In 1937, Arājs married Zelma Zeibots and was forced to drop his university studies once again to make ends meet. For the second time, he joined the police. In 1939, he returned to university, dropped out again – then, as the Soviet occupation began, made one last sortie. He took an obligatory course in Marxism and finally graduated as a Soviet Jurist in March 1941. At his trial, many decades later, Arājs claimed that he had in good faith come to believe that ‘Bolshevism was the best of systems’. Historian Andrew Ezergailis offers an intriguing suggestion to explain this anomaly. Although Arājs had inveigled his way into the Lettonia, his exposure to more privileged lives and presumably elitist attitudes of brother students may well have led him to welcome the Soviet occupation and a promise of greater social equality. ‘Indubitably, I was then a communist,’ he claimed after the war. After the occupation began, Arājs found work with a Latvian lawyer, but, not long afterwards he was arrested and deported by the NKVD. Arājs escaped and fled to the countryside. ‘My communism vanished.’ At this point his account becomes remarkably confusing. By the time the main Soviet deportations began, Arājs may have joined a Latvian army brigade attached to the Red Army.
As the German juggernaut rolled on north through the Baltic, the Russians began withdrawing their Latvian divisions to the east. The retreat degenerated into panicked flight. Chaos and mayhem overwhelmed the retreating Soviet divisions. Many Latvian soldiers deserted, often throwing themselves from the transport trains and, if they survived, joining partisan units. In his final plea to the Hamburg court Arājs said, ‘I too was in one of the [partisan] units.’ On 1 July, Arājs returned to Riga ‘with my partisans’ and made for the police prefecture. On the same day, Stahlecker led his Special Task Force across the Daugava River. At 1 p.m., the Germans too arrived at the police prefecture. A Baltic German officer called Hans Dressler who served with Stahlecker had known Arājs at his gymnasium and then served under him in the Latvian army. He introduced Arājs to Stahlecker because ‘he had a favourable memory of Arājs from the days of his military service’. That afternoon, Stahlecker met a number of other Latvian police commanders who were eager to join up. Lt Col Voldemārs Veiss, an army veteran, had already recruited a 400-strong Latvian ‘self-defence’ unit that had on its own initiative begun to round up Latvian Jews and communists. Veiss was eventually appointed Chief of Auxiliary Police – and in 1944 died serving with the ‘Latvian Legion’. He remains a national hero in Latvia. The following day, Stahlecker appointed Arājs as a ‘Sonderkommando leader’ and, he later told the court in Hamburg, ‘My assignments began on July 3 or 4’.
As a newly appointed commando leader, Arājs had one tremendous advantage: he was a former Lettonia fraternity ‘brother’. As he raced to organise his ‘Special Commando’ and impress Stahlecker, Arājs cleverly called on his old university comrades and transferred his activities to the Lettonia fraternity house, where he set up tables in the street outside to attract recruits. The brothers flocked to join – in such large numbers that Latvian Jews referred to the commando as ‘Arājsen Burschen’, from the German word for fraternity, Burschenschaft. As the Arājs Commando expanded, leadership positions went to Lettonia old boys like Feliks Dibietis, Arājs’ second-in-command who later committed suicide in Minsk. This was a battalion of murderous frat boys.
To proclaim the elite status of his unit, Arājs soon moved his operational base to a splendid town house at 19 Krišjāņa Valdemāra iela, close to the Latvia National Art Museum. No 19 was one of the best addresses in town; it had previously been occupied by A. Schmuljanš, a Jewish banker who had been deported by the Russians. Arājs shared No 19 with the Pērkonkrusts, who used the basement to ‘question’ Jews in improvised cells – many were tortured or murdered. In a grand room on the first floor, Arājs arranged German lessons for his recruits, though he himself would continue to need a translator for some time to come. In the leafy Esplanade Park just across the street, Arājs organised rifle drill.
