Prosecutors Deny Eyewitness Testimony
An insidious form of Holocaust denial is flourishing in Latvia, 83 years after Nazi Einsatzgruppen aided by Latvian auxiliary forces wiped out 90 per cent of the Jewish community, a population of 94,000.
The Latvian government’s recent decision to shut down the criminal investigation into Herberts Cukurs, a depraved killer known as the Butcher of Riga, exposes this country’s willful denial of historical truth, drawing outrage from Jewish groups and historians.
It is the third time prosecutors in this country have closed a criminal probe into Cukurs, determined to whitewash the actions of a man whom survivors remember as a wild beast in human form.
Claiming it has found “no evidence” to categorize Cukurs as a Nazi criminal, prosecutors dismissed mounds of survivor testimony and documentation that Cukurs served as the deputy commander of the notorious Arajs Kommando, the paramilitary unit responsible for some of the most brutal atrocities in Latvia.
Officials even ignored evidence presented at post-war crimes trials that supported the charge that up to 1500 Latvian gunmen, operating in Cukurs’ death squad, aided Nazi Einsatzgruppen in the mass murders of Latvian Jews. [See Sidebar]
Multiple eyewitnesses have testified that the Arajs Kommandos played a central role in the execution of Jews from the Riga Ghetto on November 30 and December 8, 1941. These barbarians herded more than 25,000 men, women and children on a 6-mile death march to the edge of giant pre-excavated pits in the Rumbula Forest.
There the surviving victims were forced, with methodical brutality, to lie face down in the pits where they were shot to death by German marksmen.
Survivors recount how Cukurs behaved like a bloodthirsty fiend in the days leading up to the massacre, personally murdering Jewish children and babies, burning Jews alive and assaulting Jewish women.
He even admitted to having “killed several Jews,” according to a 1960 JTA article, quoting from an influential Brazilian newspaper, O Jornal, that conducted an interview with him. Asked about the war crimes charges, Cukurs allowed pride to overcome discretion, telling Eduador Ramalho, the paper’s correspondent, “I cannot deny that I killed several Jews.”
But solid evidence apparently carries no weight with a government determined to move Cukurs’ remains from South America—where he escaped after the war—to Latvia, in order to give him an honorable funeral. The plan is to proclaim him a national hero, citing his aviation achievements before World War II.
This nationalist agenda mirrors that of many post-Soviet countries, including Lithuania and Ukraine, “where Nazi collaborators are being celebrated as patriotic heroes because they fought the Soviet Russia’s domination alongside the Germans in World War II,” notes JNS.
Yad Vashem: ‘Horrific War Crimes’
“Cukurs’s horrific war crimes are indisputable,” Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust Museum, wrote in a statement. The museum offered to provide the Latvian prosecutors with well-documented evidence of these crimes, saying the museum “denounces the repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’s image in Latvia by those distorting and ignoring historical truth.”
The offer was ignored.
Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, formerly head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office and an expert on Holocaust history in the Baltic states, called the move to whitewash the Butcher of Riga “morally outrageous.”
Unlike many other collaborators, Cukurs, a celebrity aviator sporting a large physique, was instantly recognizable, Zuroff said, with several survivors placing him at the scene of the deportations and murders in their testimonies given shortly after the war.
“The testimony in Israeli archives regarding Cukurs’ personal participation in the murder of Jews “is extensive, detailed, and unequivocally damning,” Zuroff wrote in 2005, citing several testimonies from survivors, including individuals who had testified under oath before post-war tribunals.
He noted the damning evidence of survivor Max Tukacier, who testified on September 23, 1948 in Munich before the Central Committee for Liberated Jews in Germany. Tukacier stated that he was arrested with other Jews by “Cukurs’ men” (Arajs Kommando) and taken to their headquarters at Valdamaras St. 19, where he witnessed numerous Jews being tortured and subsequently shot on orders from Cukurs.
