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The Complicity of Lithuanians in the Holocaust
(Times of Israel) Dr. Efraim Zuroff - 212,000 Lithuanian Jews, as well as thousands of foreign Jews, were killed in Lithuania by local Nazi collaborators. In neighboring Belarus, a Lithuanian unit murdered at least 20,000 Belarussian Jews. Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, addressed the Lithuanian Parliament on September 23: "Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were murdered in this country by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators. Almost the entire Jewish community became extinct. The totality of the destruction of such a...remarkably vibrant Jewish community, almost like none other, annihilated so cruelly, so systematically during the Holocaust - and to a significant extent by the local population. Insane, poisonous antisemitic hatred eradicated an entire civilization - my civilization - here in your homeland." Dayan then mentioned three specific Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators who have been glorified and elevated to the status of national heroes, despite their role in the murder of Jews. "Such names as Noreika, Skirpa, and Krikstaponis do not add to the honor of your nation." The writer is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of its Israel Office.