The Commander of the Telsiai district was Jonas Noreika.
Please see attached some testimonies from this region. They are from an archive called the Koniuchowsky Archive, held at the New York Public Library. The originals are in Yiddish at Yad Vashem.
The Lithuanian Governments’ Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC) states that Noreika was not in the district when these events happened (he was). They say he did not know what was happening, and is not responsible for having ordered the Jews of his district into ghetto’s and for issuing orders to plunder Jewish property. Somewhere around 100 documents from their own archives have been delivered to the Lithuanian government proving that he was a perpetrator. The government rejects the evidence.
In this article from September 30, 2019, the head of the Genocide Center states (from Google translate):
“In one text, he just calls him a killer. And even in our society, there are people who directly call him a Jewish shooter. That is not true. Taking his entire biography as much as he has suffered from one occupier to another. That is, we cannot attach such an accusation. Moreover, even the Soviet court, which sentenced him to death, did not draw any co-operation, that during the Nazi period he acted, ”said the head of the center, Therese Birutė Burauskaitė . The Genocide and Resistance Research Center expects the Supreme Administrative Court to look into historical sources. “We are accused of heroizing him. We do not heroize him. We show him what the documents say about him. Not anyone’s memories of what he wrote. Is it at all: “my aunt knows something about that. You know, serious scientists do not rely on such sources, ”says TB Burauskaitė.
https://www.tv3.lt/naujiena/lietuva/1013889/vrublevsiu-biblioteka-paskelbe-sprendima-del-generolo-vetros-lentos
Despite all documentary evidence she rejects, Burauskaitė refers to herself as a “serious scientist” and testimonies such as the attached are “: “my aunt knows something about that”.
Please read the attached testimonies, and ask yourself if someone that governed one sixth of the territory of Lithuania, someone who signed orders to persecute Jews, someone who was known as a very effective leader, could not have known. He saw nothing, he knew nothing, he heard nothing and was responsible for nothing. But, the government states without any evidence, he possibly tried to save Jews.
How do we respond when these testimonies are called “Aunties tales”?