The Blogs: America Knew. Lithuania Built the Alibi. | Eugene J. Levin

The American archive is not Lithuania’s defense. It is the evidence Lithuania hoped no one would assemble.

For decades, Lithuanian political and memory institutions have survived by separating the men from the offices they held, the offices from the institutions they served, and the institutions from the nation whose authority they claimed. A former head of government becomes a misunderstood patriot. A municipal administrator becomes a refugee. A security-police chief becomes an isolated offender. His deputy becomes another isolated offender. The officers become immigration cases. The battalion men become footnotes. American intelligence use becomes an American scandal, and the Lithuanian record vanishes with it.

It has not vanished.

I have assembled the documentary file. Court findings, cryptonyms, Justice Department records and full footnotes are here: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/08/America-Knew.pdf

It keeps court findings, official allegations and documented intelligence relationships distinct, because the pattern needs no overstatement. What it shows is not a compromised man. It is a structure.

Why America used these men is no mystery. The General Accounting Office reported in 1985 that American intelligence knowingly employed alleged Nazis and Axis collaborators against the Soviet target, and recorded an officer describing the calculation as weighing “their present value versus their past history.” What a man knew about the Soviet Union went into one file. What he had done to Jews went into another.

Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis was acting head of Lithuania’s Provisional Government from June 23 to August 5, 1941, the weeks in which the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry began. That government funded 824 men of the TDA Battalion and the concentration site at the Seventh Fort while mass murder was under way, and issued the Regulations on the Status of the Jews. The CIA later assigned Brazaitis the cryptonym AEPOLE-8. A cryptonym adjudicates nothing about his criminal responsibility. It establishes that the United States found operational value in the former head of the 1941 Lithuanian government.

Lithuania then forged that usefulness into an exoneration that never existed. An immigration inquiry, narrow in its stated window and closed without trial, hearing or judicial finding, was repackaged by Lithuanian state institutions as complete American absolution. Use is not exoneration. Administrative closure is not acquittal. A cryptonym is not a certificate of innocence.

Stasys Žakevičius chaired the Vilnius City Committee. On June 28, 1941 he broadcast an address calling Jews the backbone of Bolshevik terror and announcing their removal from Lithuanian political, economic and cultural life. Orders published under that committee imposed badges, a curfew and racial registration, and seized sixty Jewish hostages, most later murdered at Paneriai. In 1955 John Mazionis forwarded Žakevičius’s immigration request through CIA channels and called him extremely valuable for psychological warfare behind the Iron Curtain. He reached the United States in 1959 and naturalized in 1966. Lithuania treats the second biography as though it erases the first.

Aleksandras Lileikis commanded the Vilnius Saugumas. The court record names his victims. Six-year-old Fruma Kaplan and her mother Gita fled the Vilnius ghetto. Lileikis signed the order placing them at his disposal and, the next day, the order transferring them to the German Security Police. Their execution cards record December 22, 1941. The Boston court that revoked his citizenship in 1996 determined that tens of thousands died under his command of the Saugumas.

A declassified CIA memorandum states that Lileikis was a paid American asset from 1952 to 1957. The adverse information was not a later discovery. A Counter Intelligence Corps document in his own file reported that he had headed the political Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius under German occupation and was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews.

When the United States finally moved against him, Lileikis argued that it could not, because American authorities had long known who he was and what he was suspected of doing. He asked a federal court to treat American knowledge as his immunity. The court refused, on legal grounds rather than by disputing that America had known. What America knew stands without the court’s help, on the intelligence document and the payments in the Agency’s own file.

America knew. America used him anyway. When accountability arrived, the perpetrator pleaded American knowledge in his defence and lost.

His deputy, Kazys Gimžauskas, appears in Western intelligence records with a Gehlen Organization number and alias. The Justice Department stated that documents he signed establish that he ordered civilians, primarily Jews, turned over to the German Security Police for execution. One concerns Lucija Pojevanskaite-Sutarskaite, a Roman Catholic woman born in the United States, arrested in Vilnius because she was suspected of being a Jew. Paper generated inside the Saugumas carried her to her death on the same day as Fruma and Gita Kaplan.

Two more officers of the same force, Algimantas Dailidė and Adolph Milius, lost their American citizenship because their wartime records had made them ineligible. A federal appellate court found that Dailidė’s acts had provided an inextricable link in the Nazi regime’s chain of genocide.

Chief. Deputy. Officer. Officer.

That is not collective guilt. Ordinary Lithuanians are not the subject. It is institutional evidence.

The record runs past the security police to the 2nd/12th Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion, a mobile killing unit. Juozas Budreika concealed his service in it. Kazys Čiurinskas served in it too, and an American appellate court held that armed, uniformed service there sufficed to establish assistance in persecution, without proof of a personal atrocity.

Lithuania’s defence depends on forcing every name into a separate box until the institution disappears. The archive defeats that method.

Lithuania authenticated part of the evidence itself. Its Central State Archives certified the documents used against Lileikis, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs attested those certifications, and the United States Embassy in Vilnius certified the attestation. Lithuania helped establish the documentary case against the former chief of its own security police.

Lithuania has still punished no one for Holocaust crimes.

That is the indictment. American use does not cleanse the Lithuanian record; it proves the record was valuable enough to compartmentalize. American delay does not absolve Lithuanian institutions; it explains how compromised men acquired decades of Western legitimacy first.

The fragments are the institution.

The full evidentiary file, with the detail and footnotes, is here: https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/08/America-Knew.pdf

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.