the trend of representing the Karaite population of Eastern Europe as a nation of warriors. Shapshal was one of the initiators of this process. In 1939, using his connections with the community of Russian emigrés in Germany, he appealed to the authorities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Reich with a request to examine the issue of Crimean Karaites' ethnicity. After the occupation by German troops of the areas of Eastern Europe populated by Crimean Karaites, this appellation was observed by the German administration. They involved three major historian specialists on the history of the Karaites: Zelig Kalmanovich, Meir Balaban and Yitzhak (Ignacy) Schiper. Despite the fact that all three had been before the war fierce opponents of the theory of the Turkic origin of the Crimean Karaites, they supported Shapshal's theory in order to save the European Karaites from the Holocaust. Shapshal was instrumental in the formulation of Nazi policy towards the Karaims. As Hakham of Vilnius he was infamous for his confrontations with such Jewish community figures as Zelig Kalmanovich. He was also known for having been forced (under penalty of endangering his own community) to give the Nazis a detailed list of the members of the Crimean Karaites communities of Troki and Vilnius, allowing them to easily discover and arrest Jews who had forged papers stating that they were Crimean Karaites. In 1945 he formally abdicated from Karaite Gahan post, submitting a statement to the Commissioner for Religious Affairs of the Council of Ministers of the Lithuanian SSR, and got a position as a researcher at the Institute of History of the Soviet-dominated Lithuanian Academy of Sciences He co-authored a Karaim–Russian–Polish dictionary (published in 1974) and wrote a number of articles on the Crimean Karaites. Using his position he continued to promote his ideas, including forgery of some evidences regarding the military past of Crimean Karaites, publishing the articles about his "discoveries" in the Soviet Union's leading academic journals. Recent studies on Shapshal's archive have shown that his drafts include several versions of the "original" documents texts, evidencing forgery. In spite of that, Shapshal's ideas about Karaim warriors were adopted widely in USSR and even abroad. Thus in Trakai, modern Lithuania, visitors are often told that Karaim warriors were guards of Trakai Castles. In 1997, a commemorative coin in denominations of 50 LTL was issued in honor of the 600th anniversary of the Tatars and