Nazi Collaborators in the Baltics and Historical Revisionism


Ben Norton recently published an article on The Grayzone titled "New NATO-approved US monument honors fascist Lithuanian Nazi collaborator as anti-Soviet hero" (which I highly recommend reading). In this article, Norton comments on the monument that was recently unveiled in Chicago, which honours Lithuanian Nazi collaborator and unabashed anti-Soviet war hawk, Adolfas Ramanauskas (a.k.a. "Vanagas"). The ceremony for the unveiling, held on May 4th, honours Ramanauskas as a "freedom fighter" and a "hero", as Norton writes,

Lithuania’s state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has spent the past nearly three decades fueling Holocaust revisionism by portraying Nazi-collaborating Lithuanian fascists who murdered Jews in the Holocaust as anti-communist resistance heroes, while depicting Jewish anti-fascist partisans as war criminals; and by advancing the “double genocide” theory that falsely equates Soviet atrocities with Nazi crimes against humanity.

Understandably, and rightfully so, the Russian government was outraged by this gesture, as expressed on their official OSCE Twitter page:



It is no doubt that the act was yet another jibe at Russia as part of today's anti-Russia hysteria. Not to mention, the Soviet Union carried the full weight of defeating the Nazis during WWII and, out of the Allied States, suffered the heaviest casualties. Plus, one of the states they liberated from Nazi occupation was Lithuania; and so, naturally, Russia would see this recent commemoration as a 'slap in the face'. More importantly, however, this act is a flagrant rehabilitation, or 'whitewashing', of a Nazi collaborator.

Now of course, this blatant display of historical revisionism is hardly surprising. The anti-communist, right-wing governments of the Baltic states -- Estonia, Latvia, and [pre-SSR] Lithuania -- were key allies of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Not only did they commit atrocities and mass murders against the Jewish population in Eastern Europe, but the Nazis also particularly relied on the Baltics to help carry out such war crimes against Slavs, especially against Russians and Serbs. 

Also, as the end of the Cold War years were approaching, the CIA-backed colour revolution and operation, the 'Baltic Way' (a.k.a. the "Singing Revolution") was deployed by the United States to destabilize Lithuania and to assist in bringing the country (as well as Latvia and Estonia) into becoming an official NATO member and EU member -- which was dubbed as their "day of independence". They were basically the "softer" and more "colourful" hippy-ish cousins of the Forest Brothers -- and perhaps more devastatingly stealthy because of their "progressive" facade. As part of their cause, this singing, dancing, anti-Soviet, and identitarian "radical resistance" movement also rehabilitated Lithuanian Nazi collaborators as "heroes". And as with any "activist" group or persons who fell under the tutelage of Zbigniew Brzezinski, their ultimate goal was to undermine Soviet-aligned, anti-imperialist resistance. The situation in 1989 was made even worse when Mikhail Gorbachev outright capitulated to U.S. imperialism and pulled all Soviet military support from its allies, which included the former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and those in Eastern Europe. Because of that, the then-government of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), became unable to stand firm against the Forest Brothers' spiritual successors and they dissolved on March 11, 1990. 

Hence the ultra-right wing, EU-NATO puppet state that Lithuania is today.

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