He himself was beaten by Cukurs who broke nearly all his front teeth but left him alive, Tukacier said.
He testified to Cukurs’ active role in the large-scale actions of November 30 and December 8, noting that he beat and shot men, women, and children who could not keep pace on the march to Rumbula Forest.
Rafael Shub, a survivor from Riga, testified in 1949 that on July 2, 1941 Cukurs burned to death eight Jews in the new Jewish cemetery. Shub even identified some of the victims, whom he knew; “the shul shamosh Feldheim, his wife and four children.” His testimony has been archived at the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Another survivor, Avraham Shapiro, recalled having been incarcerated at Arajs Kommando headquarters at 19 Valdamaras St., after Cukurs had expropriated his family’s apartment. He related having witnessed Cukurs personally murder two Jews, one of whom was named Leitmann, who failed to appear at a line-up as ordered.
Survivor Ella Gutman Medalye, in her testimony to a Holocaust museum in Riga, recalled: “I once saw from the window Cukurs arriving by car in the ghetto. He was drunk and could barely stand up. He snatched his gun, started sprinting up the streets of the ghetto, bursting into laughter and drunkenly shooting at the terrified people as if he was hunting wild animals. ”
From the testimony of survivor Mendel Vulfovich, cited by Defending History: “Herberts Cukurs was one of the main leaders who drove the Jews out of the ghetto to Rumbula, where they were all shot. Herberts Cukurs went about with his revolver and shot all of the laggards in the column — the old and the sick — on the spot.
Isaac Kram, whose harrowing Holocaust memoir was published by his son, Dr. Michael Kram, recounted his personal experiences during the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. He testified that he saw Cukurs shoot an elderly Jewish woman trying to protect her daughter, as well as a young child who cried because he couldn’t find his mother.
The abundant eyewitness evidence leaves no doubt that Herberts Cukurs was a leading participant in the mass annihilation of the Jews of Riga who brutally murdered men, women and children.
That Latvian officials are nevertheless pressing forward with their agenda to lionize him as a national hero reveals an insidious form of Holocaust denial that lays bare their own moral bankruptcy.
Echoes From the Inferno
The government’s defense of Cukurs cannot help but evoke the bitter and tragic history of Latvia’s Jewish community during the Holocaust.
Shortly after German troops entered Riga on July 1, 1941, the Nazi occupation authorities incited Latvian nationalists to commit deadly pogroms, testified survivor Max Kaufmann in The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia.
On July 2, at the instigation of the Germans, Latvian armed youths wearing red and white armbands went about the city dragging Jews out of their homes, arresting and assaulting them.
Many were later taken out of the Central Prison and driven in trucks to Bikernieki Forest where they were shot. Within three months, more than 6,000 people were killed in Riga and the vicinity by local thugs, Kaufmann wrote.
That same week, the Great Choir Shul on Gogol Street, was burned to the ground with twenty Jews locked inside as the building was set ablaze. Historian Gertrude Schneider in Journey Into Terror identifies the victims as mostly women and children.
The burning of the shul was filmed by the Germans and later became part of a Wehrmacht newsreel.
In The Murder of the Jews in Latvia, survivor Bernard Press recounts a searing firsthand account of life and death during the Nazi reign of terror. He writes that “Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian air force officer, and his gang of thugs, burned another shul on Stabu Street in Riga, first dragging Jews out of the neighboring houses and locking them inside the shul.”
Eyewitnesses heard the victims screaming for help and saw them breaking the synagogues windows from inside and trying to escape. Cukurs shot them with his revolver, Press writes.
According to historian Alexander Feigmanis in Latvian Jewish Intelligentsia – Victims of the Holocaust, among the Jews killed in the shul massacres were the renowned Chazzan Mintz and his whole family, and Rav Yisroel Moshe Kilov, son-in-law of Rav Menachem Mendel Zak, the Chief Rabbi of Latvia.
