the rank of brigadier general and was appointed to the post of Chief Education Officer. He retired from the military in 1972. Academic career In his academic career as a lecturer on Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, he has researched World War II and the Holocaust, and has published extensively as author and editor, primarily in Hebrew. His later research deals with the Holocaust in the USSR. Dr. Yitzhak Arad served as the director (Chairman of the Directorate) of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority, for 21 years (1972–1993). He remained associated with Yad Vashem in an advisor's capacity. Arad was awarded Doctor honoris causa degree by Poland's Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń on June 7, 1993. Dismissed investigation in Lithuania In 2006, following a story in the Lithuanian Respublika newspaper that called Arad a "war criminal" for his alleged role in the Koniuchy massacre perpetrated by anti-Nazi Soviet partisans, the Lithuanian state prosecutor initiated an investigation of Arad. Following an international outcry, the investigation was dropped in the fall of 2008. Arad said "I have never killed a civilian. It could have happened during battle, but I have never killed a civilian or a prisoner of war in cold blood" and that he was "proud" that he "fought the Nazi Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators ... the murderers of my family, the murderers of my people." Arad has said he believes the investigation was motivated by revenge for expert evidence he gave in a United States trial of a Lithuanian Nazi collaborator. British historian Martin Gilbert said he was "deeply shocked" by the "perverse" investigation. Efraim Zuroff pointed out that the Lithuanian government had never prosecuted a single war criminal, despite the evidence that Simon Wiesenthal Center had collected and shared. According to Zuroff, "What is common to all these cases is that they're all Jews. Instead of punishing Lithuanian criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered Jews, they're harassing the partisans, Jewish heroes." Some 200,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust, mainly by Lithuanian collaborators. Lithuania's record of prosecuting war criminals has been spotty, leading The Economist to write that the investigation against Jews was selective and even vindictive. According to Dovid Katz, this is Holocaust obfuscation that "involves a series of false moral equivalences: Jews were disloyal citizens of pre-war Lithuania, helped the Soviet occupiers in 1940, and were therefore partly to blame