The "double genocide theory" (Lithuanian: Dvigubo genocido požiūris, lit. 'Double genocide approach') claims that two genocides of equal severity occurred during World War II: it alleges that the Soviet Union committed atrocities against Eastern Europeans that were equivalent in scale and nature to the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany. The theory first gained popularity in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, particularly with regard to discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania.[1] A more extreme version of the theory is antisemitic and vindicates the actions of Nazi collaborators as retaliatory by accusing Jews of complicity in Soviet repression, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania.[2][3][4][5] Scholars have criticized the double genocide theory as a form of Holocaust trivialization.
Finkel 2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Its latest iteration centers on east-central Europe—and especially in Lithuania—in the form of the 'double-genocide thesis' which posits that the Soviet and Nazi regimes committed genocides of equal gravity against the Baltic, Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of what Timothy Snyder calls the 'bloodlands'.
According to this 'theory,' there were two major genocides in Lithuania, the Soviet one (consisting of deportations and repressions) and the Holocaust. Both were extremely tragic events, and, according to some defenders of memory, they should be even viewed as equal. Yet some proponents of this 'theory' took the argument even further than merely asserting that there were two equally tragic developments in Lithuania. They argued that some Lithuanian Jews supported the occupying Soviet forces, and those Lithuanians who were participating in the Holocaust, were retaliating for the losses experienced during the first Soviet occupation. In other words, some Jews were participating in the 'Soviet genocide' against the Lithuanians. Needless to say, this 'theory' is flawed on many different levels. However, it did reflect a relatively popular way of thinking in the mid- and late 1990s.