The sifrei Torah were dragged out of the shuls and burned before the buildings were torched. According to Press, Jews fought their way through the flames to save the scrolls but were all killed.
The first mass murders of Latvian Jews started in July 1941and continued sporadically through the summer and fall. In the days leading up to the massacres, the local Jews had been separated according to age and gender, with able-bodied men screened out and ordered to pack their belongings, each entitled to 20 kilograms. The carrying of luggage was part of the sham to create the impression among the victims that they were being resettled
Before dawn on November 30, the real terror began.
Scenes From the Abyss
Survivors recall drunk German and Latvian thugs bursting through their doors in the wee hours of the morning with wild shouts, shoving residents outside, hurling children out of windows, driving columns of people through holes cut in fences. They herded their victims on foot through frigid temperatures to the forest site, shooting those who stumbled and fell.
In her memoir “I survived Rumbula,” Frieda Michelson describes horrific scenes: “Corpses were scattered all over, rivulets of blood still oozing from the lifeless bodies. They were mostly elderly people, pregnant women, children, handicapped – all those who could not keep up with the inhuman tempo of the march.”
12,000 people–one thousand to a column—were marched from the ghetto to the Rumbula forest, forced into three giant pits and gunned down with rifles and submachine guns. A week later, the remaining 11,000 inhabitants suffered the same fate at Rumbula.
“The first column was led by the lawyer, Dr. Elyachov,” recalls survivor Max Kaufmann. “The expression on his face showed no disquiet whatsoever; on the contrary, because everyone was looking at him, he made an effort to wear an encouraging smile.”
Next to Dr. Elyachow was the distinguished Rav Menachem Mendel Zak. Other well-known citizens of Riga lined up behind them.
The Kaufmann memoir continues, naming the Latvian guards herding the Jews along. “Among them were Altmeyer, Jager, and Herberts Cukurs, a world-famous aviation expert who had joined the Latvian SD. This murderer got out of a car wearing a leather pistol at his side,” Kaufmann relates. “He approached the Latvian guards to give them various instructions. He had obviously been informed in detail about the atrocity that awaited us.”
Ghosts of Rumbula Awaken
The massacre was carried out under the direct supervision of Higher SS and Police Chief Friedrich Jeckeln, who had previously organized mass murders of Jews in the Ukraine, including Babi Yar and the Kamienets-Podolsky massacres.
Under Jeckeln’s orders, more than 25,000 Jews had been herded on foot about six miles to Rumbula Forest, on the outskirts of Riga, and murdered there in two operations— on November 30 and December 8, 1941.
Each person was shot once in the back of the head, and often, as the day wore on and the light grew worse, the executioner would miss, meaning that victims sometimes survived. The perpetrators of this atrocity simply buried them alive, and many people died due to being crushed by the sheer weight of soil and corpses above them.
Once this was done, the Germans stationed Latvian guards around the area, to gun down anyone who managed to dig their way out of the pit.
Among the victims of the massacres was the beloved rov, Rav Menachem Mendel Zak, Chief Rabbi of Riga and head of the Riga Yeshiva. The esteemed Rav Dovid Budnik, founder of a network of Novaradok yeshivos in Dvinsk and nearby Latvian cities, was also cruelly cut down. With them were their wives, children and grandchildren as well as scores of students and followers. All of these kedoshim met their bitter deaths in the forests of Rumbula.
Frieda Michelson, who was driven along with the crowds of terrified Jews on Nov. 30, detailed the harrowing scenes in her post-war memoir:
“As we came near the forest, we heard shooting again. This was the horrible portent of our future… Nobody had a doubt as to what awaited us. We were all numb with terror and followed orders mechanically.
“Surrounded by armed murderers, we were incapable of thinking clearly… Some people wept, others prayed and recited Shema. Handicapped and elderly people were helped into the pit by other sturdier victims.”
Obeying a sudden impulse, Frieda threw herself face down in the pit, feigning death. Of the 12,000 people driven to the Rumbula execution site that day, only she and two others survived.
