Germany
Welcome to Defending History! Issues & Projects in Autumn-Winter 2026
Posted in Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views
Tagged Jewish issues in Lithuania (2025)
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A Veteran German Public Figure Speaks Out—and Suddenly Withdraws—Statement on the Last Jewish Partisan Remnant in Lithuania
Opinion | The Last Jewish Partisan Fort | History | Blaming the Victims | Germany
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Top: One of the collapsing bunkers at the Vilna Jewish Partisans’ fort in the forest just outside the new German Panzerbrigade 45 training grounds (photo: DefendingHistory.com). Bottom: Panzerbrigade forces just down the road (photos: Panzerbrigade 45).
Editor’s note: The text below is the final English version of a statement by a veteran German public figure. It was approved by the author, then withdrawn on the day scheduled for publication, May 11, 2026. In an accompanying email, the author explained that he had been persuaded to withdraw his statement by an eminent retired Lithuanian parliamentarian who “is ready to ask the Jewish authorities, in what condition the resistance bunker now is actually,” after which he would be “ready to convince the political leaders in Berlin, that the process of renovation could start very soon.”
In light of the fort’s continuing and rapid deterioration, the absence of any such remedy, and Panzerbrigade 45’s failure even to mention the fort in its extensive public relations material, we have decided to publish the statement for the historical record while preserving the distinguished author’s anonymity. Also for the record, Defending History’s first private written communication on the matter to the German Embassy in Vilnius was dated May 6, 2025, more than a year earlier. From June 2026 onward, the issue was taken up by outside media, including JTA, Der Spiegel, and Berliner Zeitung, further disconfirming any suggestion that this could or would be solved if only it does not become a public issue. In any case, it is a wholly public and transparent matter deserving to see the light of day in the public (and global) square. News on the issue continues to appear in Defending History’s section on the subject.
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This time it is different. German soldiers are being welcomed today by so many of the Lithuanian people in a unique and inspiring new role: to assist in securing the freedom of the Lithuanian people. That means, to defend Lithuania’s democratically based nationhood. To do so with conviction, the German soldiers now coming to Lithuania to populate the Bundeswehr’s new Forty-Fifth Panzer Brigade (Litautenbrigade) in the framework of NATO, must remain deeply aware, every single day, winter and summer, autumn and spring, what it was that German Nazi forces and their local collaborators destroyed in Lithuania in 1941, and in the years 1941 to 1944.
Posted in Germany, Gert Weisskirchen, History, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, German 45th Brigade in Lithuania, Gert Weisskirchen, Litauenbrigade, Lithuania's last Jewish partisan remnant, Rudninkai Jewish partisan fort
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Panzerbrigade 45, Repeatedly Citing Cemetery Cleaning in its PR, Fails to Mention Even Once the Next-Door Sinking Jewish Partisan Fort
LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | LATEST REPORTS ON THE FORT| 20-YEAR CAMPAIGN TO DEFAME THE VILNA JEWISH PARTISANS | HISTORY | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—In the present context, we are limiting this survey to the official German governmental and Bundeswehr public-relations apparatus active in connection with Panzerbrigade 45 in Lithuania. We are therefore not including serious journalistic treatments carried by institutions such as the Goethe-Institut, which is legally independent and has mixed public and self-generated funding, even where such treatments importantly discuss the Jewish partisan fort. Our concern here is narrower: what Germany’s own military and governmental communications machinery chooses to publicize about Panzerbrigade 45 and Jewish history in Lithuania, while not uttering a syllable about the Jewish partisan fort right near its own training ground. As detailed in earlier reports, the arrival of the Panzerbrigade’s massive military infrastructure has already badly damaged the fort’s accessibility and has been responsible for rapid deterioration.
