Petras Stankeras (born 29 June 1948 in Trakai, Lithuania) is a Lithuanian historian specializing in World War II.
Biography In 1972, Stankeras graduated from the Faculty of History of Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. He worked as a senior research fellow of the Lithuanian Central State Archive in 1973–1977 and an engineer of road construction in 1977–1982. In March 1982, Stankeras joined the Lithuanian Ministry of the Interior. He achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. From 2000 to 25 November 2010, he was a career public employee of the Ministry of the Interior.Stankeras Petras. Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija. T. XXII. – Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2012, 448 psl. Member of Lithuanian police veterans association.
Historian From the age of fifteen, Stankeras took a great interest in the history of World War II, German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and the Lithuanian police. He put together a catalog of 20,000 personnel files of various war criminals and an archive of 100,000 photos.
In 2000, Stankeras defended his Ph.D. dissertation Lithuanian Police during the Nazi Occupation in 1941–1944 (Organizational Structure and Personnel) at Vytautas Magnus University. The work was published by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania in 1998. Another book on the same topic was published in 2008 and partially translated into Russian in 2009. In 2014, Stankeras published Pralaimėta Adolfo Hitlerio kova (The Lost Struggle of Adolf Hitler) in which he translated and annotated large excerpts from Hitler's Mein Kampf.Pralaimėta Adolfo Hitlerio kova. Petras Stankeras In addition, Stankeras coauthored 12 scientific books, published 250 articles in scientific and popular magazines in Lithuania, Poland and the United States, presented both at national and international academic conferences. Stankeras is a board member of the Lithuanian Military History Society.
Controversy On 8 November 2010, magazine Veidas published his article about the Nuremberg trials, in which the following sentence was printed: It is important as well that the Nuremberg process provided a legal basis for the legend of about 6 million supposedly murdered Jews even though in fact the court did not have a single document signed by Hitler ordering to exterminate Jews (this document, if it exists, has not been found, even though a million dollar reward has been promised). The sentence caught attention on 23 November and was interpreted to express denial of the Holocaust. Leonidas Donskis published a blog postL. Donskio blogas. Kur toji riba? while seven ambassadors (Great Britain, Estonia, Netherlands, Norway, France, Finland and Sweden) sent a letter to the Minister of Interior Raimundas Palaitis. Stankeras was forced to resign on 25 November 2010. In a subsequent interview Stankeras explained that he intended only to question the six-million figure, while editor-in-chief of Veidas admitted that the location of the word supposedly was a copy-editing error.G.Sarafinas: kritikos dėl sakinio apie žydų naikinimą sulaukęs istorikas neneigia holokausto Other commentators pointed out that the overall article was sympathetic to the Nazis on trial.Justinas Žilinskas. Neigimo banalybė The Prosecutor's Office of Vilnius County started a criminal pre-trial investigation, but dropped it in February 2011. Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the prosecutor's decision, while Veidas lamented Stankeras' ruined reputation.Kas atsiprašys Petro Stankero?
Bibliography Lietuvių policija 1941–1944 metais (1998). Lietuvių policija Antrajame pasauliniame kare (2008). Литовские полицейские батальоны. 1941–1945 гг. (2009) Pralaimėta Adolfo Hitlerio kova (2014). Stankarų giminės kronika (2014).
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