Another Aktion the next morning added 500 more victims to the mass graves. Close to thousand people who either resisted, walked too slow or made too much noise weeping or shouting, were shot down during the roundups.
Just one week later, on December 8, 1941, a third Aktion began, and this time, the terrified Riga ghetto occupants knew the terrible fate awaiting them.
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Butchers of Riga Executed
The Rumbula killings, together with other mass murders, formed the basis of the post-World War II Einsatzgruppen trial, where a number of Nazi Einsatzgruppen commanders were found guilty of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death or life imprisonment.
The aforementioned Nazi commandant Friedrich Jeckeln who organized and oversaw the massacres of Jews in the Baltic states, described the killing process at Rumbula at his trial before a Soviet war crimes tribunal in early 1946.
Prosecutor: Who did the shooting?
Jeckeln: Ten or twelve German SD soldiers.
Prosecutor: What was the procedure?
Jeckeln: All of the Jews went by foot from the ghetto in Riga to the liquidation site. Near the pits, they had to deposit their clothes, which were washed, sorted, and shipped back to Germany. Jews – men, women, and children – passed through police cordons on their way to the pits, where they were shot by German soldiers.
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Jeckeln was publicly hanged in Riga on February 3, 1946 for crimes against humanity.
Thousands of Latvian collaborators fled east after Germany surrendered, including Victors Arajs, chief of the Latvian killer commandos and Herberts Cukurs. Arajs evaded capture for a long time in West Germany, but was finally caught, brought to trial and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979.
Herberts Cukurs escaped to Brazil through the infamous “ratlines,” where he married, started a piloting business and unlike other war criminals who hid behind fake identities, lived openly under his own name for twenty years. In 1965, agents of the Israeli Mossad managed to lure him to Uruguay in an elaborate sham business deal that played on Cukurs’ hunger for wealth and fame.
His decomposing body was later found in a bloody suitcase in an abandoned villa, with a note listing the heinous crimes he had perpetrated. It was signed, “Those Who Will Never Forget.”
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‘Justice,’ Latvia-style
In 2022, after years of prodding from World Jewish Congress and pressure from the United States, the Latvian parliament passed a Holocaust restitution bill that provided for 40 million euros (about $46 million) over 10 years. Its purpose, officials said, was to remedy “historical unjust consequences” of the Holocaust.
But the new legislation fell far short of that goal. It stated that the Latvian state is not responsible for actions taken when it was occupied by Nazi forces, a declaration that contradicts the historical record, even according to Latvian officials themselves.
For example, the country’s first post-Soviet president, Guntis Ulmanis, “spoke at a reception at the home of Israeli President Ezer Weisman in Israel in Feb 1998, apologizing for Latvian participation in the Holocaust,” reported JTA at the time. Ulmanis addressed similar remarks to the ADL during a trip to the United States to attend a U.S-Baltic summit in Washington, the article noted.
Despite the 2020 restitution bill’s false assertions of Latvian “innocence” during the Holocaust, and the fact that the bill failed to provide restitution for massive amounts of stolen Jewish property, it was hailed by Arkady Sukharenko, then chairman of the Latvian Council of Jewish Communities.
“Finalizing this process demonstrates that even 77 years after the end of the Holocaust, it is never too late for justice,” he said, as if the bill could be deemed a moral achievement when Latvian war criminals continued to reside comfortably in Latvia since the end of the war. Not one was ever convicted.
When Lativa regained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, property was denationalized and Latvians rushed to reclaim it, including all of the public and private property that had been confiscated from the Jews during World War II.
Government officials appropriated the majority of Jewish homes, slaughterhouses, orphanages and shuls. There was no acknowledgement of the rights of the surviving Jewish community and the heirs of the murdered Jews.
For many, it remains questionable whether restitution advocates were right to set aside the issue of culpability. Doing so has arguably cleared the way for today’s Latvian government to exonerate one of history’s worst mass murderers.
