It’s not a common occurrence to be able to have a court establish the guilt of a criminal 72 years after his death, but such an opportunity has emerged in Lithuania and will be taking place in a courtroom in Vilnius next week, more precisely on Wednesday, January 16 [2019, editor].
Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite: Shouting on Russia but keeping silence about Jonas Noreika
The circumstances of the case are quite unusual. The charges against the alleged criminal were not brought forward by the government or its prosecutors, but rather by a private individual, who does not represent any political entity, but is pursuing the issue on behalf of his relatives, more than 100 of whom according to his calculations were murdered during the Holocaust. According to Grant Gochin, a South African-born Jew of Lithuanian origin currently residing in California, Jonas Noreika who served as the Lithuanian liaison with the Nazis in northwestern Lithuania, was an active participant in the mass murder of the Jews of that region and the theft of their property and belongings.
“Kaunas Garage Massacre” of the Jews by the local Lithuanian mob in June 1941 before German troops arrived
On the surface, this case is hardly unusual. Many thousands of Lithuanians collaborated with the forces of Nazi Germany in the annihilation of the local Jewish community, foreign Jews deported to Lithuania from Central Europe to be murdered, and Jews in Belarus, approximately 20,000 of whom were killed by one of the Lithuanian auxiliary police battalions sent there for that purpose. Although the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania after World War II, prosecuted many of these culprits, thousands escaped punishment for those crimes, both inside and outside Lithuania, in the latter case primarily by fleeing to Anglo-Saxon democracies, where only a select few were successfully prosecuted decades after their arrival.
Jonas Noreika was never held accountable for his role in the Holocaust, but his prominent postwar role in the local anti-Soviet resistance led to his capture, conviction and execution by the Soviets in 1947, with no reference to his Holocaust crimes. Once Lithuania reobtained its independence in 1990, however, he was one of the Lithuanians singled out for glorification as a national hero for his bravery and sacrifice in the struggle against the Soviet occupation. “General Vetra (Storm)” as Noreika was known in the anti-Soviet underground, had a plaque in his memory placed in the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and Art, where he worked as a lawyer and was arrested by the Soviets, had a primary school named for him in his hometown of Sukoniai, and had his name carved on the façade of the Vilnius district court building which had previously housed the Soviet KGB and Nazi Gestapo.
IN ANY “normal” country, certainly ostensibly one like Lithuania which is a member in good standing of both the European Union and NATO, Noreika’s leading role in the mass murder of the Jews of Siauliai (Shavel), Telsiai (Telz) and Plunge (Plungyan) would have automatically disqualified him from being considered as a national hero. Unfortunately, that is not the case in contemporary Lithuania, where several Holocaust perpetrators have been given recognized as outstanding patriots. When Grant Gochin learned of Noreika’s role in the Shoah in northwest Lithuania, he tried to protest to various Lithuanian institution and officials against the honors he was granted, but to no avail. The issue was referred by the Lithuanian authorities to the “Genocide and Resistance Research Center,”(GaRRC) their national institution which is responsible for dealing with historical issues during the period from the first Soviet occupation in June 1940, through the Nazi occupation, and second Soviet occupation until Lithuania obtained its independence in 1990, when the Soviet Union crumbled.
Jonas Noreika – “General Storm”
Their response in this case, was absolutely ridiculous. In a statement issued on October 11, 2018, they opined that, only those individuals tried and found guilty in their lifetimes may be considered guilty, all others are considered to be completely innocent. As Gochin wrote in one of his many op-eds on the subject, according to such logic, both Hitler and Stalin would be considered innocent as well. And this brings us to Wednesday’s court hearing, where the judges are supposed to rule on Gochin’s suit against the Genocide and Resistance Research Center. One can only hope that the judges in question will not be moved by the rampant Lithuanian patriotism which motivates the GaRRC and blinds its leadership to the accurate historical facts, and that the embarrassing honors bestowed by Holocaust perpetrator Jonas Noreika will finally be canceled.
