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An 80-Year Search for the Murderers of Jews in Lithuania

(Times of Israel) Efraim Zuroff - A Nazi war crimes investigation of the brutal murder of Jewish infants in Raseiniai, Lithuania, has continued until 2021. Of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania under the Nazi occupation, 96.4% (212,000) had been murdered. In 1945, Leib Kunichowsky, a Jewish survivor of the Kovno Ghetto, collected 1,684 pages of testimony in Yiddish on the fate of Jews in the provincial communities. Kunichowsky focused on the identity of the perpetrators and the critical role played by local Nazi collaborators in the murders. The testimony contained the names of 1,284 Lithuanian perpetrators, of which only 121 were known from other sources. I first learned of the testimonies in 1980, while working as a researcher in Israel for the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to the U.S. after World War II. After gaining access to the material in 1989, I was able to find many dozens of suspects who had fled to the West.
2021-01-28 00:00:00
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