Given the solemn respect that both the Bundestag and the current German government have shown in repeated statements, it seems that there is a disturbing dissonance with the Lithuanian-related PR coming entirely out of the German state’s budget.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Christian-Jewish Issues, Germany, History, Human Rights, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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German Bundestag and Government Statements on the Rapidly Sinking Remnants of the Last Jewish Partisan Fort in Lithuania
LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | 20-YEAR CAMPAIGN TO DEFAME THE VILNA JEWISH PARTISANS | HISTORY | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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Berlin speaks of respect for the last remnant of Jewish partisan resistance, and particularly the partisan fort where the Vilna Jewish Partisans, all escapees from the Vilna Ghetto, lived and fought the Nazis, most famously after the ghetto’s liquidation on 23 September 1943 and right up to the end of Nazi occupation in July 1944.
But the German army’s new Panzerbrigade 45 is the new factor causing the fort’s rapid deterioration. In spite of all the laudable German government statements and commitments set out below (with links to sources), the remnants of Lithuania’s last surviving Jewish partisan fort from the resistance to Nazi rule — in the historic Rudnitsk Forest, today Rūdninkai Forest — have been deteriorating rapidly since the arrival immediately nearby, in the same forest, of Germany’s new NATO-affiliated Panzerbrigade 45 (“Litauenbrigade”).
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Christian-Jewish Issues, Documents, EU, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, History, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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Blaming the Victims: Documents from a 20 Year Campaign to Defame and Decommemorate the Jewish Partisan Resistance against the Nazis
LAST UPDATE
(originally published 21 Aug. 2010). See also (older, not updated) Responses page.
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2024 2025 2026
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The campaign of defamation by Lithuanian state prosecutors and allied elites (particularly in the Genocide Center and the antisemitic right-wing press) has resulted in a number of cherished Holocaust Survivors being smeared as “war criminals” without a single charge ever having been leveled against anybody. Launched in 2006, the campaign, abusing tools such as “pre-trial investigations” and leaks to the media, have sought to brand as “war criminals” the heroes of the war against Hitler. It grew in 2011 with the addition of equally perverse “libel charges,” launched with fanfare when Interpol (!) was sent to disturb in Tel Aviv the elected head of the last active group of Litvak Holocaust survivors in the world. Then, in 2013, the state’s “red-brown commission” defamed one of Vilnius’s last survivors on equally perverse grounds, all the while putting on “Holocaust events” for naive Western audiences, usually funded by the (unknowing) Lithuanian taxpayer, in venues including London, New York, Toronto, and Vilnius.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Documents, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Did State-Manipulated NGO in Lithuania, Called on to ‘Fix’ Germany’s ‘Jewish Partisan Fort Problem’ Even Mention to the German Soldiers the Jewish Fort Remnants Abutting Panzerbrigade 45?
OPINION | MEDIA WATCH | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—Appreciation is due to the Lithuanian NGO Maceva, and both members of its management team, and the German Army’s new Panzer Brigade in Lithuania (Panzerbrigade 45, Litautenbrigade) for their new joint effort to clean and maintain old Jewish gravestones, as reported, inter alia, on Facebook. This is a noble endeavor.
It is a laudable activity for both Maceva and for the German soldiers. Cleaning pre-Holocaust gravestones of a people of whom none exist anymore in those places is in itself a valuable indirect lesson in the meaning of “genocide” on the ground rather than just in the realm of academic and political debate of the day.
But there is a catch.
Posted in Germany, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views
Tagged Following Fania, German Panzerbrigade 45, Germany and the Holocaust, Holocaust remembrance, Jewish Labor Bund, Jewish Labour Bund, Jewish partisan fort in Rūdninkai Forest, Legacy of the Jewish Partisans, Litauenbrigade 45, Litvak Cemetery Catalogue, Maceva, Melbourne Bund, NYBC (National Yiddish Book Center), Plea to Litauenbrigade, Rūdninkai Forest, Yivo
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The Magic Wand for Making Holocaust Perpetrators into Heroes in Lithuania — While Jewish Resistance Heroes become ‘Enemies of The State’ …
LITHUANIA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | BLAMING VICTIMS | GLORIFYING PERPETRATORS | LAST REMNANT OF JEWISH PARTISAN RESISTANCE IN THE FORESTS OF LITHUANIA | HISTORY
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OPINION
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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- “Soviet rule has disappeared. The Jews are left behind as fair game.”