Lithuania: The plaque devoted to Jonas Noreika
Originally published on 2019-01-14
About the author: Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. His latest book, with Ruta Vanagaite, is Musiskiai; Kelione su Priesu (Our People; Journey With an Enemy) deals with the complicity of Lithuanians in Holocaust crimes and has already been published in Lithuanian, Polish, Hebrew and Russian, and will appear in Swedish in 2019.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
EuroLithuania: Vilnius, Gediminas Ave (main avenue in the city), March 11, 2011 (Independence Day celebration)
RT: Kosovo wants to establish an army and has received several Humvee armoured vehicles from the USA. Although there was official NATO restraint, how much is the establishment of a Kosovo Army a fixed development?Marcus Papadopoulos: Kosovo is, effectively, a NATO protectorate today – and has been ever since Belgrade lost control of this Serbian province in 1999. It follows, therefore, that the illegal entity which is the Republic of Kosovo will begin the process of creating its own armed forces so that, in time, Kosovo will gain entry into NATO.RT: The EU has rejected the introduction of Kosovo sanctions ...
The struggle for peace and the struggle for full respect of universal human rights, as defined by UN Declaration on protection of human rights, are interdependent and non-separable. Violations of sovereignty and territorial integrity, military interventions, aggressions and occupations go hand in hand with massive violations of the basic human rights.It is clear that there are no humanitarian military interventions.NATO military aggression against Yugoslavia ( Serbia ) which started March 24rth, 1999 was launched to allegedly protect human rights of Kosovo Albanians. It was carried out in blatant violation of the basic principals of International Law and without approval of ...
Over the past several years, analysts and commentators have noticed a rising tide of domestic support for the Croatian homegrown Nazi movement of the Second World War, the Ustashe, which actively exterminated Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the territory it controlled from 1941-45. Far from condemning this alarming development, the Croatian government, the European Union, and non-state actors within it have tacitly and actively supported the rising tide of sympathy towards the Ustashe.
This disconnect between the ostensible “European values” of human rights and tolerance that the European Union claims to represent, and its tacit support of trends towards extremist politics ...
It was in 1916, in the midst of World War I, that Britain and France (pitted against the Germans, Austrians and Ottoman Turks) made their infamous Sykes-Picot agreement. In grand imperial style, they used this agreement to divide up the Middle East between them. It was a daring move, considering that the war was at a stalemate and the two allies did not know if they were going to win the struggle. Nonetheless, they went ahead with the agreement and in doing so made a number of decisions that continue to shape the region to this day.Besides bringing traditional European imperialism ...
On September 10th, 2015 a City Council of Croatia’s capital Zagreb decided to promote a war criminal General Ante Gotovina to “honorable citizen of the City of Zagreb” for his “contribution to the defending of Croatia’s independence and territorial integrity”. The General, however, as a Commander-in-Chief of Croatia’s army, is directly responsible for a brutal ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed by Croatia’s army, police forces and state authorities over the Serbs during the SS-punishment-style military-police operation “Storm” (Oluja) in August 1995 when around 3000 ethnic Serbs in the Krajina region were killed and 250.000 expelled from their homes. That ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Unless We Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat It
Preface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.
So why do I frequently point out America’s warts? Because – as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained – we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat …
While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, ...
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Save
Save
Save
Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, one of the most shameful and tragic chapters in the history of the foreign policies of Britain and France and one that constituted a pivotal factor in the outbreak of the second world war, the most destructive conflict in the history of mankind, in which the Holocaust occurred.
This is not to castigate the governments of Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier for wanting to avoid another world war.
The traumas of the Great War were ingrained in the minds of British and French statesmen and this should not be overlooked or downplayed.
Nor should the ...
Here are before-and-after pictures, at https://twitter.com/MAL0mt/status/701077438525263873/photo/1, of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East:
What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush.
As President Obama instructed his military, ...
After WWII, the official state-sponsored myth, based on notorious lies and forged historical facts, of the anti-fascist combat and the liberation of Yugoslavia by Tito’s Partisans acquired a political life of its own until the 1990s.The official brainwashed dogma became the so-called National Liberation of Yugoslavia while the personal cult of Josip Broz Tito became framed on the propaganda that self-proclaimed “Marshall” of Yugoslavia (on November 29th, 1943 in Bosnian town of Jajce) was one of the most intelligent and ingenious national leaders of the anti-fascist coalition in Europe during the wartime.[i] However, in post-1945 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ...
