Lithuania, Poland, and Congress (Part 2)

In Part 1, I showed that Lithuania has articulated a governing doctrine of public honor: when disqualifying facts emerge about a commemorated figure, the responsible authority is obliged to act. Lithuania applied that doctrine to a Polish cardinal with legal threats and a one-month deadline. It has refused to apply the same doctrine to its own Holocaust-linked national canon. That double standard condemned the prosecution of Artur Fridman before the trial even began.

This article addresses a harder problem. Lithuania’s dishonesty in this field does not stop at its own borders. It reaches directly into the integrity of its relationship with the United States.

The case is Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis.

This is where hypocrisy hardens into something worse.

Congressman Brad Sherman wrote to Lithuania’s prime minister in September 2019. He did not merely disagree with Lithuania’s treatment of Brazaitis. He accused a Lithuanian state institution of a misstatement of facts and misuse of US Congressional documents. Sherman asked the government either to provide specific and credible references proving Brazaitis had been exonerated or to publicly retract the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s claims. He explained that the Center had falsely asserted that the United States Congress and the INS had “completely exonerated” Brazaitis. He further explained that the American investigation ended because Brazaitis died and that the available record did not support Lithuania’s laundering narrative.

Sherman’s letter laid out the factual record in detail. The US Department of Justice had investigated Brazaitis for his responsibility, as Minister of Education and acting Prime Minister under the 1941 Provisional Government, for the issuance and enforcement of repressive edicts against the Jewish minority. Brazaitis was unable to testify because he had suffered his fourth heart attack and was hospitalized. He died on October 24, 1974. The review committee concluded that further investigation appeared unwarranted. The Immigration and Naturalization Service removed his name from its active list. That is administrative closure after death — not exoneration.

Sherman also noted that the 1974 investigation was cursory — conducted only under pressure from Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who herself accused the INS of a “half-hearted, dilatory investigation” run by “three part-time bureaucrats without the background or authority to direct an investigation of this nature.” The INS failed to contact the German or Israeli governments, the National Archives, or Soviet Jews in Israel who may have had pertinent information. Like other known perpetrators who reached the United States after the war, Brazaitis had gained entry because of his “operational value” to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Since that cursory investigation, key documents have emerged. In 2001, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s own historian, Rytas Nanydas, discovered and published the authentic minutes and decrees of the Provisional Government. These included the “Regulations on the Situation of the Jews” bearing Brazaitis’s signature — a document asserting that Jews had exploited the Lithuanian nation economically, demoralized it, and waged battle against Lithuanian independence under the mantle of Bolshevism. The minutes also recorded that Brazaitis and the Provisional Government approved funding for the TDA Battalion and the concentration camp at Kaunas VII Fort. From June 28 to July 6, 1941, the TDA Battalion murdered approximately 5,000 Jewish men and held Jewish women and children without food or water at the Seventh Fort.

In 2005, the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania concluded that the Provisional Government approved segregating Lithuanian Jews and expropriating their property, recognized the TDA Battalion as a responsible agency in the killings, and determined that the “Regulations on the Situation of the Jews” was the most comprehensive expression of the Government’s official antisemitism. The Provisional Government funded the TDA. Brazaitis signed the regulations.

None of this was available to the INS in 1974. All of it was available to Lithuania when it continued to claim American exoneration.

In 2021, Sherman wrote again. He noted that he had received no official response to his 2019 letter and that the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre had treated his intervention as merely “the opinion of a politician.”

That is not historical caution. That is institutional dishonesty after notice.

The issue is no longer merely Lithuanian memory laundering. It is the repeated conversion of US administrative closure into fictitious American endorsement after formal correction by a member of the United States Congress.

Put the two postures side by side.

In the Gulbinowicz case, Lithuania says that when facts emerge inconsistent with accepted morality and ethics, honor must be removed immediately.

In the Brazaitis case, when a member of the United States Congress points out a misstatement of facts and misuse of US Congressional documents, Lithuania does not answer with correction, transparency, or withdrawal. It stalls, persists, and permits contemptuous dismissal.

