Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  In the long run, the rival Nazi bosses all assumed that the Reich would eventually completely ‘digest’ the Baltic nations. In the short term, that is until the war had been won, the German occupiers needed to buy time. To do this they set up so-called self-administrations to do the donkey work of government. This meant that the Germans would have to square a circle in the sense that they would need to recruit, say, credible Latvian officials while stifling Latvian nationalism. The Germans had already had their fingers burnt in Lithuania when nationalists had declared independence. Stahlecker’s solution, hatched up with the army group commander General Franz von Rocques, was sly. According to Baltic German Harijs Marnics, who worked closely with the Germans occupiers, ‘it was recommended that the terms ‘Latvia’ and ‘Latvian people’ should not be used, so as to get the Latvians to forget about their nation’.13 From the German point of view, this made historical sense. Before 1920, Latvia and Estonia had never existed as sovereign nations. When Latvians proclaimed independence in 1918, they had to set out their borders using the thirteenth-century defensive frontier drawn up by the Teutonic Knights as a bulwark against Russian incursion. Since the idea that Latvia was a nation state at all was a figment of deluded Latvian imaginations, the German occupiers assumed that it would evaporate along with its name. A German official put a mollifying gloss on this scam: ‘the times of political independence are in the past … they have been exchanged for times of peace and prosperity under the protection of the German Reich.’14 Ignorant of the long-term German master plan, many Latvians continued to bask in the glow of deliverance from Soviet tyranny – and there would be no shortage of eager collaborators.

  On the afternoon of 1 July an assembly of Latvian nationalists gathered at the ‘Latvian Club’ in Riga. Led by Col Ernests Kreišmanis and former partisan fighter Bernhards Einbergs, the group comprised army officers and former government ministers who had served under former President Ulmanis. They called themselves the Latvian Organisation Centre (LOC) and set about forming a provisional government.15 Kreišmanis forcefully argued that the most effective way of pleasing the Germans would be to appeal to the Pērkonkrusts, the ultranationalist faction previously banned by the Latvian government. The virulent brand of chauvinism espoused by the Pērkonkrusts would, he assumed, strongly appeal to the Germans. Kreišmanis had strong grounds for making this argument.

  In 1940, Pērkonkrusts’ leader Gustavs Celmiēš had fled to Berlin, where he made influential contacts. At the end of June 1941, he returned to Latvia as a Sonderführer (special leader) with a German army brigade. But Celmiēš was much too self-important to throw in his lot with any provisional government not led by him – and in any case his influence with his German friends proved to be expedient and short lived. On 3 July, Stahlecker, who had set up his headquarters in Riga’s imposing medieval Ritterhaus, threw out LOC demands and insisted that there would be no ‘Latvian government’ of any kind until the war had been won. He may have sent an even more direct message. On 18 July, assassins killed Lt Col Viktors Deglavs, a protégé of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, who had been recruiting a Latvian national army modelled on the Ukrainian Nachtigall. A witness testified: ‘Around his head there was a puddle of brains and blood. Down the stairs … stood two lower ranking SD men, apparently German.’

  The purpose of Stahlecker’s machinations soon became clear. The Germans imposed a ‘Land Self-Administration’ (Landselbstverwaltung) that, as its name implies, had no national status of any kind and ranked lower in the German pecking order even than the puppet governments of Slovakia and Croatia. To fill the top post, the Germans chose an opportunist Latvian general, Oskars Dankers, on the grounds that he was married to a German Balt and was on excellent terms with his German chauffeur. As for the other ‘directors general’ who would serve under Dankers, the Germans set some pretty basic criteria: candidates would need to be ‘popular with Latvians’, but ‘obedient and submissive’ to the German Reichskommissar. Notwithstanding its chronic impotence, the Latvian SA rapidly turned into a forum for frustrated squabbling. Stahlecker and his SD successors let the various factions slug it out. The conservative Ulmaniesi, who had served under President Ulmanis, went many rounds with a second faction, the anti-Semitic fascist Perkonkrustiesi. They competed in turn with the so-called Repatrianti who had been thoroughly ‘Nazified’ in Berlin and enjoyed even closer ties with the Germans – to say nothing of the Kalpakiesi, grizzled ‘War of Liberation’ veterans, and a host of nationalist intellectuals and fraternity old boys. For the Germans, the SA provided gladiatorial entertainment. The general directors wielded not a shred of power, and they all knew it. They were, one admitted, ‘seven bleached outpillars’.16 In 1943, the Latvian diplomat Alfreds Bīlmanis, who fled to the United States, provided the Americans with an excoriating analysis of the Latvian ‘self-administration’. Dankers’ principal task, Bīlmanis explained, was to ‘advertise for the Reich Labour Service’ and SS Schuma battalions. The general directors ‘are no ministers as in the cabinet of an independent state’, but ‘subjects’ of the German commissars. The SA General Directorate, in brief, was a ‘German Nazi stooge organisation to deceive the population’.17

