Communism and Nazism committed massive genocides in the 20th Century with Communism killing far more than Nazism, but only Nazi genocides receive memorials and movies today. The genocides that Jewish communists carried out for Stalin are rarely discussed.
Different groups have different interests. It served the interests of Lithuanian nationalists to side with the Nazis against the Communists just as it served the interests of Lithuanian Jews to side with the Communists against the Nazis.
In a new party line, institutions of the contemporary Lithuanian government now portray Nazi-aligned nationalists as anti-Soviet heroes and anti-Nazi partisans—in particular the Jewish ones—as traitors. Arad lives under the cloud of an open-ended investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors for crimes against humanity committed in the final days of World War II, when he allegedly executed Lithuanian anti-Communists, including civilians, for Stalin’s secret police.
…That Russian Jews had been wildly overrepresented in the generation that led the Bolshevik Revolution is indisputable.
…After the War, Lithuania was reincorporated into the USSR and Soviet authorities suppressed the truth about the significant Jewish role in the partisan resistance and the remarkable degree of local Christian collaboration with the Nazis.
…The investigation also succeeded in muddling the historical narrative by positing a moral equivalence: Lithuanian paramilitaries may have paved the way for the Nazi’s Holocaust, but Jewish partisans had committed atrocities that helped pave the way for the Soviet “genocide.”
…In present-day Eastern Europe, Katz explained in his Brooklyn accent, “Holocaust denial” is being replaced by a seemingly respectable “Holocaust obfuscation.” Lithuania and other Eastern European countries are embracing a “double genocide” theory that posits that both the Nazis and Soviets committed genocide. What the hypothesis lacks in intellectual honesty, it makes up for in political expediency. By positing twin genocides, Lithuanians become victims—and “Judeo-Bolsheviks” become perpetrators—in a second, mirror-image holocaust. As Ephraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center summarized, “If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty.” To Leonidas Donskis, a part-Jewish Lithuanian intellectual who has served in the European Parliament in Brussels where he has opposed official Nazi/Soviet equivalence resolutions, the ultimate purpose of the “double genocide” theory is to allow Eastern European ultra-nationalists to “portray the people who were killing the Jews as people who fought the Soviet regime. [It is] dangerous nonsense.” As an added bonus, this historical narrative nicely fits the present moment in which Lithuania is (justifiably) more worried about Putin’s Russia than Merkel’s Germany.
…Heading back into Vilnius, the young couple mulled their nation’s bloody history. “The Nazis were bad; the Soviets were worse,” the artist offered matter-of-factly. “My grandmother remembered the war,” the architect added. “She always said the Germans were polite and the Russians weren’t.” When I pressed her on her Soviets-were-worse-than-the-Nazis assumptions, the most she would concede was a post-modern gloss that it was all a matter of perspective. “It depends who you were: the Nazis were worse for Jews, the Soviets were worse for Lithuanians.” The blithe, implicit assumption was that Lithuanian Jews were not Lithuanians.