On Jan. 10 (2017, remark by the Editor), Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau replaced Foreign Minister Stephane Dion with Chrystia Freeland, a former journalist proud of her Ukrainian roots and well-known for her hostility toward Russia. At the time, a big question in Ottawa was why. Some analysts believed that Trudeau’s decision may have started when it still seemed likely that Hillary Clinton would become the new U.S. president and a tough line against Moscow was expected in Washington.
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland
However, by the time the switch was made, Donald Trump was on his way into the White House and Trudeau’s ...
On the occasion of 20th anniversary of the aggression of NATO Alliance against Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the FRY), on 22nd and 23rd March 2019 Belgrade was the venue of the International Conference under slogan NEVER TO FORGET, and title “Peace and Progress instead of Wars and Poverty”. The organisers of the Conference are the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals, the Federation of Associations of Veterans of the National Liberation War of Serbia, the Serbian Generals and Admirals Club, the Society of the Serbian Hosts, in cooperation with the World Peace Council. Besides the participants from Serbia, the Conference ...
US-installed Ukrainian fascists commemorated Poroshenko’s established victory in Europe Day of Remembrance by vowing to “destroy Moscow,” free its people, and let them “shape their own future.”
Ukrainian ultranationalists attending a May 8 commemoration included 14th SS Waffen Grenadier division veterans, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) members, and Nazi-infested volunteer battalions involved in what they call “the Russian-Ukrainian war.”
Svoboda party overt Nazis participated. Their slogan is “Ukraine for the Ukrainians” – meaning ethnically pure, free of Jews, Russians and others not wanted, by extermination or other means.
Party member Yuri Sirotyuk called war on Russia Ukraine’s historic mission. “I believe that if we ...
The historical and political precedents for the creation of a greater Sqiperia or Greater Albania was set during World War II when the Kosovo and Metohija regions along with territory Southwest of lake Skutari from Montenegro and the western region of Southern Serbia, or Juzna Srbija (now part of Macedonia), were annexed to Albania by the Axis powers led by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, under a plan devised by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler to dismember and to destroy the Serbian Nation and people, which the Germans and Italians perceived as the main threat to the Axiss powers and ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Introduction
Some have tried to debunk the view that the West implicitly or explicitly promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east after German reunification and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact). These claims are misleading and obfuscate the historical record of at least a clear understanding, if not promise that there should be no NATO expansion eastward in any way, shape or form. At the very least the West made a implied commitment not to expand NATO east. It is more precise to say, however, that the West gave an explicit verbal, that is, unwritten guarantee not to ...
I was provoked to write this discussion of what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism by an article in Ha’aretz on the “controversy” created by the awarding of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to George P. Smith. According to the reporting, Smith is not only a brilliant scientist whose work has helped lead to the creation of new drugs that can treat cancer and a range of autoimmune diseases, he is also an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli policies.
The Ha’aretz piece notes that Smith has long been “a target of pro-Israel groups” and is listed ...
The contemporary Lithuania uses the official interpretation of bloody events that took place in Vilnius on January 13, 1991 as an ideological foundation for Russophobia-based confrontation with its eastern neighbor. It says “the Soviet soldiers committed an intentional murder of 13 unarmed people and one special operations serviceman”. The truth about what really happened, as well as the doubts over the official interpretation, are punishable crimes.
The Lithuanian authorities have been trying to get Algirdas Paleckis condemned by court for some years. He is a young politician and a diplomat, the leader of Lithuanian Socialist People’s Front (SPF), a holder of ...
On 23 April 1999, a NATO missile attack on Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) headquarters killed 16 employees of the state broadcaster. The forgotten war crime occurred during the Kosovo War (March 1998-June 1999), and was part of NATO’s aerial campaign alongside the US-backed Kosovo Liberation army, in opposition to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.In the aftermath of the attack there were no great public campaigns launched for the 16 murdered journalists and employees, no outpouring of emotion for those killed, no calls for solidarity and togetherness in the face of aggression. On the contrary the West justified this grievous ...
SHORT LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The website’s owner & editor-in-chief has no official position on any issue published at this website. The views of the authors presented at this website do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the owner & editor-in-chief of the website. The contents of all material (articles, books, photos, videos…) are of sole responsibility of the authors. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the contents of all material found on this website. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. No advertising, government or corporate funding for the functioning of this website. The owner & editor-in-chief and authors are not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the text and material found on the website www.global-politics.eu