  It is especially telling that Minister Rosenberg regarded Riga as a ‘German city’ and appointed his father-in-law, Hugo Wittrock, a Baltic German, to serve as its mayor.

  With the Baltic nations extinguished to most intents and purposes as sovereign nations, the way was clear for Stahlecker to begin recruiting native militias. The danger of inadvertently forming a national army was in theory neutralised. As partisans, Latvians or Lithuanians or Estonians fought for national liberation from the Soviet Union. But now that the Baltic nation states had been dissolved away in the acid bath of the Reich Commissariat Ostland, Himmler had carte blanche to recruit the ‘foreigners’ Hitler feared and who could no longer be distracted by nation-building. The SD led the way. From offices at Reimersa iela 1, which occupied an entire city block, Department IV of the ‘resident SD’ (to distinguish it from the mobile Special Task Forces) began to plot the destruction of Latvia’s Jews. Just hours after arriving in Riga, Stahlecker began recruiting native auxiliaries called, at this stage, Hilfspolizei. He informed Berlin:

  Lieutenant Colonel Voldemārs Veiss [a Latvian] has been made leader of the Hilfspolizei: care has been taken to ensure that these troops would not become a Latvian militia … two further independent units have been established for the purpose of carrying out pogroms. All synagogues have been destroyed; so far 400 Jews have been liquidated.18

  To lure Latvian young men to join SD auxiliary units, the Germans promoted a perverted brand of patriotism. German propaganda ceaselessly reminded Latvians that ‘Jewish NKVD’ men had organised the deportation of tens of thousands of Latvians – forgetting to mention that the Soviets had also arrested many thousands of Jews. As in Ukraine, Wehrmacht and SS units employed Jewish forced labourers to excavate the corpses of NKVD victims and then exhibit the battered and decaying corpses. This macabre theatre definitively attached blame for the Soviet liquidations to Jews who it was claimed had secret knowledge about where the bodies had been buried. German and Latvian propaganda made much of the fact that Semjon Sustin, a high-ranking NKVD officer posted to Latvia, was Jewish. Latvians who had returned from Nazi Germany with the Wehrmacht or the SD, as well as Baltic Germans who spoke Latvian, played a pernicious role convincing young, often unemployed Latvian youths that Latvian Jews had been responsible for the calamities of Soviet rule. As the German occupiers set about destroying the Latvian nation, they exploited frustrated patriotism of young Latvian men who hated the former president Ulmanis for refusing to fight the Soviets. Now they would willingly take up arms against Jews.

  Latvian newspapers played an especially corrosive part, reinforcing the power of the SD and spreading the lethal poison of blame. The fascist Perkonkrustiesi and the ‘Germanised’ Repatrianti, ‘savage Jew haters’, all poured forth a stream of stomach turning bile. Ma
rtinš Vagulans, a fêted journalist, a former agronomist and Pērkonkrusts die-hard, penned some of the nastiest diatribes directed at ‘Muscovite Kremlin degenerates and Jews’ and ‘ghastly Jewish and Bolshevik bondage’.19 Vagulans was very likely well known to the SD before 22 June 1941, for en route to Riga Stahlecker’s Special Task Force halted briefly in his home city of Jelgava. Stahlecker immediately sought out Vagulans, appointed him commander of an SD auxiliary commando and authorised him to begin publishing a newspaper which was to all intents and purposes an SD front. In the following months, Vagulans and his writers set new standards of vileness with a stream of Jew-baiting headlines and cartoons. As soon as Stahlecker moved on to Riga, Vagulans’ new militia the Nacionālā Zamgale signalled their intentions by setting fire to the main Jelgava synagogue. This was, of course, a warning of worse atrocities to come. The offices of Vagulans’ newspaper doubled as the Nacionālā Zamgale command centre. Stahlecker dispatched (unsigned) orders from Riga and Vagulans then issued orders and instructions to his men through his paper.

