The Extraordinary Recent History of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania




OPINION  |  HISTORY  |  LITHUANIA’S STATE COMMISSION ON NAZI AND SOVIET CRIMES   |  LITVAK AFFAIRS

by Dovid Katz

This paper was published today by Taylor and Francis on its website. It appears in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, volume 31, no. 3, pp. 285-295 (Dec. 2017). Dapim is edited by the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research at the University of Haifa.

In Lithuania, the primary provider for Holocaust studies for close to two decades has been the state-sponsored International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (ICECNSORL), which was established in 1998 by decree of the nation’s president and is housed in the office of its prime minister, embedding it in the highest strata of Lithuanian politics. Several of its activities have enabled significant contributions in research, education, and public commemoration.

It has, however, played a simultaneous and inseparable role in nationalist-based historical revisionism designed for export, and current geopolitics, in a part of the world where these aspects of history are contemporary politics. The same commission providing for research is a primary engine for changing the actual narrative of the Holocaust per se into the revisionist ‘Double Genocide’ model, while straddling the political need to appeal to both the local nationalist base and Western and foreign Jewish audiences. The core of the history has perhaps been best summarized by Yitzhak Arad:

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