Andrew Ezergailis

The Holocaust in Latvia

Introduction

The psychological concomitants of the present war— above all the incredible brutalization of public opinion, themutual slandering, the unprecedented fury of destruction, the monstrous flood of lies, and man's incapacity to call ahalt to the bloody demon.... This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian, and has at thesame time shown what an iron scourge lies in store for him if ever again he should be tempted to make his neighborresponsible for his own evil qualities.

C. G. Jung, 1916

This event [the Holocaust] had been written down in its own code which had to be broken first to makeunderstanding possible.

Zygmunt Bauman

The Holocaust lends itself more to description than analysis. And to the degree that historywriting is analysis, abstracting, and universalization of knowledge, to that degree historicalinquiry is at odds with the Holocaust. The Holocaust does not want to open itself up for analysis.Assigning a cause means explaining, and explaining means mollifying, if not forgiving. AHolocaust historian does not want to forgive. The Holocaust is the perfect subject for literatureand poetic description—these deal with the whole, the concrete, the specific, and immediate. Butparadoxically, there is less good literature written about the Holocaust than there is history. Theenormity of the Holocaust is too immense for any one explanation. No sooner is an explanationadvanced than it is rebuffed, and new and deeper explanations are demanded. The Westernhistorians of the Holocaust have latched onto the chronological dimension to explain the killingof the Jews. To them anti-Semitism appears to be a major key, and no stone is left unturned inpursuit of Europe's anti-Semitic past. In texts of the Holocaust historians, citations from MartinLuther and the Church fathers can appear as readily as those from Gobineau, Chamberlain,Wagner, or Hitler himself. The iconography of Rome and the facades of gothic churches areexamined for their anti-Semitic content.

For several reasons the Western model of explaining the causes of Latvian participation in thekilling operations is inadequate. When the anti-Semitic evidence from Western Europe is allbrought together, Germany, and especially France, seem so heavily laden with anti-Semiticimages and writings that one can not help but be persuaded of the correctness of that line ofinquiry. But then the question arises, what does this have to do with Latvia?

To historians of the Holocaust, Latvia has been an enigma. The Holocaust in Latvia exists morein the press and the courtrooms of the world than in history books. In the general texts on theHolocaust Latvia has hardly made it into the footnotes. When Latvia is mentioned in the text,there is little more than statistics of victims, accompanied by some statement that is as likely to bemistaken as nonspecific. For example, in Martin Gilbert's The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust(1982), Latvia is on the map, but the only significant Holocaust location noted is the KaiserwaldCamp (Mezaparks), which he calls a mass-murder site. Cryptic as Lucy Dawidowicz was aboutLatvia, she was clearly badly misinformed when she wrote that the Baltic peoples were givenlimited autonomy under the German occupation.

This is in part because most of the German documentary evidence, which was the only evidenceavailable and on the basis of which much of the early history of the Holocaust has been written,was very skimpy about the killing operations in Latvia. The basic sources for the early writersabout the Holocaust in the East were the Ereignismeldungen of the Security Police and SDEinsatzgruppen. But these reports gave very little text other than numbers, and even they may notbe fully reliable. In no sense can the Ereignismeldungen be considered to provide more than cluesabout the killing operations and the identity of the killers and the organizers in Latvia. Thecryptic comments need study and decoding, for which the early historians of the Holocaust—thegeneralists, who wanted to lay out the whole of the Holocaust in one seamless flow— lacked timeand patience and perhaps knowledge of the background.

Lacking specific and accurate information about the killing of the Jews in Latvia, the generalistsovergeneralized. They were better versed, with more solid documentation in hand, in the post-Wannsee phase of the killings, the camps in Germany, the transports and the gassing installationsin Poland. The generalists tended to apply their knowledge about the later phase and thecountries that they had information about to the earlier phase and a different political and

geographic environment. For example, the generalists have given insufficient consideration tothe differences between the occupation of the Soviet territories and that of the Netherlands,Denmark, and France. In the countries that the Nazis judged to be "Germanic," a modicum oflocal administrative structure was maintained. A large part of France was administered byFrenchmen themselves, albeit collaborationists, and in Denmark the royalty continued to act assymbolic head of the nation. The generalists have also failed to note the differences in racialjudgments that the Nazis made about the people in the West as opposed to the ones in the East.On the racial scale, the Latvians were judged much closer to the Jews than they were to theFrench, the Danes being in a category of their own. The Latvian nation was slated for extinction;a full and total germanization of the Baltic was anticipated. The Germans planned to replace theLatvians with Germanic peoples from the West; the Dutch and the Danes were considered to bethe prime candidates for settlement in Latvia.