- Entry of July 7, 1941. From Surviving the Holocaust: Kovno Ghetto Diary, by Avraham Tory.
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In the late sixties while working in a small company in Brussels my Jewish boss who had been “geschmuggelt’’ out of the ghetto in Lvov (former Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine) in a truck, before it was liquidated in 1942, had repeatedly told me that after his escape he had repeatedly tried to join with partisan groups in the area, mostly Polish or Ukrainian. Had they known that he was Jewish, he would have been killed outright. His luck was that he could pass himself off as a Pole as he spoke the language well. He had been fifteen years old at the time. I remembered these words recently on the occasion of the scandal that has erupted these past months regarding the Jewish Partisan Fort in the Rūdninkai Forest (Yiddish; Rudnitsker vald) which is now in danger of being erased due to the presence in that zone of the new German NATO Panzer Brigade (Litauenbrigade).
EFFECTS OF THE LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT’S ‘MAGIC WAND’? Left: Public monument to Holocaust collaborator Juozas Krikštaponis (photo: Seimas). Right: One of the collapsing bunkers at Lithuania’s only relic of the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance that sits next door to Germany’s new Panzer brigade and may soon disappear (photo: DefendingHistory.com).
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Collaborators Glorified, Germany, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Roland Binet
Tagged Genocide Center Vilnius, Jewish partisan fort (Lithuania), Ministry of Culture (Lithuania), Roland Binet, Solveig Grothe, Timothy Snyder, Yitzhak Arad
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Der Spiegel’s Solveig Grothe Elicits Official Culture Ministry Position on Destruction of Lithuania’s Last Relic of Jewish Anti-Nazi Resistance
OPINION | MEDIA WATCH | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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by Dovid Katz
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VILNIUS—Solveig Grothe’s article in Germany’s weekly Der Spiegel, appeared today in the journal’s print edition, and yesterday, in a slightly longer version, in the online edition (alternate link; PDF of print edition). The piece resulted from months of research including onsite work in Vilnius, and at the forest fort, and seeking out statements for the record from all sides in the debate.
For some, the article’s greatest revelation will be the degree to which not only the state-sponsored Genocide Center, but also its prestigious Ministry of Culture, rushed to go on the record to trash the legacy — and the memory and possibility of commemoration — of the tiny handful of Lithuanian Jewish citizens who survived the Holocaust by joining up with the partisan anti-Nazi resistance in the forest.
Posted in Germany, Human Rights, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Last Jewish Partisan Fort in Lithuania, YIVO and Jewish partisans
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Berliner Zeitung’s Maritta Tkalec Breaks (Weird) German Media Taboo on the Sinking Jewish Partisan Fort in Lithuania
OPINION | MEDIA WATCH | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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by Dovid Katz
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VILNIUS—Maritta Tkalec is to be congratulated on her fine article in today’s Berliner Zeitung (PDF; English; Lithuanian). It breaks the (weird) taboo in mainstream German media on the mystically powerful and rapidly sinking Jewish anti-Nazi partisan fort in a forest in Lithuania that — by the majesty of history or the hand of higher powers — has ended up just next door to the vast German Army 45th Brigade training grounds now under construction in the context of NATO.
Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Germany, History, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, German 45th Brigade, Jewish fort Rudninkai (Lithuania), LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), Litauenbrigade, Maritta Tkalec
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A June 2026 Plea to Germany: Please Honor the Memory of the Vilna Jewish Partisans & Preserve their Rapidly Disappearing Fort in the Forest
LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS
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OPINION
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Please ask your elected officials to contact the German embassy in your country:
Please rapidly mark, fence and protect the ground sacred to Holocaust survivors and their families that now abuts the forest training grounds of the new German Brigade arriving in the Lithuanian forests as part of NATO. The fort, where 100 Vilna Ghetto partisans found refuge and valiantly fought the Nazis, is disappearing by the day, used for late night partying by the barracks builders, and very soon, if not corrected, by thousands of German troops…
For decades, partisans veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922–2024) took thousands of visitors from around the world to this major historic site in the Lithuanian forest. What a splendid opportunity this is for genuine Holocaust education of the young German troops heading eastward. Video of Fania at the fort in 2007.
Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky showing us around the Jewish partisan fort, in her Vilna Yiddish, in 2007 (video). Her last request to future generations. DH’s section on the Jewish partisan fort (also in ascending chronological order).
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Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views
Tagged 45th Brigade (Germany in Lihtuania), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Germany + Holocaust in Lithuania, Germany and the Holocaust, Jewish Labor Bund, Jewish partisan fort in Lithuania, Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot, Litauenbrigade, Nusach Vilna, Yivo
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Text of Question and Answer in the German Parliament on Lithuania’s Last Remnants of Jewish Partisan Fort in the Forest (right next door to the new German Army Brigade)
FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | JEWISH FORT IN THE FOREST | BLAMING THE VICTIMS
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BERLIN—The German Bundestag’s 16 December 2025 record of questions-and-answers on the remnants of the last Jewish partisan fort in Lithuania, is now online on the German parliamentary website (and available as separate PDF). The Bundestag followed up with a press release affirming respect for the site. See now Defending History’s evolving page on the subject.
Images of the individual pages:
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Germany, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory
Tagged Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, German Army 45th Brigade in Lithuania, Last Jewish Partisan Fort in Lithuania, Rachel Margolis, Rudninkai Jewish Fort Remains and German Army
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Germany’s New Brigade in Lithuania (‘Panzerbrigade 45’): Right Near Remnants of the Last Anti-Nazi Jewish Partisan Fort in Europe
[LAST UPDATE (SEE AT END): 20 JUNE 2025]
LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EASTERN EUROPE | POLITICS OF MEMORY | GERMANY | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—International media has reported in detail on last week’s military ceremonies in Vilnius celebrating the permanent installation of thousands of German soldiers as part of NATO forces in Lithuania, southernmost of the three Baltic republics. The new entity is “Germany’s 45th Armoured Brigade” (Panzerbrigade 45) that is also known as the “Lithuania Brigade”.
The Defending History community is a staunch supporter of the values and security needs of the European Union, NATO, the Western alliance of free and democratic nations, and has from day one condemned the medieval, barbaric February 2022 invasion and unleashing of mass death and destruction upon Ukraine by Putin’s Russian Federation forces. Our support includes reproducing a statement that has appeared for over a decade on p. 1 of DefendingHistory.com (right hand column). As stated there, adherence to the democratic values of the EU and the NATO alliance includes cherishing the free-speech right to criticize: efforts to rewrite Holocaust history by Eastern Europe’s ultranationalist far right; efforts to defame the victims, including Jewish partisans who fought valiantly against the Nazis; efforts to disseminate Double Genocide revisionism in the realm of Holocaust and World War II history; efforts to glorify Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators; efforts to curtail free speech by criminalizing or delegitimizing views that oppose these efforts.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Jewish Fort in the Lithuanian Forest: A Last Remnant of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Birgit Kraemer, Chancellor Merz, Fania Brancovskaja, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Germany's "Lithuania Brigade", Germany's 45th Armoured Brigade, Jewish partisans in Lithuania, Jewish partisans in Vilna, Mantautas Sulskis, NATO in Lithuania, Panzerbrigade 45, Rūdninkai Forest, Rūdninkai training ground, Rūdninkų giria, Rudnítsker vald
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Arkady Kurliandchik Critiques German Embassy’s Kukliansky Award
OPINION | LITHUANIA’S JEWISH COMMUNITY ISSUES | GERMANY
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by Arkady Kurliandchik (Vilnius)
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I am aware that it has long been a practice to award assorted leaders with assorted honors on assorted occasions. Perhaps there is some logic behind it. If you are the leader of something, well, then surely you must deserve recognition!
