The prosecutor alleges that Dr Arad was involved in the killing of Lithuanian civilians as a partisan during the Second World War.

Dr Arad, who became a brigadier-general in the Israeli army and was the IDF’s chief education officer, was due to visit Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to participate in the work of a government committee investigating Nazi and Soviet crimes in the country.

But an article in a right-wing magazine, Republika, raised question marks over Dr Arad’s history with the partisans and the matter was taken up by the government’s prosecutor.

Joseph Melamed, president of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, said: “Until now they’ve not found even one Jew who would have killed defenceless Lithuanians. There were no Jews like this. But in all the archives you will find the names of 23,000 Lithuanians who killed Jewish people.”

Dr Arad gave testimony at the trials of Nazi war criminals. He believes he was targeted as part of a general Lithuanian policy against pro-Soviet World War Two troops.

He said: “What, as I understand, they are investigating now is actually the whole Soviet partisan movement.”

He added that, as a Jewish teenager, “I saw as my obligation to fight those who were murderers of my people, those who were murderers of millions of other people.

“I saw it as my duty. I was proud of it. And, of course, I saw it also as a matter of survival.”

Leading historians in Israel have suggested that the committee investigating Nazi and Soviet crimes was set up in order to appease Western calls for the country to deal with its Nazi past, in order to ease Lithuania’s passage into the European Union.

thejc.com