According to Ramūnas Karbauskis, Lithuanians experienced the same situation during the war, when Soviet authorities sent them to Siberia and seized their property.
“That would create confrontation in society and we would have a certain negative effect. We would single out one group of Lithuanian citizens from among others based on ethnicity without addressing the problems of other people who are in an analogous situation,” Karbauskis told a LNK TV news program.
“Because if we are talking about World War Two, the situation affected people of many nationalities,” he added.
The LFGU chairman commented on calls by US officials and the Lithuanian Jewish community on the government to return private property to Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
Lithuania six years ago committed itself to paying 37 million euros in compensation for Jewish religious communal property by 2023.
The Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators killed about 195,000 Lithuanian Jews during the German occupation period. Only five to ten percent of the Lithuanian pre-war Jewish population survived the war.
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