However, the recent award which was bestowed on the D-Day anniversary upon the head of the “Lithuanian Jewish Community” by the German Embassy here in Vilnius seems rather misplaced. As stated on the LJC website, the award was presented to Ms. Faina Kukliansky “for her tireless work commemorating Lithuanian Holocaust victims and long-term efforts to unite the LJC including enhancing the organization’s role on the national and international level.”
Posted in "Good Will Foundation" (Jewish Restitution in Lithuania), American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Lithuania, Arkady Kurliandchik, Faina Kukliansky, Germany, Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged American Jewish Committee (AJC), Andrew Baker (AJC), Arkady Kurliandchik, Faina Kukliansky, German Embassy in Vilnius, Jewish Community of Lithuania, Vilnius Jewish community
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President of Germany Honors Major East European ‘History Dissident’ Rachel Kostanian, Longtime Head of Vilnius’s Only Holocaust Museum
RACHEL KOSTANIAN | TRIBUTES ON HER 91ST BIRTHDAY | MUSEUMS | GERMANY
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Andreas Görgen, head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of Germany’s Federal Foreign Office presents Rachel Kostanian the Presidential Order of Merit signed by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Lukas Welz, chairman of AMCHA Germany was there and issued today’s press release. Photos: Florian Krauss for AMCHA Germany.
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Rachel Kostanian in 2010
VILNIUS—Rachel Kostanian, doyenne of Holocaust history dissidents in Lithuania and beyond led, for over a quarter century, a tiny little museum in a wooden green house — it came to be known internationally as The Green House — high up a driveway invisible from the street, that insisted on telling the bitter truth about the Holocaust. Though part of the state’s Jewish museum complex officially, she personally raised support for its own major projects and publications and kept the editorial control independent. Her museum told the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust, starting with the mass campaign of murder, plunder, humiliation and violence unleashed by the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF), and other local “White-Armbanders” before the first German soldiers even arrived in June 1941. The huge “Genocide Museum” on the city’s main boulevard, by contrast, some seven minutes’ walk away, has a large hall dedicated to glorification of these same collaborators as supposedly heroic leaders of an anti-Soviet “rebellion” (a strange term here, as the Soviets were fleeing Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history, not the local white-armbanded fascists). As it turns out, the issue comes to the fore in 2021, with the 80th anniversary of the events looming, and the nation’s parliament having named the year in honor of an LAF member accused of atrocities.
Posted in Events, Germany, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
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Berlin Press Release on German President’s Award of Order of Merit to Rachel Kostanian
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The following press release was received today from the office of Lukas Welz, chairman of the board of AMCHA Germany, who nominated Rachel Kostanian for the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Contacts: Email: info@amcha.de. Twitter: @amchade. Facebook: www.facebook.com/amcha.deutschland.
See also: Defending History’s report on the event; tributes and good wishes published on Ms. Kostanian’s 91st birthday; and DH’s Rachel Kostanian section.
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Rachel Kostanian Awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
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From left: Rachel Kostanian; Andreas Görgen, head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of Germany’s Federal Foreign Office; Lukas Welz, chairman of AMCHA Germany. Below: The Order of Merit. Photos: Florian Krauss for AMCHA Germany.
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BERLIN—Rachel Kostanian was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on February 9, 2021 in Berlin for her lifelong work in researching and remembering the Holocaust in Lithuania. For a quarter century she was director of a small but world-renowned and unique Holocaust museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, known as The Green House that she co-founded as Soviet rule was crumbling in the late 1980s.
