Ms. Kukelinskita states flatly that Mr. Losys' commission has been uninterested in actively pursuing evidence of guilt. The 6,000 men who served in the battalions should be held to account, she said, as well as any others who shot Jews.
Being convicted by the Communists doesn't automatically make you not guilty, she said.
But because the government is not releasing records, she said, it is impossible to know how many rehabilitations should be contested.
Ms. Kukelinskita, who herself was a prosecutor under the Communist regime, said the people in power today simply don't want to confront the unpleasant truth that Lithuanians were enthusiastically killing Jews in 1941.
Some would rather blame the Germans -- and some the Jews themselves.
The Soviets originally occupied Lithuania in 1940, ousting a fascist but not particularly ruthless regime. The Nazis attacked in 1941 and held the country for three years.
"You should understand, the Jewish tragedy started not with the arrival of the Germans but with the arrival of the Soviets in 1940," said the Rev. Alfonsas Svarinskas, a Roman Catholic priest and member of Parliament who spent 22 years in Soviet camps.
And the nature of that tragedy? "The Jews sided with the Communists," he said. "And the Lithuanians understood that."
One Jewish leader here says that in 1940 the Communists didn't look like such a poor choice compared with the alternative.
But for Catholic Lithuanians, the focus of hatred was always Moscow. Lithuanians resisted communism; partisans roamed the forests until 1953. With the Nazis, there was little trouble.
An unusual libel case
Lithuania's confrontation with the war crimes issue first erupted in September. But the issue of Lithuanian guilt vs. Communist distortions of history came into sharp relief earlier this month in an unusual libel case brought by Antanas Gecas, a former officer of the 12th Lithuanian Battalion now living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Lithuanian government -- stung by earlier Western press reports implying that all 23,000 of those rehabilitated had served the Nazi cause, which is not true -- saw the case as a chance to prove its argument that the KGB fabricated war-crimes evidence against its enemies.
In 1987, while Lithuania and other Baltic states were still part of the Soviet Union, Mr. Gecas was accused by Soviet officials of having taken part in the mass execution of Jews in Slutsk, a town about 100 miles away in what is now Belarus. The Soviets asked Britain to extradite him, but the British refused.
But a crew from Scottish Television went to Lithuania and interviewed the chief witnesses against Mr. Gecas. They described how soldiers machine-gunned Jews so that they fell into a pit and how Lieutenant Gecas then climbed into the pit and shot survivors with his revolver.
Soviet prosecutors had directed the witnesses to appear before the Scottish crews, but the producers went ahead and aired the program.
Mr. Gecas, who denied shooting Jews, sued, seeking $1.1 million. Because the witnesses are now quite elderly, the Scottish court trying the case came to Vilnius to hear two days of testimony.
Scottish Television's defense fared poorly. Juozas Aleksynas said the KGB had forced him to give evidence against Mr. Gecas. He said his account was "exaggerated."
"There's been too much said against Gecas," he told the court.
Motiejus Migonis, a 73-year-old pig farmer, said he had been at a guard post 30 to 50 yards from the pit and hadn't actually seen any shooting, contrary to what he had told the Scottish crew.
"How could I say what was happening there?" he said.
When the Scottish lawyer persisted in asking about the incident, he replied, "I don't like questions like those. This is getting on my nerves."
Later, he said, "There might be some mistakes pertaining to the investigation by the KGB," but he would not elaborate.
The discomfort of Mr. Aleksynas and Mr. Migonis is perhaps understandable. Before the trial, they had been sent letters by Mr. Losys, pointing out that the authorities would be paying attention to their testimony.
Afterward, Mr. Losys denied that he had been trying to intimidate the witnesses. "Those letters were written in a very delicate form," he said. "The only aim was to restore the truth. We told them to remember what testimony they had given [to the KGB], and to think of what they could add."
Mr. Aleksynas has changed directions before. A Lithuanian soldier before the war, he became general secretary of the Communist trade union council after the Soviet takeover in 1940. In 1941, he joined the German army. In 1987, he gave testimony against Mr. Gecas, but now he says he did that only to placate the KGB.
Mr. Gecas himself, after winning a medal from the Germans, left Lithuania to fight in Italy. There he deserted and joined the British, who also gave him a medal. In 1947, he settled in Scotland.