  Vagulans was plainly ambitious. He promoted himself from commander Latvian SD Jelgava to Latvian SD Jelgava district commander. He made deals with Aizsargi leaders (the old paramilitary civil defence forces), Latvian police and stray partisan units (who had fought the Russians). He organised teams of cyclists, who sped from one village to the next proclaiming the great victory of the Reich and denouncing Jews, ‘the cause of all pestilence and misfortune’. By the end of July, Vagulans lorded it over 300 auxiliaries, organised into guard units, criminal sections, a department in charge of sorting appropriated valuables and a second responsible for reallocating flats formerly occupied by Jewish families. Vagulans ordered building supervisors to register their tenants, and separate Jews and ethnic Latvians. He threw Jews out of local government jobs and banned them from using parks and cinemas. In the meantime, he stepped up the pressure through his newspaper: ‘No pity and no compromise must be shown. No Jewish tribe of adders must be allowed to rise again in the renewed Latvia.’20

  Vagulans’ trap soon snapped shut: by 18 July his goons had press-ganged large numbers of Jewish men into labour groups and separated them from their families. They evicted Jewish women and children, threw them into the street then force-marched them to a hastily improvised camp inside a derelict warehouse. Then on 1 August, Vagulans ordered that all Jews must leave Jelgava city and district ‘or be punished in accordance with the laws of war’. It was a sham. Vagulans’ ‘order’ was the signal to begin a final assault with the full backing of the German SD authorities in Riga. Three days after Vagulans issued his depuration order very few Jews remained alive in Jelgava. The evidence that would tell us in detail how events unfolded in Jelgava on 2–3 August 1941 is fragmentary. What information we do have comes from the post-war trial of Alfred Becu, an officer in Vagulans’ commando, that was held in Cologne in 1968; and from a pre-trial deposition made by an eyewitness Arturs Tobiass.21 Becu confessed that he had led a German SD unit to Jelgava; Tobiass, who lived close to the synagogue, observed the German SD men arrive in the city either in late July or at the beginning of August. Soon afterwards, he heard a loud explosion and ran into the street to see what was happening. He watched German soldiers pouring gasoline through the main door of the local synagogue and then throwing hand grenades through a side window. The rabbi refused to leave. As flames ripped through the synagogue, German soldiers drove a column of Jews along the street towards the fish market, where they were corralled by Vagulans’ men. Many Latvians, Tobiass claimed, commiserated with the Jews as they were driven past about the loss of their ‘church’.

  Sometime later, the SD men herded their captives from the market to a nearby firing range. According to another eyewitness, one Wilhelm Adelt, Latvian SD men with bolt-action rifles and white armbands then began shooting. Adelt testified: ‘Every day a new pit was dug … The offenders [sic] had to take off their over clothes. Becu [the officer in charge] said that the Jews were killed because they did not fit into the Nazi regime, and that Jews in general would be rooted out.’22

  On 15 August, Vagulans declared on the pages of his newspaper: ‘Jelgava is “free of Jews” … the shapers of the new life – German soldiers – displayed exemplary trust in supporting and assuring the success, ejecting that race of people who are creators of all the world’s misery.’23 This proved to be Vagulans’ undoing. Three days later, Stahlecker sacked him as Jelgava district police chief and editor. He had said too much. The fall of Martinš Vagulans spelt out a simple message: lackeys are dispensable. And when Stahlecker set up his temporary headquarters in Riga, he found there was no shortage of Latvian fanatics eager to do Germany’s bidding.

