The row follows investigations by the country's prosecutor into whether the former partisans - Holocaust survivors now in their 80s - themselves committed war crimes.

Israel has denounced the inquiry as scandalous and refused to allow one of the main potential witnesses to be questioned. Britain's foremost World War II historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, told the BBC he was "deeply shocked" by the investigation, which he called "perverse".

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which works to track down Nazi war criminals, claims it is part of an attempt to establish a "false symmetry" between atrocities committed against Jews and atrocities allegedly committed by them.

And the dispute has now led to a tense meeting between the Lithuanian prime minister Gediminas Kirkilas and American Jewish leaders.

'Punitive action'

At least four former fighters have now been questioned or are being sought for questioning. All deny any wrongdoing, and so far the main evidence appears to be memoirs written by former partisans themselves.

The row began to develop last September when the Lithuanian prosecutor for war-crimes and crimes against humanity asked to talk to Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad about his experiences as a 16-year-old boy, after he had escaped from a Nazi-run ghetto in Lithuania and joined the Soviet-led resistance force in the forest.

Dr Arad, 81, is former head of Israel's Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem.

He was not informed what provoked the inquiry, but the prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevicius, told the BBC he was investigating the killing of at least one civilian in a raid by partisans on Girdenai, a village in eastern Lithuania in 1944.

In his book, The Partisan, first published in English in 1979, Dr Arad described how his brigade was ordered to mount a "punitive action" against villagers who, he wrote, were armed by the Germans and had shot partisans attempting to requisition food.

Dr Arad described how houses were burned. But he denies involvement in the killing of any civilians.

He has said he is willing to be interviewed by Lithuanian journalists, but not by the police. "I don't trust them," he said. "The case has no basis. It is trying to falsify events. And I don't want to be part of this play."

Rewriting history?

Dr Arad, like other former partisans, insists that joining the Soviet-led resistance force was effectively his only means of staying alive in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

Historians say about 95% of the country's Jews - 200,000 people - were killed by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators, probably the highest proportion in Europe.

Under Lithuanian law, any citizen can initiate an inquiry into wartime crimes, and Dr Arad believes the inquiry into his record is revenge for expert evidence he gave at the trial in the United States of a former Lithuanian Nazi collaborator accused of involvement in the killing of Jews.

"I think they use my case as a general intention to rewrite history," he said, "to show that Jews are not the only victims."

Lithuania's deputy foreign minister Jaroslavas Neverovicas told the BBC that Dr Arad was wanted as a witness, not a suspect.

But the case has undone painstaking work by the government a few years ago to establish an international commission of historians tasked with examining the crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in Lithuania, and attempting to draw up a definitive version of highly controversial events.

One aim was to reconcile differing assessments, inside and outside Lithuania, of the extent of Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust.

Sabotage

Dr Arad, seen as a key Israeli scholar, was originally persuaded to join the Commission only after the personal intervention of Lithuania's president. But he has now withdrawn, at least until the case is dropped, as has Britain's representative, Sir Martin Gilbert.

"The Commission was one of the best things that happened in post-Soviet Lithuania," the deputy foreign minister, Mr Neverovicas, said. "It's unfortunate that such an episode appeared. But when the accusation happened, our prosecutor's office could not sit still, it had to investigate."

The government-appointed head of the commission, however, believes that its work has been deliberately sabotaged by nationalist forces who want to lead Lithuania away from the European mainstream.

Conservative member of parliament Emmanuelis Zingeris, Lithuania's leading Jewish politician, who was one of those at the forefront of the country's campaign to break away from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, said:

"Someone has tried to dismantle this carefully-built bridge between Lithuania, Israel, America and world historical opinion. And it's a real tragedy.. a highly counter-productive move against Lithuanian liberal values, against all our shared values with NATO and EU countries."

For the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the world's main Nazi-hunting organisation, the investigation of Jewish partisans is part of a wider attempt by Lithuania to improve its international image by rewriting the history of World War II.

"The participation of so many Lithuanian volunteers in the mass murder of Jews is a very sensitive subject," says Efraim Zuroff of the centre's Jerusalem office. "However if it emerges that there were Jews who committed crimes against Lithuanians, that would blunt the shame that Lithuanians feel in response to their World War II crimes."

"The Holocaust obfuscation, distortion and deflection going on in Lithuania should be a very serious cause of concern in the EU and Nato," he added.

"I think what is happening in Lithuania and elsewhere throughout Eastern Europe is far more serious than the phenomenon of Holocaust denial which has never penetrated mainstream European society."

Dr Zuroff describes independent Lithuania's record in prosecuting Nazi war criminals as a "miserable failure". Since 1991, it has prosecuted three Nazi collaborators - and 24 people accused of crimes against humanity or genocide under the Soviet regime.

Totalitarian

The country has its own judicial definition of the word "genocide", wider than that used by the United Nations.

It includes attempts to wipe out particular social as well as ethnic groups, and can therefore potentially be used to prosecute Soviet crimes as well as Nazi ones.

Many non-Jewish Lithuanians argue they were subject to a form of genocide because the Soviet Union attempted to destroy the nation's intellectual elite through mass deportations to Siberia, the fight against anti-Soviet guerrillas, and other forms of persecution.

As for Nazi collaborators, the government says most were prosecuted in Soviet times, whereas the task of finding Soviet collaborators could only begin after independence.

Deputy foreign minister Neverovicas says Lithuania is being even-handed in investigating both totalitarian regimes and is right to be spearheading efforts in the European Parliament to make Western Europeans more aware of Soviet crimes.

But his government is clearly embarrassed by the still-widening investigation of the partisans.

This spring prosecutors questioned 86-year-old Fania Brantsovskaya, who still lives in Lithuania, about the role her partisan brigade played in an alleged massacre of 38 civilians in the village of Kaniukai in south-eastern Lithuania in January 1944.

Mrs Brantsovskaya insists she was not present during the raid and has now also been told that she is not a suspect.

Nevertheless the prime minister Mr Kirkilas was so concerned about the possible impact of the case on Lithuania's relations with America's influential Jewish community that he invited her to tea before his trip to New York.

Lithuania insists, however, that the judiciary works independently of the government, and the inquiry continues.

bbc.co.uk