Arājs seemed to have fallen on his feet. But though he was ambitious, to begin with Stahlecker and the SD commanders who took his place remained wary. An Einsatzgruppe report sent to Berlin on 20 July even refers to the imminent ‘dissolution of the Security [i.e. Arājs] commando’.24 And yet the Arājs Commando would prove to be the most resilient of all the auxiliary units formed by German occupiers in the east. It survived in different forms and under a variety of names until 1944, when it was absorbed by the Latvian SS divisions. It will be recalled that following Heydrich’s instructions, Stahlecker warned that any auxiliary units must not be allowed to become ‘a Latvian militia’. Now Arājs had only the most tenuous connections to Latvian nationalist circles. As a student, he flirted, to be sure, with a fringe fascist faction but had never joined the Pērkonkrusts. To finally complete his legal studies, he had joined the Soviet legal apparatus and then taken up arms to fight the retreating Russians at the last possible moment. In short, Arājs made no bones about seizing the main chance. Stahlecker and the SD powerbrokers welcomed such energetic ‘hard men’ who made it clear that they believed that heartfelt patriotism was for suckers. Arājs swiftly proved himself dedicated and proficient génocidaire. And loyalty, obedience and devoted service brought, as Himmler promised it would, rewards.
On 2 July, Stahlecker ordered the Latvian police auxiliaries to begin rounding up Jews in Riga and then bring them to square in front of the police prefecture. Stahlecker assumed that ethnic Latvians, attracted by the hubbub, would spontaneously turn on the Jews. But this did not happen – and both Stahlecker’s consolidated report and the Einsatzgruppe morning reports sent from Riga described the Latvians as ‘absolutely passive in their anti-Semitic attitudes’.25 Stahlecker turned for help to Arājs who took immediate action. He published an appeal in a semi-official newspaper Tevija for ‘all nationally conscious Latvians – Pērkonkrusts members, students, veterans and others to participate in the cleansing of our country of destructive elements’.26 Stahlecker had supplied the words. The response was ‘overwhelming’; thousands of young Latvians volunteered. Many were no doubt lured by the thought of plunder. German propaganda that associated the Soviet terror with ‘the Jews’ had also done its insidious job. Many Latvians, like the death dealer of Kaunas in Lithuania, now sought revenge. A former policeman, whose family had been arrested by the NKVD, promised ‘I will kill every Jew in sight’.
On a warm evening at the beginning of July, Arājs unleashed his pent-up paramilitaries. Armed bands rampaged along streets with known Jewish residents. Like the Lithuanian snatcher squads, they kidnapped anyone they believed was a Jew. Arājs and his men dragged their captives, both men and women, back to their headquarters, where they were beaten in basement rooms and left to die. They raped and tortured Jewish women. Arājs’ headquarters soon acquired a terrible notoriety. No 19 had become a house of horrors.
This first action was much too tentative for Stahlecker. A week later, he ordered Arājs to begin attacking Riga’s synagogues; this new campaign would be murder by arson. All over the east, images of burning synagogues would provide potent emblems of German power over life and death – a signal that Jews had forfeited any protection from the law and their fellow Latvian citizens. Arājs commenced operations with the Gogolu iela Synagogue (the Gogol Street Choral Synagogue). He sent Jewish prisoners into the building to remove valuable Torah scrolls and candelabras. Then the Arājs men herded hundreds of men, women and children inside the synagogue, emptied cans of gasoline around the high alter and made their getaway. Arājs himself gleefully fired the shots that ignited the fuel and rapidly set the entire building on fire. His men then formed lines to prevent any firefighters from trying to damp down the inferno. The Arājs men incinerated other synagogues that same evening – as well as the prayer house in the Smerli cemetery. As the synagogues burnt, the killing escalated. By the end of the second week of the occupation, 8,000 Jews had been murdered in central Riga.27 Arājs and his Pērkonkrusts friends began hoarding looted treasures at No 19, e
ventually acquiring enough artefacts to set up an ‘Anti-Semitic Institute’ modelled on the German museums that displayed Jewish books and artefacts as evidence of their eternal perfidy.
Stahlecker was under pressure to report the most impressive figures to SD headquarters in Berlin. This meant that large-scale ‘special actions’ needed to be moved outside the centre of Riga so that victims could be easily disposed of in the soft Baltic sands. In the centre of Riga there was no single ‘Jewish Quarter’ and before the establishment of the ghetto in October, attacks on Jews had necessarily been patchy. Arājs or one of his Latvian officers suggested transferring operations to the Bikernieki Forest, a thickly wooded area 5 miles to the north of Riga. The forest encircled a garden city called the Mežaparks, which German residents called the Kaiserwald. Affluent Latvians had built scores of luxury villas dotted about in bucolic forest glades, but Arājs tracked down a secluded spot close to the Riga road. Here he would carry out Stahlecker’s instructions. Over a period of several weeks, the Arājs men arrested Jewish men and alleged communists and held them ‘for questioning’ at their headquarters. They then drove them in batches (usually about seventy individuals) to the execution site. During the first phase of operations, between 6 and 7 July, the Arājs men murdered at least 2,000 Jewish Latvian men in Bikernieki Forest. As they refined the operation, the numbers rose steadily through July, August and September.
