Just when the roiling waters surrounding the Noreika controversy in Lithuania started settling, Lithuania’s Orwellian Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania (abbreviated to Genocide Center among almost all vulgar mortals) has stirred the pot yet again with a new “historical finding” exonerating the Holocaust perpetrator, whom they plainly stated was a Holocaust perpetrator in their earlier “findings.”

Based on a deposition and/or court testimony allegedly made in Chicago in 1984 or 1986 by a Lithuanian Jesuit, the latest finding by Lithuania’s state-funded Holocaust distortion agency says Jonas Noreika set up a network of priests to smuggle Jews out of the Šiauliai ghetto to safety on the farms of sympathetic farmers, and that he was the leader of some mythical anti-Nazi underground resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania.

Lithuanian Holocaust distorters in the past, including at the Genocide Center, have dismissed almost all Holocaust survivor testimony as hearsay which cannot be taken at face value without a deep review of the facts. Facts they claim only they are privy to. In actuality, when independent Holocaust researchers conducted studies on Noreika for Grant Gochin’s court case against the Genocide Center for the crime of Holocaust distortion and denial, the Center fired back on their website claiming Gochin’s research was amateurish and “might be” in violation of both the Lithuanian criminal code and the Lithuanian constitution. Gochin’s research, incidentally, turned up testimony by an eye-witness that Jonas Noreika as LAF commander in Žemaitija, the western region of Lithuania, directly issued the command to execute a group of over 1,000 Jews.

The news editor of the Lithuanian news website 15min.lt writes the author of the latest official “historical finding” is Lithuanian geologist Dalius Egidijus Stancikas. Editor Rūta Miškinytė contacted the geologist turned Holocaust historian to sort out the strata involved, to get to the foundation of the new claim. In what appears to be a long email or chat dialogue, it becomes clear Stancikas’s only real source is the sacred word of the priest, that he hasn’t even looked for any Jew actually rescued by the network of priests and that the Genocide Center itself is in deep internal disarray. The editor asks repeatedly about the seeming contradiction with the Center’s earlier “historical findings” and Stancikas repeatedly says it’s none of her business, it’s his personal affair and that he was and, it seems, was at the same time not in consultation with the Center’s other historians.

Lithuania’s Orwellian Genocide Center has done it again, making the political personal and the personal political and even lending it the rubric of “official state policy,” ignoring the testimony of the victims in favor of third-party testimony from friends of the perpetrators aimed at dragging out forever any confrontation with the truth. Claiming all the perpetrators, all of them now dead, are “innocent until proven guilty,” and that they are the only government agency capable of making such a decision while they also claim in clear contradiction that only the courts can make such a determination, the “official” state historians at the Genocide Center continue to write whatever they want because it’s their own personal affair what they write, the title of Rūta Miškinytė’s interview with the Holocaust geologist available in Lithuanian here.