Jonas Noreika: Nazi Collaborator or National Hero? A Test for Lithuania
Blaming Russian propaganda, however, has suddenly become a lot more difficult thanks to Mr. Noreika’s own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, a Lithuanian-American from Chicago who has spent years researching a biography of her revered relative and went public in July with her shocking conclusion: Her grandfather was a fierce anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator [...]
Kaunas, Lithuania, June 1941 (before Germans arrived): Killing of the Jews by local Lithuanians
For the tiny village of Sukioniai in western Lithuania, the exploits of General Storm, a local anti-Communist hero executed by the Soviet secret police in 1947, have long been a source of pride. The village school is named after him, and his struggles against the Soviet Union are also honored with a memorial carved from stone next to the farm where he was born.
All along, though, there have been persistent whispers that General Storm, whose real name was Jonas Noreika, also helped the Nazis kill Jews. But these were largely discounted as the work of ill-willed outsiders serving a well-orchestrated campaign by Moscow to tar its foes as fascists.
Blaming Russian propaganda, however, has suddenly become a lot more difficult thanks to Mr. Noreika’s own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, a Lithuanian-American from Chicago who has spent years researching a biography of her revered relative and went public in July with her shocking conclusion: Her grandfather was a fierce anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator.
Her unequivocal verdict — announced in an article posted on Salon — has stirred emotional debate inside Lithuania and prompted a flood of “told you so” reports by state-controlled news media outlets in Russia.
“It was terribly shocking,” Ms. Foti said in a telephone interview of her finding that her grandfather was a killer, not a hero. “I had never heard about any of this Nazi stuff.”
It was also shocking for Jolanda Tamosiuniene, a teacher and librarian at the J. Noreika Basic School in Sukioniai, where Mr. Noreika was born at the end of the hamlet’s only street in 1910.
What shocked her, however, was not Ms. Foti’s discovery that her grandfather was complicit in the Holocaust — that was not really news to locals — but that a member of a patriotic émigré family had gone public and turned a private family matter into a public national shame.
“We have all heard things about what Noreika did during the war,” Ms. Tamosiuniene said. “He obviously took the wrong path. But his granddaughter should have kept quiet. Every family has its ugly things, but they don’t talk about them. It is better to stay silent.”
Keeping things in the family might be a natural self-defense mechanism in a small, traumatized country that, since it first gained independence from Russia in 1918, has been occupied once by Nazi Germany and twice by the Soviet Union.
A monument for Jonas Noreika in Sukioniai, Lithuania, the town where he was born
But the silence has only played into Russian claims of a cover-up and cast a long and sometimes unfairly dark shadow on a country justifiably proud of its success in building a tolerant, democratic nation on the ruins left by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Virtually nobody in Lithuania is denying the Holocaust or the role in it of local people. Its horrors are taught in schools and denounced by officials. And lately there have been growing calls, at least from a younger generation less scarred than its elders by memories of Soviet oppression, for an honest accounting of the role played by some national heroes like Mr. Noreika.
Indeed, on a visit last month to Vilnius, the capital, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, praised the country for taking “great steps to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust” and for its “commitment to fighting anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head.”
Ms. Foti’s research into her grandfather helped prod the mayor of Vilnius into asking the country’s guardian of official history, the Genocide and Resistance Research Center, to take a fresh look at whether Mr. Noreika merited his status as a national hero — and whether a plaque in his honor at the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius should be taken down.
But at a time of rising nationalism across Europe and heightened tensions with Russia, Mr. Noreika has managed, despite repeated protests, to stay secure on his pedestal.
Appeals that he be toppled have met resistance from nationalists and the many Lithuanians whose relatives were deported to remote Soviet regions by Stalin or tortured by the K.G.B. intelligence service, crimes that blur the far greater crime of the Holocaust and often make them loath to condemn the actions of those who resisted Soviet power.
“They have built up a whole national narrative around fighting Communism that they cannot dismantle,” said Grant Gochin, a South African of Lithuanian descent who has calculated that he lost 100 family members to the Holocaust in Lithuania, dozens of them in territory under Mr. Noreika’s control during the Nazi occupation.
For many citizens of Lithuania and the two other Baltic countries, Estonia and Latvia, the all-important memory of the war and its aftermath is of the 200,000 people deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan from 1941 to 1949 and of the tens of thousands who took to the forests at the end of World War II in a doomed fight against rule from Moscow.
For others, particularly those with family memories of the Holocaust, this is an undeniable calamity but one far less horrendous than the systematic extermination of more than 200,000 Jews in Lithuania alone from 1941 to 1945.
