In a statement issued in Jerusalem today, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff noted two major flaws
in a recent report issued by the state-sponsored Genocide Center in Vilnius,
Lithuania. The report’s key findings, presented by the Center’s Dr. Alfredas
Rukšėnas, were published by the Lithuanian news portal Delfi on 25 October
2013 (English translation available in Defending History).
According to Dr. Zuroff:
“The findings of the report, as presented
by the coordinator of this project, are clearly part of a
systematic attempt by the Lithuanian government to minimize
the role of ethnic Lithuanians in the mass murder of Jews
during the Holocaust. Based on the records in our archives,
I can unequivocally state, that the figure of 2,055 Lithuanians
whose direct and indirect participation in Holocaust crimes
was confirmed by this study, is a gross underestimate of
the number of Lithuanians complicit in Shoah crimes, designed
to deflect blame from local collaborators and hide the extensive
scope of Lithuanian involvement in the mass murder of Jews,
both in Lithuania and outside her borders.
“Also highly objectionable is the
assertion by Dr. Rukšėnas that those Lithuanians who indeed
murdered Jews really had no choice but to do so, having received
orders to commit murder from their superiors. Besides the
fact that in many cases, these superiors were themselves
Lithuanians, such arguments have been consistently and unequivocally
rejected by courts all over the world, starting with the
Nuremberg Trials.”
defendinghistory.com
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