By mid-July, Stahlecker had moved on (he stayed in Riga just two weeks) and the commander of Einsatzkommando 2, Dr Rudolf Lange and his assistant Arnold Kirste, assumed overall command of the Latvian auxiliaries. Under Lange, the SD became the dominant occupation agency in Latvia. The ‘intense and dedicated’ Lange hated Jews so much that, according to Joseph Berman, a Holocaust survivor, ‘he could not look at them’. A favourite of Heydrich’s, Lange was a fervent ideological anti-Semite. In January 1942, Heydrich invited him to attend the Wannsee Conference – called to plan the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ – and he was congratulated on his ‘success’ in Latvia. Short and dark complexioned, Lange was a vain man who toured his fiefdom decked out in capacious military greatcoats with fur-lined collars. He rejoiced in his demonic legend as the ‘Bloodhound of Latvia’.28 Lange was a German ‘officer and a gentleman’ – and a killer. Under Lange’s management, the SD reached into every nook and cranny of Latvian society. His SD men, with their field grey uniforms, black ties, yellow shirts and peaked caps bearing the death’s head motif, became all too ubiquitous.
At the end of July, Himmler returned to Riga. He must have been impressed by the activities of the Latvian auxiliaries; as we have seen, just a few weeks before Himmler had authorised the formation of Schuma battalions in the east, disregarding Hitler’s insistence that ‘it must never be tolerated that a person who is not a German carries weapons’. Now he was beginning to mull over deploying the Schuma outside their national territories as bandit hunters.29 In Riga, Lange’s SD recruited scores of different auxiliary Latvian police brigades. The most feared were the ‘Schutzmannschaft in geschlossenen Einheiten’ (the closed brigades).30 Lange usually referred to his Latvian murder squads as the ‘Arājs people’. The Arājs Commando (now officially the ‘Latvian Security Police and SD Security Force’) had proved its worth to the SD and Lange soon reduced the numbers of German SD officers responsible for supervising operations, though he personally liked to attend large-scale executions. One of the commando recruits, Genadijs Mūrnieks, described a typical Judenaktion: ‘the actions began at 2 or 3 am … From the place where the victims were let off [the truck], they were driven through a ‘corridor’ that consisted of Arājs commando policemen, and they were shot by the pit.’ The Germans always provided generous quantities of alcohol, usually schnapps or vodka to inspire their executioners. Most such operations were completed in time for a hearty breakfast.31
The SD squads faced formidable logistical problems. Outside Riga, many Latvian Jews lived scattered in small market towns, often situated at crossroads. In bigger towns, the SD could make use of local Latvian police – but Lange needed some means of throwing his net deeper into the countryside. For the people of Riga, a fleet of sturdy, cheerful-looking blue buses imported from Sweden had become a part of everyday life. Arājs had commandeered a few of the familiar blue buses to transport prisoners to the Bikernieki Forest. Now at the end of July 1941, he commandeered an entire fleet of the blue buses to convey the ‘Arājs boys’ to every corner of Latvia in style and comfort. Each bus could carry about forty commandos, equipped with rifles and shovels – as well as supplies of vodka, cigarettes and sausages. When the buses rumbled into some remote Latvian hamlet, local police officers had often already rounded up Jewish men from nearby villages. Arājs himself always arrived in a chauffeur-driven car. He was frequently inebriated after the long, vodka-refreshed drive. The job swiftly became routine. The Latvians disembarked from the bus and began excavating a shallow pit. The local police pushed their captives to the edge and the Arājs men began firing. As the pit was covered, the shooters leant casually against the sides of their blue buses, slurped vodka and wolfed down steaming hot sausages. For Arājs’ SD bosses, these blue bus actions proved most satisfactory: the Latvian auxiliaries, fuelled by nicotine, sausage and vodka, efficiently carried out mass executions and burnt synagogues in every corner of Latvia.
