Lithuania pledges to publish names of 1,000 suspected Nazi collaborators

Historians claim that around 95 per cent of Lithuania’s Jewish population were murdered during the Holocaust

Israeli President Shimon Peres speaks during a remembrance ceremony in Lithuania (Getty)

A state museum on genocide in Lithuania is preparing to publish a list of 1,000 local Nazi collaborators, according to reports.

Terese Birute Burauskaite, who heads the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania, said her institution would “this year try to publish a book” containing “over 1,000 Lithuanian residents who are connected to the Holocaust,” the news website Delfi.lt reported Tuesday.

The decision to publish the list of suspected perpetrators follows the publication in Lithuania of a book titled ‘Musiskiai’ – or, ‘Our Own’ – on local complicity during the World War Two genocide in Europe, in which six million Jews were sent to their deaths.

One of the books authors Ruta Vanagaite began researching the Holocaust after discovering members of her own family played a role in the murder of Jewish people.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, the genocide museum provided Lithuanian authorities with a list containing 2,055 names of suspected perpetrators. The newspaper adds that Rimantas Vaitkus, Lithuainia’s deputy minister for education made no attempt to investigate the people concerned. “We do not have such a list,” he is reported as saying.

Historians claim that around 95 per cent of Lithuania’s Jewish population – believed to have been around 200,000 – were killed by Germans and local collaborators. It is thought that this is higher than anywhere else on the continent.