. Massacres were committed by all sides, most especially in the East.
After the War, ethnic Germans were expelled. Most of them had lived in these countries for many centuries. Depending on which estimates you believe, somewhere between .5 and 2.5 million of the died in the process.
That Germans, who had persecuted Slavs, Balts and Jews, were themselves abused and massacred when the Slavs and Balts got the upper hand (most of the Jews were dead by then), should surprise nobody. That's human nature.
What I do find surprising is that a supposed historian would seriously put forward the idea that only Jews suffered during WWII, or even that Jews themselves were never guilty of participation in war crimes. It's pretty well known that a high percentage of the leaders of the Red Terror were ethnic/racial (although not religious) Jews.
Unfortunately, this also causes side effects, such as honoring Nazi criminals and collaborators, and arresting and jailing anti-Nazi fighters.
When Lithuania did that to its own citizens and subjects, Russia was just unhappy, but the world at large didn't pay attention. However to accuse a Jewish anti-Nazi fighter, citizen of Israel, of a crime of fighting Hitler ... they jumped the shark there. A country has to be certifiably mad to blame a person for "escaped from a Nazi-run ghetto in Lithuania and joined the Soviet-led resistance force in the forest". Do they think the guy should have stayed in ghetto and waited for his train ride to Germany?
I don’t think the issue is about whether the guy should have waited for his boxcar, but about what he did in the meantime. Speaking from experience, I’ll tell you that this is one effed-up portion of the world, and these people will be struggling with these issues for a long, long time.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
You can’t litigate war. You can’t litigate history. Lithuania was caught between Stalin and Hitler. It was a guarantee for tragedy. I have talked to Russians who initially saw the Germans as their liberators; only after the roundups started and the executions did they start to fight back against the Nazis. For the Baltic states it was even more complicated.
In a war in which Nazis are on one side, and stalinists on the other, good people can be caught up on either side of it. Its part of the tragedy that is history. You mourn it, document it, and move on.
Dr. Arad owes no one any apology. He survived a war that killed 95% of his fellows, and he fought against the people who did it, and somehow he managed to survive. The prosecutor is shaming Lithuania. Arad should not allow himself to be drawn into something that is essentially dishonest and shameful. He’s too old for these guys to be able to do anything to him. He should walk tall and spit in their eye if they get too close.
This is laughable. 50 million people died. Civilians died by the millions.
Why would Communist want to stir up trouble for old communist Partisans? Doesn't compute!
More likely Lithuanian nationalists.
Are you a Putin Fan?
Well said!
However, once you've escaped there are certain actions that go beyond resistance and become war crimes. In addition to fighting Germans, Communist Partisan throughout eastern Europe committed numerous atrocities while imposing their system.
This is just one example.
Hey Numb nuts! Do you realize this thread is a month old?
So?
NATO stealth missions continue after crash (March 28, 1999)
"..The Serb military reported that one of its missiles shot down the F-117A Nighthawk. Serb television broadcast video of the twisted, burning wreckage of the plane for several hours before NATO confirmed the crash..."
You have been posting pro Putin and pro Commie ever since.
Why would a Putin-sympathizer try to rally people to old communist Serbs?
Opposing Clinton's Balkans policies and misuse of NATO in an illegal war against Yugoslavia was hardly pro Communist. If you supported Clinton's actions, I would think DU or KOS might fit you better. The vast majority of Republicans, at least in the House, opposed the "war".
Here and here are two Republican Senate position papers on the Balkans. Since then, John Schindler's book Unholy Terror expands on the problens Clinton caused us. Bush's recognition of Kosovo was to bear biter fruit.
As far as Georgia goes, I believe Saakashvili is a fool that tried to drag us into his war. I've used the term "Russian trap" that he fell into. However, since then I've run across a pundit who observed it is hardly a trap when everyone knows about it. It was was like a flashing sign...
The Fourth of July, American independence, two top American officials, heady stuff for Saakashvili in Dubrovnik; old Ragusa and Lord Byron; but there is more in the air, this is Croatia... Knin, Operacija Oluja... US support.
But he's told that he is not in NATO. If he get's into it, he's in it by himself. "Nobody's coming. There is no cavalry." If that wasn't bad enough, the other official nails him to the wall...
"... I pointed out that Georgia hasn't won a war against anybody for 2,000 years." "Let's not kid ourselves. You're not Chechens."
A direct insult to romantic Georgian manhood! Tskhinvali would be his Knin, this would be his Operation Storm, the US would have to come to his aid!
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