Lithuanians Offer Plan on War Criminals

This nation on Tuesday proposed working with Israel to ensure that criminals who took part in the World War II massacre of 200,000 Jews in Lithuania are not rehabilitated.

The Vilnius government, which recently won independence from Moscow, has been angered by U.S. reports that war criminals are being exonerated wholesale through its program to rehabilitate people condemned for resisting Nazi occupation or Soviet rule.

But the government admitted that mistakes may have been made. “We are striving only for justice,” a government statement said.

It said that a joint working party of the Lithuanian and Israeli parliaments could investigate each questionable case and “make it possible to avoid mistakes concerning rehabilitation.”

“Not one person who can be proven guilty of actions of genocide of Jews or the massacre of unarmed civilians can be rehabilitated,” the statement said.

The government indicated it is also ready to cooperate with the U.S. Justice Department, where there have been moves to send Lithuania a list of about 2,000 convicted war criminals to prevent their rehabilitation.

Under a law of May, 1990, Lithuania is reviewing the cases of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them long dead, who were condemned by Soviet military or KGB tribunals, or simply deported. About 35,000 people have been rehabilitated.

The statement said that in isolated cases, law enforcement officials may have given insufficient attention to people bringing forward new, incriminating evidence, and information from abroad may not have been dealt with quickly enough.

But officials said the task is complicated because many were convicted under catch-all articles such as “offenses against the Soviet state.”