Posted in Germany, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
Tagged AMCHA Germany, Andreas Görgen, German Presidential Order of Merit, Holocaust educators, Holocaust in Lihtuania, Holocaust mueseums, Lukas Welz, Rachel Kostanian
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Clemens Heni Confronts the “Red-Brown Equalization Project” in Major Interview in “Frankfurter Rundschau”
MEDIA WATCH | GERMANY | ANTISEMITISM | DOUBLE GENOCIDE
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BERLIN—In a groundbreaking interview with Dr. Clemens Heni, director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) in the leading German liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Heni criticizes the ongoing comparison of Hitler and Stalin and the relativization of the Holocaust. He reminds readers, in the interview conducted by journalist Katja Thorwarth, what psychoanalyst Zvi Rix had to say about German reception of the Holocaust: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Clemens Heni, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Germany, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform"
Tagged Antisemitism in Germany, Clemens Heni, Double Genocide, Frankfurter Rundschau, Katja Thorwarth, Prague Declaration (2008)
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Honest Error at German Embassy in Vilnius?
OPINION | USE AND ABUSE OF PONÁR | VILNIUS JEWISH LIFE | LITVAK AFFAIRS | GERMANY
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VILNIUS—“There is nothing new under the sun,” as the Good Book says (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Sure, on occasion, Irish communities will feud in Boston, Italians in New York, Chinese in LA and Lithuanians in Chicago. It is part of the professional training, posture, and policy of diplomats to negotiate such inevitabilities by way of common sense, wisdom, and fairness. For years now, the widely admired German ambassador to Lithuania, HE Jutta Schmitz has kept her embassy’s diplomatic table open to people and organizations, governmental and non-governmental, from across the colorfully diverse spectrum of opinion in Lithuania. It is not known whether the recent completion of her Vilnius ambassadorship and departure from Lithuania, and the temporary vacancy, had anything to do with the embassy’s recent, and quite innocent, faux-pas.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius)
Tagged Ambassador Jutta Schmitz (Vilnius), Faina Kukliansky, German Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC), Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevicius), Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC)
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Major German Holocaust Scholar Slips (Again) into Baltic Nationalist Discourse
OPINION | HISTORY | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFAIRS | RED-BROWN COMMISSION
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by Dovid Katz
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East European state-sponsored “Holocaust Fixing” continues apace. The distinguished German scholar and author of a major two-volume work on the Lithuanian Holocaust, Professor Christoph Dieckmann, has given a major interview intended for the general public on the popular Delfi.lt news portal. He was in town for an IHRA conference held in intimate collaboration with the Lithuanian government’s units on the Holocaust and Jewish affairs, including the Red-Brown Commission, of which Prof. Dieckmann is, surprisingly for many of his genuine admirers, a longtime member and apologist.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Germany, History, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Views of Prof. Sarunas Liekis
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Monica Lowenberg’s Speech at the Protest Outside the Latvian Embassy in Berlin
LATVIA | GERMANY | WAFFEN SS MARCHES IN RIGA | BALTIC MARCHES | GLORIFYING COLLABORATORS
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by Monica Lowenberg (London)
The following is an English translation of Monica Lowenberg’s speech that was read out at the protest at the Latvian Embassy in Berlin on 15 March 2017 also addressed by German member of parliament Volker Beck. Ms. Lowenberg could not be in attendance and her speech, published here in the author’s English translation, was read to the assembled by historian Dr. Hans Coppi, chairman of the VVN (Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in Berlin).
Historian Dr. Hans Coppi (with microphone, center rear) addressing protesters at the Latvian Embassy in Berlin on the eve of the 2017 annual Waffen SS march in central Riga. PHOTO: LOTHAR EBERHARDT.
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Germany, Human Rights, Latvia, Monica Lowenberg, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Riga's Waffen SS Marches
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