A researcher who headed Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center, which investigates crimes against humanity by the Nazis and Soviets during their periods occupying the Baltic nation, has been fired for “whitewashing” the facts about a Nazi collaborator who deported 12,000 Jews to the ghetto and confiscated their property.
Professor Adas Jakubauskas was accused by some of the government center’s staff of politicizing the organization’s research. They stated that he claimed ghettoes were “relatively safe” places for Jews.
The research centre focuses on crimes committed by the Soviet Union, especially the deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia. It also researches Nazi war crimes in Lithuania. However, according to the European Jewish Congress, it describes Lithuanians who were responsible for the murder of Jews as “anti-Soviet heroes,” including Lithuanian Jonas Noreika, a collaborator who worked with the Nazis to deport the country’s Jews.
After the complaints, the Lithuanian parliament voted in a secret ballot to remove Jakubauskas from his post, also finding that his actions harmed the center’s reputation with the public.
Jakubauskas claimed his dismissal was politically motivated and blamed Israel’s Ambassador to Lithuania Yossi Levy for his firing, the European Jewish Congress wrote. Jakubauskas accused Levy of attempting to “impose his own views on how the research was to be conducted.”
Many of the center’s published writings have drawn ire from the public and academics for their far right wing bias. There has been a boycott of the centre by Lithuanian historians, who charge it is selling a “bogus version of history instead of an accurate recount of the events that befell Jews from 1941 to 1944,” the European Jewish Congress wrote.
During the Holocaust, over 230,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, 95 percent of the country’s pre-World War II Jewish population. Many were shot to death in forests and fields by the Nazis and Nazi collaborators.
Lithuania’s government has been running a public campaign to educate citizens about the genocide of the Jewish community that occurred in the country during the Holocaust.