The news website sekunde.lt reports Raimundas Pankevičius, leader of the Panevėžys faction of Political Prisoners and Exiles and a member of the Lithuanian Conservatives/Christian Democratic Party, has gone on trial for anti-Semitic remarks made during a meeting of the Panevėžys city council. The right-wing politician is accused of public statements to the effect Jews shot Jews during World War II in Lithuania.

As a member of the city council, Pankevičius is alleged during deliberations on the erection of a monument to commemorate the Joint Distribution Committee’s work there in September of 2014 of having denied Nazi crimes against the Jewish people by saying Lithuanian Holocaust victims killed each other and that the Jewish police in the ghettos in Lithuania sent thousands of their fellow Jews to their deaths in a single day.

That meeting of the city council apparently adopted unanimously a decision to erect a stele to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Joint. Pankevičius, however, also said he didn’t see any evidence of the Joint’s work and suspected elements of fraud in the story. He said Jewish SS shot 5,000 Jews in southwestern Lithuania in one day during World War II.

In court Pankevičius didn’t renounce his statement of several years ago, but said he had made a small mistake. “I wanted to say Jewish police and SS. The Jews were part of the Gestapo, not SS, and that’s even worse,” he said in court.

“It was much more tragic than we now imagine. Because it wasn’t just Germans and Lithuanians, but also Jews themselves murdering Jews. The police established in their ghettos made sure their people didn’t escape and selected who was to be shot. The worst thing was the Jewish police knew where their fellow Jews were hiding children and they extracted and murdered them. In the West, in the Czech Republic [sic], for example, the Jewish police took care of their own people, but in Lithuania, the Germans gave the Jews medicine for typhus, but the Jewish police demanded they pay for it. Only rich Jews could get treatment. That I now stand accused is unjustified ignorance. It’s impossible to hide the fact that Jews murdered Jews,” Pankevičius explained to the court.