The Lithuania’s Minister of Justice Remigijus Šimašius declared that Lithuania should answer questions of history with its head raised high.  In his blog the Minister dismissed accusations that the Baltic nation was anti Semitic and collaborated with the Nazis during WW2.

The Minister’s post was prompted by the BBC’s HARDtalk with Lithuania’s Prime Minster Andrius Kubilius.  The programme’s host suggested that Lithuania is unwilling to acknowledge its own part in killing Jews and that the Baltic country doesn’t lobby for attention towards Hitler’s crimes as it does to those of Stalin.

The Minister Šimašius said, “First of all, the fact that many Jews were killed in Lithuania doesn’t in itself mean that Lithuanians are Jew killers. Quite on the contrary, Lithuania was a place where Jews were safe and lived in peace. That was until the Nazis came here. Had Lithuanians been anti-Semitic, Lithuania wouldn’t have become a haven for the Jewish and Vilnius wouldn’t have been known as Jerusalem of the North.”

The Minister Šimašius continues, “I do not want to bring it up and remember but unlike like the US, which at first didn’t want to take in Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, from the Soviet Union, which would return runaway Jews to the Nazis, or even the UK, which had its share of pseudo-Arian nonsense, apart form some jokes about the Jews their were neither persecuted nor oppressed in Lithuania.

Secondly, throwing accusations of anti-Semitism or collaboration at Lithuania is insulting to the memory of the hundreds of Lithuanians, who were helping Jews.

How can anyone accuse Lithuania of collaborating with the Nazis, if this collaboration simply never took place in any official or formal ways?

Furthermore, despite of the Nazi efforts they never managed to gather its SS legion in Lithuania, differently from Latvia, Estonia and many others among its occupied states.

I think we should answer questions of history with our heads raised high, especially when we have clear answers.  I understand that those arguments provided here on historic theme might appear dilettante to serious historians.  In such case I am waiting for historians’ help,” the Minister concluded.