One posture reveals the doctrine Lithuania preaches.

The other reveals the contempt with which Lithuania treats correction when the target is one of its own.

Nor is this now confined to Lithuania’s internal memory politics. The Brazaitis case reaches directly into Lithuania’s relationship with the United States.

Lithuanian institutions repeatedly converted a 1974–1975 US administrative closure into a false narrative of American exoneration, continued doing so after professional correction, and persisted after formal notice from members of the United States Congress. That is not misunderstanding. It is misuse of American governmental process after notice.

A government that repeatedly launders its own Holocaust-era narrative through fictitious US endorsement does more than falsify history. It corrupts the integrity of its representations to an ally. It shows that, where national mythology is at stake, even the documentary record of the United States government may be bent into service of protected falsehood.

That should matter in Washington.

The United States guarantees Lithuania’s security and treats it as a NATO ally. But alliance depends not only on shared threats. It depends on trust in how a state handles truth, correction, notice, and official representation. A state that repeatedly demands moral seriousness from others while refusing equivalent scrutiny for its own protected canon is not merely demonstrating inconsistency. It is demonstrating that its official representations cannot be relied upon where national myth is at stake.

In the Brazaitis matter, a Lithuanian state institution did not merely make a mistake. It used American governmental paper to launder a Holocaust-linked figure, persisted after direct correction from a member of Congress, and then treated that correction as merely the opinion of a politician. Sherman explicitly demanded either credible references or a public retraction for the misstatement of facts and misuse of US Congressional documents. Lithuania did neither.

That is not an honest disagreement between allies. It is contempt for the integrity of the relationship itself.

A state that borrows American institutional credibility to sanitize its own Holocaust record, then shrugs off congressional correction when exposed, is not demonstrating reliability. It is demonstrating that alliance language and democratic vocabulary stop where identity management begins. If Lithuania is prepared to threaten legal action over a Polish cardinal because moral stain supposedly disqualifies honor, while refusing equivalent scrutiny of its own canon and prosecuting a Jewish citizen who demands that scrutiny, then Washington has every reason to ask a harder question: should the United States continue to defend a state that treats truth this way, and can such a state still be regarded as a trustworthy ally in matters touching history, law, and democratic principle?

Lithuania does not merely have a double standard. It has a reliability problem. It has shown that when the truth threatens its national mythology, it will misuse foreign legitimacy, dismiss correction, protect the canon, and punish the critic. That is not what moral seriousness looks like. It is what untrustworthiness looks like.

If Lithuania wants to live under a doctrine of moral seriousness, then Fridman should not be prosecuted for demanding moral seriousness. He should be vindicated by it.

Lithuania does not lack a doctrine for removing tainted honors. It has one. It is using it now.

What it lacks is the willingness to apply that doctrine to itself.

And in the Brazaitis case, it has shown something worse still: not merely dishonesty toward its own past, but contempt toward the United States government whose credibility it has repeatedly tried to appropriate, whose corrections it has dismissed, and whose protection it continues to expect. A state that treats American records as instruments of nationalist laundering has already corrupted the integrity of the relationship. The question is no longer only what Lithuania commemorates. The question is whether the United States should continue to underwrite, defend, and politically shield a state that has shown such persistent bad faith toward American truth, American institutions, and the obligations of alliance.

A country that cannot be trusted with the historical record cannot automatically be trusted with the moral vocabulary of alliance.

Eugene J. Levin is the founder and president of Dim Bom Productions, LLC, a film production company dedicated to powerful storytelling and historical truth. Born in Riga, Latvia, and a proud Zionist, Eugene immigrated to the USA in 1989, bringing with him a deep appreciation for Jewish history and identity. He is the producer and director of the award-winning Holocaust documentary Baltic Truth, which uncovers hidden narratives of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and explores their ongoing impact. With a passion for preserving history and combating antisemitism, Eugene continues to create impactful documentaries that inspire dialogue and understanding.