“Every nation has to have its heroes. I understand Lithuanians on this. But how can we have heroes like Noreika?” said Pinchos Fridberg, 80, a retired professor and the only Jew left in Vilnius who was born in the city before the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Clouding Lithuanians’ judgment, Mr. Fridberg said, has been a deep fear of Russia and a widespread assumption that anything that puts their country in a bad light must be Russian disinformation or at least worthy of skepticism because it comforts the Kremlin.
“Whatever someone says or does, so long as they are against Russia they are heroes,” Mr. Fridberg said.
When a group of prominent public figures in Lithuania signed a petition in 2015 demanding the removal of the plaque honoring Mr. Noreika on the library in Vilnius, the Genocide and Resistance Research Center protested that “the contempt being shown for Lithuanian patriots is organized by neighbors from the East.” In other words, Russians.
Portraying opponents of Moscow as fascists has been a feature of Russian propaganda for decades. After the end of World War II in 1945, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Ukrainians who resisted their incorporation into the Soviet Union were invariably tarred by Moscow as Nazi collaborators or their ideological heirs, no matter their record or views.
President Vladimir V. Putin has further stoked this narrative, repeatedly smearing Russia’s opponents at home and abroad as fascists as he establishes reverence for Russia’s huge role in defeating Hitler at the center of his campaign to revive national pride and his country’s status as a great power.
Dovid Katz, an American authority on Yiddish who lives in Vilnius, said the best response to Russian propaganda would be for countries like Lithuania and Ukraine to draw a clear line between heroes and criminals in their accounts of the war. Instead, he said, they have often gone into a self-defeating defensive crouch.
“Just because Russia says something for the wrong reasons does not mean it is automatically wrong,” said Mr. Katz, who runs a website focused on the Holocaust.
Mr. Noreika spent the last months of the war in Nazi detention, a fact that his defenders cite as evidence that he was never really pro-Nazi. But his principal claim to hero status is that the Soviet Union convicted him of treason and executed him for his role in organizing anti-Communist resistance while working as a lawyer in Vilnius at the Academy of Sciences following the war.
After regaining its independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lithuania canceled the conviction and declared Mr. Noreika a heroic martyr, ignoring his role as an official under Nazi occupation, which resulted in the slaughter of about 95 percent of the more than 200,000 Jews living in Lithuania when Hitler invaded.
A plaque commemoratingMr. Noreika at the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius
Today the country is dotted with Holocaust grave sites and memorials. One of the biggest stands in a forest outside the western town of Plunge, where Mr. Noreika served as commander of the Lithuanian Activist Front, an openly anti-Semitic group that was fiercely hostile to an initial Soviet occupation in 1940 and cheered the Nazis as liberators the following year.
Plunge’s entire Jewish population of more than 1,800 was murdered within days of the invasion, mostly by local people.
Eugenijus Bunka, the son of a prewar Jewish resident who survived because he fled to the Soviet Union, said Mr. Noreika probably didn’t kill Jews himself but still bore responsibility as an administrator who signed orders seizing their property and ordering their “isolation.”
“I hear all these people shouting about defending our patriots, but the people who have another view are all silent,” he said, pointing to one of the pits where Plunge’s Jewish residents were buried after being shot or beaten to death by their neighbors.
When Ms. Foti started researching her book on her grandfather 18 years ago, she expected to produce a glowing tribute.
“My grandfather was going to be the white knight in shining armor, a pure hero from beginning to end,” she said. “I had always heard how he had done so much for Lithuania and had died at the early age of 36 at the hands of the K.G.B.”
Instead, after digging up wartime documents with her grandfather’s signature relating to the treatment of Jews and talking to relatives and others during research trips to Lithuania, she realized that he had been an accomplice in mass murder. Mr. Noreika, she said, did not pull the trigger himself but was a “desk killer.”
She said he oversaw the slaughter in Plunge, where his family moved into a handsome home seized from its Jewish owners, and also in the nearby town of Siauliai, where he served as county chief under the Nazis starting in late 1941 — and where the main government building now has a plaque in his honor.
“Lithuanians have been raped three times — by the Communists twice and by the Nazis once,” Ms. Foti said. “All they know is that they were raped, that they are the victims. They have no more room in their psyche for any other victims.”
The Kaunas Garage Massacre – Lithuanian nationalists clubbing Jewish Lithuanians to death, 1941
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.
Kaunas, Lithuania, June 1941 (before Germans arrived): Killing of the Jews by local Lithuanians
For the 11th year running, the center of Lithuania’s beautiful capital, Vilnius, was gifted in the high afternoon hours this past Sunday, March 11th, to far-righters and neo-Nazis on the annual holiday cherished by the free world for its historic importance, in 1990, in the series of events that toppled the Soviet Union’s hated misrule. The Defending History community, all resolute admirers of Lithuania who celebrate its success, has monitored this event annually. The international outcry after the 2008 event, which featured “Juden raus” and a throng of swastikas had led to curious “compromises” each year between organizers and the municipality ...
