[LAST UPDATE. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 19 MARCH 2025]
A Vilnius professor, a former foreign minister, and group of Conservative (Homeland Union) parliamentarians announce ‘collegium’ to glorify 1941 LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front / ‘White-Armbander’ ) Hitlerists who murdered their neighbors — effectively ‘initiating on the ground’ the Lithuanian Holocaust
25 June 2025 update: Member of the Seimas proposes law to legitimize the “declaration of independence” of the LAF and Hitler’s puppet “provisional government” by an act of parliament (reports in Lrytas.lt, 15mins.lt, and BNS). Also: publication of statement by former energy minister claiming that without the genocidal, local-Holocaust-initiating LAF there would be no 11 March 1990…. DH’s take? Classic instances of ultranationalist politicians working to turn perpetrators into heroes, smearing the actual history as “Soviet” though it is the proven Western narrative.
The professor. Official announcement on website of the Seimas. Article citing former foreign minister. Article explaining that a new Seimas law will mandate spending on far-right history revisionism to smear the historic narrative (the Western narrative, the Holocaust history narrative) as Kremlin-inspired (!) while glorifying the killers of thousands of innocent Jewish neighbors. Far from helping the name of today’s free and democratic Lithuania, this Seimas proposal brings self-inflicted damage of the worst sort — glorifying the perpetrators of the early days and weeks of the Lithuanian Holocaust.
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OUR TAKE
Leonidas Donskis answers Prof. Girnius from the grave:
‘When will the truth finally set us free?’
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NOW IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
Testimonies of 121 survivors on the 1941 LAF / white-armbander rampage of mass murder of Lithuanian Jewry
MAY-JUNE 2025 UPDATES
Former foreign minister, cofounder of the “collegium” announces June launch date for the drive to glorify the LAF murderers of thousands of Lithuanian Jewish citizens. Plans include lavish English-language publications intended to persuade major Western embassies in Vilnius and assorted foreign entities. Back in 2012, he was the author of the infamous Hitler-Stalin “moustache remark” when he attacked six inspirational Lithuanian parliamentarians who signed the Seventy Years Declaration.
In 2010, the Lithuanian Jewish Community protested his antisemitic tirade. In 2012, the Social Democrats, inspirationally led by Vytenis Andriukaitis, fought valiantly for the truth of history. See reports from the period, and especially Dr. Andriukaitis’s reply to the then foreign minister, and a historic parliamentary intervention by Andriukaitis and Algirdas Sysas. For Defending History’s take on the issues per se, please see our reply to the recent article that launched the latest attempt to kosherize and glorify one of Adolf Hitler’s most “successful local mass-murder machines” of 1941. The victims were all civilian Jewish citizens of Lithuania. Thousands were murdered before the Germans even came or took control.
See also dozens of survivor testimonies of the white-armbanders / LAF’s “accomplishments” for Lithuanian history, and English excerpts from their pre-Nazi invasion leaflets.
Of the many Lithuanian Holocaust survivors interviewed and taped in the last 35 years, virtually all considered the Lithuanian Holocaust to have started on 23 June 1941 (“when 600 years of tolerance turned overnight into mass murder in dozens of locations before the first German soldiers had arrived”). The feelings were much more pronounced and intensely sad on those (rare) years when June 23rd fell again on a Monday as it does in 2025.
We call on genuine friends of beautiful, modern, democratic Lithuania to speak up loud and clear against the impending travesty.