  In 1975, an elderly Latvian man who called himself ‘Viktors Zeibots’ stood before a German court in Hamburg accused of the vilest war crimes. The 78-year-old Herr Zeibots had been born in Latvia, but spoke fluent, barely accented German. He had greying blonde hair and striking pale blue eyes. Otherwise his appearance was unremarkable. As Herr Zeibots sat impassively in the dock, the court was shown a photograph taken in 1942 at the German SD school in Fürstenberg. It shows a posed group of officers. In the front row there is a young man sitting erect alongside two German officers, Dr Rudolf Lange and Arnold Kirste. A black SD cap throws a shadow over the upper half of his face, concealing his eyes; we can see that he is smiling. Three decades separate the SD officer in the picture from the accused sitting silently in the Hamburg dock. But the resemblance of the young man in the photograph to the elderly Viktors Zeibots is striking. For the man who called himself Viktors Zeibots had once been SD recruit Viktors Arājs: one of Hitler’s most infamous foreign executioners.

  A young Jewish mechanic who had once worked for Arājs recalled that he had a ‘sympathetic face’. ‘He had no particular characteristic that stayed in one’s mind,’ recalled another Latvian recruit. ‘To describe his facial features is difficult,’ admitted another. But others could recall meeting Viktors Arājs with terrible clarity. A guest at a dinner party in Riga heard this young man with a ‘sympathetic face’ boasting how he had murdered Jewish infants by hurling them in the air then shooting them as they fell. Had he executed them on the ground, he explained casually, bullets ricocheting from the concrete floor might have injured his men. It was said that Viktors Arājs once presented the German SD commander Rudolf Lange with a Christmas tree festooned with rings and diamonds pilfered from Jewish homes he had plundered. Frida Michelson, a survivor of the Rumbula massacre, remembered seeing ‘Arājs, heavily drunk … working close to the execution pits’. A young woman walking along a bombed out Berlin street in 1945 remembered an encounter with a young Latvian man who introduced himself as ‘Arājs, the Latvian Jew-killer’.

  The Hamburg court sentenced Arājs to life imprisonment. He died in a German prison cell thirteen years later in 1988. He must have appreciated the irony of this because the German judge Dr Wagner acknowledged that Arājs ‘acted on orders of Dr. Lange’. It is estimated that the ‘Arājs Commando’ murdered at least 26,000 Latvian Jews between July 1941 and the summer of 1942. When Arājs ‘ran out of work’, the Germans assigned his commando men to the Minsk region in Belorussia where they applied their unrivalled experience as mass murderers in other large-scale actions. After 1943, Arājs and many of his commandos served in the SS ‘Latvian Legion’.

  Vicktors Bernhards Arājs provided at least three very different biographical sketches. We know that he was born in January 1910, in a small town near Riga. According to Ezergailis’ account, his mother Berta Anna Burkevics descended from wealthy German-Latvian farming stock – but like many Latvians, Teodors (his father) had ambivalent feelings about German Balts and refused to let his children speak German at home. Viktors himself insisted that he had been ‘raised as a Latvian’ and when he met Stahlecker in 1941 spoke very poor German. At the beginning of the First World War, Teodors enlisted in the Imperial Army of the Tsar – and vanished. His son was four. When Russian soldiers destroyed the Ar�
�js’ family home, Anna fled to Riga and found work in a factory. As the family sank into poverty, Viktors ran amok and his mother sent him to work on her parents’ farm. He recalled sleeping in a stable and ‘making his own toys’. After the Latvian War of Liberation, Teodors reappeared in Latvia sporting a Chinese wife. By then, Anna had moved to Jelgava and life was looking up. She had inherited money and bought a rooming house. When he turned 16, Victors left home to become a farmhand. He recalled that one day, his father unexpectedly approached him as he worked in a field and they had a brief conversation.

  Viktors would never see Teodors again and grew up without a father. He went to school only in the winters. He joined a wandering band of carpenters, building houses, farms and saunas. Viktors was a diligent worker, and after he lost his job as a carpenter, won a place at the Jelgava Gymnasium. Here he excelled, despite taking on a number of manual jobs to make ends meet while he was studying. After graduating, he joined the Vidzemē artillery regiment and in 1932, still serving as a corporal, enrolled at Riga University to study law. It would take him eight years, plagued by interruptions, to complete his legal studies and graduate. He was plainly both intelligent and driven. He was shrewd enough to join the prestigious Lettonia fraternity – no mean feat for this former farm boy. The Latvian fraternities, as mentioned before, bred generations of Latvian chauvinists. When Arājs began recruiting for the German SD in 1941, he would turn to former ‘Lettonians’ to fill the officer ranks in the Arājs Commando.