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According to Terese Birute Burauskaite, head of the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Center, “these are people who probably held the gun in their hand”.
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VILNIUS (AFP/EJP) --- A study by a Lithuanian genocide centre has revealed up to 2,000 Lithuanians could have been directly responsible for killing Jews in the country during the Holocaust.
According to Terese Birute Burauskaite, head of the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Center, “these are people who probably held the gun in their hand”.
The initial investigation by the centre yielded 1,034 possible suspects out of 4,268 names originally touted, a figure that is expected to double by the conclusion of the study at the end of 2013.
The news follows recent controversy over the state-funded reburial of Lithuanian Nazi collaborator and WWII leader Juozas Brazaitis. Brazaitis died in exile in the United States in 1974, having assumed power in Lithuania in 1941, when Nazi Germany drove out the Soviets, following their year-long brutal occupation of the country. He was buried in a Cathedral in central Kaunas earlier this month, with the national anthem accompanying the ceremony.
Whilst the Lithuanian state claim Brazaitis’ government tried to restore national sovereignty, Jewish groups insist he was a Nazi collaborator who refused to halt anti-Semitic pogroms and contributing to the climate with a wave of anti-Semitic legislation.
Following the ceremony, unknown attackers daubed Vilnius’ Choral Temple, the only remaining active synagogue in a city which boasted more than one hundred before the Holocaust, in green paint.
Burauskaite confirmed that she will make the full list of suspected war criminals available to justice authorities, who will then be responsible for deciding whether to make the list public. She continued to say that the majority of named suspects had already been sentenced to death by Soviet authorities and there was no evidence “that any murderer of Jews is now living in Lithuania”.
The Russian foreign ministry sought to distance itself from former Soviet collusion with Nazi Germany which led to its short-lived occupation of Lithuania during WWII, in condemning the Lithuanian government’s moves to sanction the reintenment of its wartime successor Brazaitis as “deeply hurtful to the families and memory of thousands of Jewish victims”.
“We (the foreign ministry) hope for a strong reaction from international partners and responsible organisations after this whitewash of fascist criminals in Lithuania”, it continued.
Lithuania was home to 220,000 Jews before WWII, but 95% perished during the war at the hands of the Nazis and local collaborators. Today, approximately 5,000 Jews are thought to live in the country.