Dainius Žalimas served as the chief justice of the Constitutional Court of Lithuania from 2014 to 2021. He currently teaches. When protestors gathered to stop the city of Vilnius from taking down an illicit monument to wartime-era Lithuanian Nazi leader Kazys Škirpa, Lithuanian media went to Žalimas for commentary, because he had ruled in a case concerning Škirpa several years ago. The arrest of three protestors Sunday was followed by an unsanctioned but apparently announced protest in front of Vilnius City Hall Monday, where premade glossy posters were handed out to about 20 Škirpa fanatics, including one set of posters attacking Faina Kukliansky, the chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, for allegedly dictating political decisions to Vilnius mayor Valdas Benkunskas, who had called the Škirpa shrine, illegally installed on the Vilnius court building and former KGB palace, an act of “hooliganism,” which was later redacted by other members of the municipality to “vandalism.”

Dainius Žalimas posted to facebook regarding the legacy of Lithuanian Nazi leader Kazys Škirpa by quoting himself from an interview conducted by 15min.lt a year ago. This is an unofficial translation of his self-quote:

Some of us mark June 23 as a day of national pride and post photographs from that time of Lithuanian soldiers and residents joyfully greeting the Lithuanian insurgents and Germans, as well as photos of Soviet POWs being led through the streets. Yes, the Russian Bolshevik occupation had gone much too far for everyone. So there was no reason to feel pity for the occupiers. Under other circumstances we truly could’ve had something of which to be proud.

But if we want to be fair, objective, honest and completely open, we should post other photos as well. Of our murdered fellow citizens the Jews, with the Lithuanian Activist Front and their creation the Lithuanian Provisional Government forming the ideological foundation for their extermination. A primitive Nazi one, but a foundation. Then we’ll have a holistic view, and instead of national pride, national shame.

I’ll add a few very illustrative sources documenting the current events of that time. These aren’t the products of the Nazi occupiers, but are by the Lithuanian insurgents themselves.

The first is the newspaper which called itself “The New Lithuania” [Naujoji Lietuva]. The goal of the uprising was precisely to create a new Lithuania in Nazi-ruled Europe, without Jews, of course. And the newspaper appropriately begins with the article “Lithuania without the Jews.” This goal appeared to the editors of the newspaper to be the most important one, more important than national independence or the fight against Bolshevism. Demonstrating that is the first sentence:

“The greatest parasite upon and exploiter of Lithuania, as with the other nations, was and in some places is still the Jew.”

The second is the segregation order by the commander of the Vilnius insurgents (and the dean and teacher of the Law Faculty of Vilnius University as well) requiring Jews to wear special symbols and forbidding their appearance on the streets [i.e., in public] during the evening and night. I emphasize that this was an especially educated person, a professional attorney who couldn’t have failed to understand the criminal nature of his order.

And last, more highly educated people who fully understood what they were doing, documents from the Lithuanian Provisional Government: the decision to establish a Jewish concentration camp (which was supposed to be the responsibility of the Infrastructure Ministry, or actually the responsibility of that ministry’s deputy minister, who logically of course had to be completely subordinate to the minister himself), as well as the infamous Regulations on the Status of the Jews. These last begin with statements such as “for whole centuries the Jews have been exploiting the Lithuanian people” and broadly incited a “battle against Lithuanian independence and the Lithuanian people.” The goal of these Regulations was therefore to “put a stop to this harmful activity and protect the Lithuanian people from their [the Jews’] poisonous influence.”

All of this led to the dehumanization of our Jewish fellow citizens, without looking any deeper into any individual or their behavior. Dehumanization is of course the first step towards genocide, and this has become the classic example of that crime. Lithuania in 1941 remains only one of many examples.

So really, of what should we be proud on June 23? That the leadership of the Lithuanian insurgents, for which many among the Lithuanian elite pledged their support, not only failed to reach their goal of restoring independence, but also engaged in the horrors of the Holocaust? In other words, they betrayed Lithuania because they so facilely spit in the face of the fate of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens and even collaborated in their extermination. This is the true picture of things when we talk about the alleged glory of the Lithuanian uprising.

I can already hear the objections, that it is easy to judge from today’s perspective, that the leaders of the uprising couldn’t have acted differently. But the thing is, today’s perspective isn’t different from the perspective then, because even then the Lithuanian constitution forbade the mass murder and dehumanization of any group, and all citizens were equal under the law. And back then as well there were the same requirements of being a human being, and God’s Commandments, according to which the crime of genocide was already very clear, even if the name for this crime hadn’t yet been formalized.

Well, regarding the idea that they couldn’t have acted differently, that’s the same thing all criminals say to justify their actions. A typical defense tactic which usually doesn’t really help their case. Especially in our case where the red lines which under no circumstances could be transgressed were drawn so clearly for everyone.

These attempts to distance the leadership of the uprising from the extermination of the Jews seem pathetic and tragic. It’s as if it weren’t the exact same people engaged in both things, and that both things–to rise up, and to get rid of the Jews–hadn’t been clearly specified by the insurgents as their goals long before the uprising.

Therefore June 23 is not a date worth celebrating. It’s more of a date for mourning and critical self-assessment, to avoid the repetition of mistakes of history. And it’s a date favorable for learning that when you make a deal with the Devil, you never gain anything, and you lose your human soul. This is the blood of innocent people murdered staining a day of formal white dress shirts.

Full text in Lithuanian here.