Stepan Bandera is considered as a national hero in Ukraine, with many Ukrainians praising him and his deeds as a fighter for Ukraine's independence and freedom before, during and after WW2. Yet his real history shows there is nothing praiseworthy about the man, or what he strove for. As a young man who was a fervent Ukrainian nationalist he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists OUN in 1929. The OUN was a ultra nationalist fascist organization that accepted violence as a political tool against foreign and domestic enemies of their cause. Bandera quickly rose in the OUN ranks and ...
The outbursts of anti-Russian rhetoric of Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė is certainly very bizarre in view of her curriculum vitae. Dalia Grybauskaitė is a very educated woman. Because of the free education system of the former USSR, she was able to complete her university education at the elite Saint Petersburg State University. She became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1983, some five years before she earned a doctoral degree at the prestigious Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow. It is generally known that not every applicant is routinely accepted to become a Party member.This ...
The facile and indiscriminate use of the term fascism has led to a widespread misunderstanding and misuse of its meaning. Asked to define fascism, most people would respond in terms such as dictatorship, anti-Semitism, mass hysteria, efficient propaganda machine, mesmerizing oratory of a psychopathic leader, and the like.Such a pervasive misconception of the meaning of the term fascism is not altogether fortuitous. It is largely because of a longstanding utilitarian misrepresentation of the term. Fascism is deliberately obfuscated in order to sanitize capitalism. Ideologues, theorists and opinion-makers of capitalism have systematically shifted the systemic sins of fascism from market/capitalist failures ...
For decades former Nazis and German war criminals served at the highest echelons of NATO. Most of them were highly decorated Nazis, who later served in top positions in the Western German army, and were later promoted to serve as Commander and Chief of all NATO forces in Europe. This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post WW2 western Europe and especially in Western Germany. Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry out the holocaust and other war crimes, genocides and crimes against Humanity were almost never put on trial ...
On September 22, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion had a ceremony honoring its fighters who were killed in combat in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass regions. It is natural for any military unit to honor its dead. But it is evident from the images on Azov’s own website that this ceremony used iconography that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s Nuremberg rallies, including the use of searchlights, the banners with Waffen-SS stylized logos and the flames.The background of Azov, its leadership, its recruitment and emblems are all deeply disturbing. It grew out of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), a group of far right and neo-Nazi organizations ...
On October 21, 2016 a typical Estonian school witnessed an opening ceremony of the bronze bust of Harald Nugiseks. He was an SS-Oberscharführer (Sergeant) in World War II, who served voluntarily in the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS. According to the director of this education institution, the memory of Harald Nugiseks will lead to the increase in feelings of patriotism among students and must increase their willingness to protect their country in case of external aggression.So who is this Nugiseks? – During the Second World War, he was awarded with the second highest military award in the ...
A photo documentation of the destruction of (Serbian) Christianity in Kosovo from June 1999 up today.The Western colony of Kosovo is the main stronghold of radical Albanian jihad Islam at the Balkans, transformed into the first independent Balkan ISIL state protected by the Western gangsters of the USA, the NATO and the EU.Presented photo evidence is just an iceberg of the real destruction of Euro-Christianity in Kosovo by the barbaric Muslim Albanians who are also fighting in the Middle East as the jihad soldiers of ISIL - a creation of the US administration.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, ...
What has happened is that NATO provides cover for these transgressions of the United States government’s policy. In other words, it absolutely legitimizes what effectively is NATO aggression. Moreover, what one needs to bear in mind and what one needs to be mindful about is the fact that in Western Europe you no longer have rulers with the independence of Charles de Gaulle.It seems that Washington, and we can use Washington, America and NATO interchangeably because NATO is dominated by the United States. It is a command structure, which ultimately is based on American military power and American military precedence. ...
Bosnia’s Nazi past and role in the genocide of Bosnian and Krajina Serbs, Jews, and Roma during World War II has long been censored and covered-up in the U.S. and the so-called West. Film footage exists, however, of the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS troops and Imams in the Handschar and Kama Nazi SS Divisions.Bosnian Muslim Division Imam Abdulah Muhasilovic shown in 1943 during training and formation of the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division HandzarMoreover, German film footage also exists of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, a self-proclaimed leader of the Muslim world, reviewing the Bosnian Muslim ...
