OPINION | THE RED-BROWN COMMISSION | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | YITZHAK ARAD | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—Everybody makes mistakes, even august, storied and splendid international organizations. As in personal affairs, so in conference rooms, the secret is in the ability to say so and make a change, remembering the adage attributed to Mark Twain, along the lines of it being much easier to fool a person than to get them to admit they have been fooled.

The Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany) has just allowed its vaunted name and logo to appear on the publicity for events in Palanga and Plunge, Lithuania organized by one of the major engines of East European Holocaust revisionism. That entity is the state-sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes,” which local diplomats have long dubbed for short “the Red-Brown Commission” starting in 2008 when the Commission reacted with utter silence to prosecutors’ launching of absurd and cruel kangaroo pretrial war crimes investigations into two of Vilnius’s most beloved Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015) and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024). Please skim through the saga.

Please take a moment also to see what the Holocaust survivors of Lithuania thought of the commission, from the moment it was set up, back in 1998, to “equalize” Nazi and Soviet crimes in an effort to write the Holocaust-as-such out of history (and to cunningly abuse and instrumentalize legitimate Holocaust studies toward that “higher goal”).

As if that were not enough, the Commission’s executive director during its more than a quarter century — and its executive director today — went on in 2012 to tell the world, officially, on camera, what he thinks of the campaign of prosecutions against Holocaust survivors (breaking his Commission’s public silence). This was all part of the East European revisionist movement known as Double Genocide, and indeed, the Commission was a prime mover of the 2008 “Prague Declaration” which for years featured it in full on its website. One of the victims of Vilnius prosecutors and history-rewriters was Dr. Yitzhak Arad, longtime head of Yad Vashem, whose seminal essay in Defending History made the point very clearly.

With the death of the survivors, the debate has moved into the realm of lingering history debates, where the support of (eastern) European Union state institutions for East European Holocaust revisionism has constituted a state investment in Holocaust obfuscation, distortion, negationism and trivialization, and, above all “Double Genocide revisionism,” as pointed out over the years by researchers including Yehuda Bauer, Leonidas Donskis, Dov Levin, Joseph Melamed, Danny Ben-Moshe, Clemens Heni, Michael Shafir, Tomas Venclova, Efraim Zuroff, and this journal’s editor. Among the documentary films focusing on these issues are Rewriting History (Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe) and Defending Holocaust History (Richard Bloom). In his still unpublished book on the subject, the late Michael Shafir traces in detail the Red-Brown Commission’s tactic of dominating genuine Holocaust studies (including fine teachers and fine courses) in the “higher” interest of rewriting the entire narrative and abusing current geopolitics to maul history via a large bag of tricks including the legal redefinition of “genocide” and state glorification of Holocaust perpetrators on the grounds that they duly opposed “the second equally genocidal World War II era regime.” Shafir’s chapter on the subject from his last still-unpublished scholarly book is making its mark via wide informal distribution but proper publication remains a major goal for the field.

Question: Is the Claims Conference being unwittingly misled by members of its board who have been collecting Silver Cross medals from the Lithuanian government over many years? Can American Jewish organization heads receiving such honors not realize to what extent they are being instrumentalized to legitimize Holocaust revisionism?

But as the Claims Conference sees its name and logo on the publicity for the Palanga event it has been persuaded to support, it would do well to ensure that all participants see the official statement on camera clarifying what the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania” (that’s a name from Orwell if ever there was one) thought about the persecution (and now, after her death, permanent defamation in the history books) of beloved Holocaust survivor and Jewish partisan hero Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (against whom a new campaign has been launched — in 2025).

Roll the tape and get to see, feel and hear what Double Genocide Revisionism is all about, what is sounds like, and how it has led to an atmosphere of hatred toward Holocaust survivors who survived by joining the anti-Nazi resistance, as just one part of a major effort to “fix” the Holocaust history of Eastern Europe.