Post-war Soviet investigations and German legal proceedings have provided a great deal of information about the men who served with Arājs. His deputy commander Herberts Cukurs was a celebrated long-distance pilot, sometimes called the ‘Latvian Lindbergh’. After 1941, the ‘Eagle of the Baltic’ acquired a second reputation as the ‘Hangman of Riga’. After the war, Cukurs fled to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived openly under his own name. The Brazilian government turned down a succession of requests by the Soviets to extradite Cukurs for war crimes. On 23 February 1965, Mossad agents, posing as agents of an aviation business, lured Cukurs to Uruguay. In a beach house called the Casa Cubertini in Montevideo he was tortured and then killed. His decomposed body was found, weeks later, locked in a trunk. It is regrettable that Herberts Cukurs was never brought before a court.32 When Latvia became independent, the Cukurs family and supporters launched a campaign to restore his name. In 2005, an exhibition opened in his home town of Liepaja proclaiming ‘Herberts Cukurs – Presumed Innocent’. Even Latvian historian Andrew Ezergailis has made statements backing the rehabilitation of Cukurs. Ezergailis is alleged to have said that ‘MOSAAD killed an innocent man’.33 But Ephraim Zuroff, Director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, has discovered eyewitness accounts in the archives of Yad Vashem that prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Herberts Cukurs was an ardent anti-Semite and killer. This ‘Latvian Lindbergh’ burned to death the family of a Riga synagogue sexton. According to one eyewitness, Cukurs molested and tortured a young Jewish girl; another observed Cukurs shooting and torturing numerous Jews at Arājs commando headquarters and asserts that he tried to force an elderly Jewish man to rape a 20-year-old Jewess. At the end of November, Arājs and Cukurs took a leading part in the Rumbula massacre – as we shall see shortly.34
The trial records also tell us a great deal about the commando rank and file – who did the digging and shooting while Arājs and Cukurs sipped vodka. Most recruits were aged between 16 and 21 and the majority had completed secondary level education; 21 per cent had gone on to university. Latvian historians describe the educational practice of the Ulmanis period as ‘conformist’. These were bright, relatively ambitious young men, used to following orders – and awash with testosterone. At their post-war trials, some of these young men tried to explain their motivation for joining Arājs: one ‘did not wish to do manual work, was eager to advance in life’; a second ‘was hostile towards Jews because they had arrested many Latvians [sic]’; another ‘wished to enter the University of Latvia, for which he needed a background of 1 year of service in police, German army or RAD’; many ‘yielded to the influence of German propagan
da’. Other recruits had more mundane reasons: one had ‘lost his warm clothes in a card game’. These statements make it quite clear that anti-Semitic propaganda, spewed from SD backed newspapers, had a significant impact on Latvian ears and minds. Many of the volunteers parrot German-inspired mythology that linked the hated Soviets with all Jews – and a few refer to Jews as ‘parasites that must be eliminated’. When Arājs led the attack on the Gogol Street synagogue, he is reported to have bellowed: ‘Since the people of Riga hate Jews, we must demonstrate our position by setting fire to the synagogue so that nothing of Jewish culture remains.’ Anti-Jewish rhetoric rather than opportunism inspired many of the young men who joined the Arājs Commando; these men were not just thrill-seeking hooligans.35
In September 1941 Himmler made another visit to Latvia and this time toured the port city of Liepāja (Libau) in the Kurzeme, which had been turned into a German naval base. Since early July, as elsewhere in Latvia, SD and Latvian Schuma brigades had been carrying out executions of Jews, gypsies and suspected Soviet agents, most notably in the Rainis Park shootings. In Liepāja, these actions usually took place in open public places rather than nearby forests. At the end of the month, the Arājs Commando had arrived in Liepāja and carried out a number of much bigger-scale mass executions. But in September, Himmler was appalled to discover that many thousands of Jews remained alive in Liepāja – many of them in the Liepāja ghetto, where they worked as forced labourers for German companies. Himmler vented his spleen on the HSSPF Prützmann, who had plainly not shown quite the same zeal as Stahlecker and Lange. But the bigger stumbling block was the Commissar ‘Herzog’ Lohse and his boss, the despised Alfred Rosenberg. Their plan for the east depended on extracting maximum profit from Jews incarcerated in ghettoes. So far Lohse had resisted Himmler’s importunate demands that every Jew must be liquidated; when profits could be made, murder was simply wasteful. At the end of October, Himmler’s patience ran out. He replaced the allegedly ‘soft’ HSSPF Prützmann with a dedicated and efficient SS killer who could be relied on to ignore any bleating protests from Hinrich Lohse.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 26