On August 9 [2020], presidential elections were held in Belarus with five candidates bidding to be head of state. According to the Central Election Commission, the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won in the first round with over 80% of the votes. Mass protests began in Belarus right after the announcement of the preliminary election results. People went to the streets, expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the elections that they believe were unfair. Mass protests turned into riots and there were clashes between rioters and the police. Many people were detained and injured, and two protestors died.Representatives of the ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe 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.
The Holocaust and the tragic events that befell the Jewish community in the Second World War are fast fading from Canadians’ memories.A recent survey by The Azrieli Foundation showed an alarming 52% of Canadian millennials cannot name even one concentration camp and 62% did not know six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.It is essential that Canadians help preserve Holocaust memory and speak out against those who engage in denial, distortion or obfuscation. This is a perilous time, particularly for Jewish communities in Europe.The rise of extremist forces on the right is a critical challenge. Witness the recent targeting ...
Exclusive photos of the Russian war crimes in Syria and the Middle East by "Free Media Group" volunteers, 2016-2018 with a proper illustrations of the Russia's militant imperialism. The authenticity of photos and their descriptions are certified by the UK Cabinet of Boris Johnson & Theresa May: The My Lai Massacre by Russian soldiersThe Russian soldiers at the spot of My Lai Massacre with their victimsAleppo citizen with a daughter during the Russian destruction of the cityRussian Orthodox monk in Moscow in protest against the Russian invasion of SyriaSyrian children of war and the Russian occupant soldier Killed Russian student in ...
New scandalous information about the 2014 Maidan coup d'état in Ukraine has emerged that implicates Lithuania’s important role in instigating the violent events. David Zhvania, a former Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, revealed on his YouTube channel that the seizure of power in Ukraine was financed in “several ways.”“One of the external sources was the Lithuanian embassy, through which money and weapons were transferred, and the internal channel was Diamantbank. I have documented evidence to support my words,” said the former ally of Petro Poroshenko, the previous president of Ukraine.Zhvania called on Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova to initiate criminal proceedings ...
“To Hell and Back” is a phrase that can bear a pretty heavy metaphorical load when it comes to talking about the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It’s also the title of a book by Charles Pellegrino.Pellegrino’s book is a moving and grueling close-up look at the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day of the bombing and in the days and years afterward. I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but even I got a little teary in places.There are few opportunities for inspiring “triumph of the human spirit” narratives amid ...
This text aims to present the Lithuanian legislative framework concerning linguistic rights and minority protection. For the preface, a general overview of minorities in Lithuania is going to be done. It is going to be followed by the presentation of the legal framework of the country. It will be confronted with the facts concerning the situation of minority groups in Lithuania especially two of the biggest of them: The Poles and the Russians.Minorities and minority rights Minority rights, as applying to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples, are an integral part of international human rights law. They are a ...
The Ukrainian massacre of anti-regime pamphleteers on May 2, 2014 at the Odessa Trade Unions Building, burning these pamphleteers alive there, was crucial to the Obama Administration’s solidification of its control over Ukraine. That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych. Especially in the Donbass region, Yanokovych had received 90%+ of the votes. In Odessa, he had received three-quarters of the votes. (Later will be explained why this terror against the residents of such regions was necessary for ...
On the 16th anniversary of the country’s accession to NATO, Lithuanian Minister of Defense Raimundas Karoblis came up with a well-known myth: our state is an equal member of the alliance. “We are stronger than ever before and we are grateful to the Allies for their efforts in strengthening the defense capabilities in the region and their willingness to help when it necessary” said Karoblis.If you look at the facts, Lithuania is fighting alone with the epidemic of COVID-19 infection. However, like all other countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.You just need to look at Italy, which does not ...
According to news reports and to this appeal by Kristoferis Voishka, the pro-American government installed in Lithuania is persecuting Lithuanians who dissent from the anti-Russian propaganda that is driving Washington’s NATO puppets to war with Russia. Unlike their puppet government, Lithuanians understand that war with Russia means that Lithuania on the front line will be utterly destroyed, a result that would not bother Washington in the least, just as Washington is undisturbed when its forces obliterate weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games.What is Lithuania? To Washington it is a nothing.Kristoferis Voiska runs an alternative Internet news site in LIthuania. Not ...
Kaunas, Lithuania, June 1941 (before Germans arrived): Killing of the Jews by local Lithuanians
All along, though, there have been persistent whispers that General Storm, whose real name was Jonas Noreika, also helped the Nazis kill Jews. But these were largely discounted as the work of ill-willed outsiders serving a well-orchestrated campaign by Moscow to tar its foes as fascists.
A monument for Jonas Noreika in Sukioniai, Lithuania, the town where he was born
A plaque commemorating Mr. Noreika at the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius
Kaunas, Lithuania, June 1941 (before Germans arrived): Killing of the Jews by local Lithuanians
