During the 19th century, Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire. The building, completed in 1890, originally housed the court of the Vilna Governorate. The German Empire used it during its World War I occupation of the country. After independence was declared, it served as a conscription center for the newly formed Lithuanian army and as the Vilnius commander's headquarters. During the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, the city was briefly taken by the Bolsheviks, and the building housed commissariats and a revolutionary tribunal. Following Żeligowski's Mutiny of 1920, Vilnius and its surroundings were incorporated into Poland, and the building housed the courts of justice for the Wilno Voivodship. Lithuania was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, and following an ultimatum, became a Soviet Socialist Republic. Mass arrests and deportations followed, and the building's basement became a prison. In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the country; the building then housed the Gestapo headquarters. Inscriptions on the cell walls from this era remain. The Soviets retook the country in 1944, and from then until independence was re-established in 1991, the building was used by the KGB, housing offices, a prison, and an interrogation center. Over 1,000 prisoners were executed in the basement between 1944 and the early 1960s, about one-third for resisting the occupation. Most bodies were buried in the Tuskulėnai Manor, which underwent reconstruction and hosts a branch of the museum. In addition to housing the museum, the building now serves as a courthouse and as the repository of the Lithuanian Special Archives.
Collections
The non-violent aspect of the resistance is represented by various books, underground publications, documents, and photographs. The collection pertaining to the Forest Brothers' armed resistance includes documents and photographs of the partisans. A section devoted to the victims of deportations, arrests, and executions holds photographs, documents, and personal belongings; this collection is continually expanded by donations from the public, seeing the museum as the best means of preserving the materials.
Controversy
No exposition devoted to the Holocaust in Lithuania existed in the Museum of Genocide Victims until 2011, despite the fact that more Jews were killed in Lithuania than in Germany, both in relative and absolute numbers, and that only a few historians believe Soviet repression against the Lithuanians constituted a genocide. To address international criticism, a small exposition describing the Holocaust in Lithuania was added in 2011. In April 2018, after a piece by Rod Nordland in The New York Times quoted Dovid Katz as saying the museum was "a 21st-century version of Holocaust denial", the museum changed its name to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. As of 2020, the museum "focuses almost entirely on the murder of the Lithuanian non-Jewish population, while perpetrators of the Holocaust are lauded as victims in their countries’ struggle against Soviet occupation."
