An international row has erupted after a monument to a Lithuanian war hero alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis was erected in Chicago.

The memorial to Adolfas Ramanauskas, who led anti-Soviet resistance during World War Two, was installed in the Illinois city last week in a ceremony attended by Lithuania’s foreign minister.

It has has been criticised as "offensive" by Russia and a US-based Jewish human rights organisation, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which researches the Holocaust and antisemitism.

The centre said Ramanauskas led a vigilante gang that persecuted Jews after the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941.

Russia’s America embassy accused Lithuania of glorifying “Nazi collaborators and Holocaust henchmen, portraying torturers as victims”.

It called the unveiling of the monument “especially cynical, since it almost coincided with the Holocaust Remembrance Day”.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

The Lithuanian foreign ministry responded furiously, tweeting the embassy to say: “You will not drag us down to your level.”

The ministry on Tuesday summoned a Russian diplomat to Vilnius to “protest false statements about the "anti-Soviet guerrilla hero".

“It is most inappropriate for Russia to accuse him of collaboration with the Nazis or of participation in the Holocaust," it said in a statement. "His impeccable reputation has been confirmed by numerous independent experts researching the historical events and archival documents of that time.”

Ramanauskas – known as Vanagas, or “hawk” – was working as a teacher when the Soviet Union recaptured Lithuania from Nazi Germany in 1944.

He joined the anti-Soviet resistance and rose from platoon commander to be chairman of the Lithuanian Freedom Fighters.

Adolfas Ramanauskas led the Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance movement, but is said to have persecuted Jews

But the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said Ramanauskas led a gang of vigilantes who persecuted the Jewish community of Druskininkiai in the weeks after the Nazis captured Lithuania from the Soviets in 1941. Ramanauskas had written about these activities in his memoirs, researchers added.

“Though there is no proof that he himself directly murdered anyone, it is the centre’s position that his leadership during this period of persecution should automatically disqualify him from being declared a national hero,” the centre said.

It described the Chicago monument as “morally untenable and offensive to the memory of the Holocaust victims in Lithuania”.

There were an estimated 210,000 Jews living in Lithuania when the Nazis invaded the country. The vast majority of them were murdered within months.

In 2017, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi-hunter and Holocaust historian, Efraim Zuroff, met with Lithuanian MPs in a bid to convince them not to honour Ramanauskas.

But the Lithuanian government insists the freedom fighter ran a “property protection unit” that merely guarded homes and shops following the Nazi invasion and did not target Jews.

Ramanauskas was captured by the Soviets in 1957 and executed.