Among the historians Lucy Dawidowicz stands out for her historiographical analysis of writing onthe Holocaust, The Holocaust and the Historians (1981). She concluded that the English andAmerican historians had treated the Holocaust unevenly, not given the event its due. In theirbooks, particularly the textbooks, the greatest of this century's tragedies is passed by as afootnote or given no more than a paragraph. The British especially, she writes, have beenconcerned much more with the pathology of Hitler than with his criminal acts. She characterizesthe works of German historians as a "shadow of the past." Although she sees promise in someGerman historians, their error is to explain the Hitlerzeit in terms of historical discontinuity,depicting Hitler as an historical accident. Dawidowicz in general praises the works that havecome out of the Institutfiir Zeitgeschichte, but cautions that they can be too academic, overlyconcerned with the Nazi era, swamped by details that blur the Holocaust's connection withbroader questions. [1] Dawidowicz reserved her harshest words for the Soviet historians, whoseworks she termed "palimpsest history," because they rewrite Holocaust history beyondrecognition, to "demonstrate" that it was the Jews themselves, the Zionists, who brought thetragedy onto themselves. Had Dawidowicz written about the Holocaust literature of Latvia shewould perhaps have termed it the "history of the missing center." The shape of the Holocaust inLatvia can be apprehended more by what has not been written about it than by what has. There isa considerable body of work, historical and literary, dealing with World War II in Latvia, but onlya few books and articles that approach the Holocaust.

Changing Interpretations

The question of who was responsible for the killing of the Jews in Latvia has undergone somerevision. The original historians, such as Gerald Reitlinger, Lucy Dawidowicz, and to somedegree Raul Hilberg, were much like the prosecutors in the Nuremberg Trials and attributed themajor and primary responsibility for killing to the Himmler-Heydrich team: the Einsatzgruppenof the Security Police and the SD. The major point of this school still looks solid, but there arenumerous questions remaining on the periphery.

The Abwehr

One of major Soviet contentions in explaining the Nazi atrocities has been to attribute them inlarge measure to the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German military. Although the Abwehrhad links and agents in Latvia, the Soviet emphasis on the Abwehr did not pass muster, and in theWest the view has not earned any credibility. The Abwehr explanations must be ascribed to theSoviet tendency to extend guilt and responsibility to every nook and cranny in the enemy camp.This explanation is partly due to the Soviet preoccupation with secret societies and spies.

The Wehrmacht

A more serious question concerns the role of the Wehrmacht in the killing operations. Althoughthere has been no documented case in Latvia of Wehrmacht members participating in the actualkillings, it is equally true that the Wehrmacht created the conditions in which the killings couldtake place. First, most of the killings in Latvia occurred while martial law or conditions similar toit prevailed. Second, in many cases, the first "Jewish laws" (concerning wearing yellowidentification badges and food distribution) were established by the Wehrmacht commanders inregional or municipal areas. The "Jewish laws" frequently were issued within the first days,sometimes hours, of occupation. There is no question that the Wehrmacht could have stoppedthe killings had it been determined to do so, and that the atrocities took place on theWehrmacht's watch. It is clear that the large masses of German soldiers did not know about theorders to kill the Jews, but it is equally true that Hitler and all of the SS and SD hierarchy hadcoordinated the killings with the Wehrmacht command. The killings could not have taken placenor the anti-Jewish laws issued without the knowledge of the supreme commander, Keitel.

The School of the 1970s

In the 1970s a new view, or rather an attitude, about the Holocaust in Latvia began to emerge inthe West. The new attitude was a pervasive one and appeared not only in the works of journalistsbut also among historians; it influenced prosecutors the world over. The new view softened thelegalism of Nuremberg — the assumption that the SS, the Himmler-Heydrich team, were theperpetrators of the Holocaust. Histories, legal briefs, and works of journalism began to appear inwhich it was contended, in the most extreme cases, that the native peoples in the East, in theirrelations to the victimized Jews, were worse than the Germans. To a high degree the origins of

this view can be traced to the Soviets, but to designate it as the Soviet School alone would be toonarrow. In all of its cardinal tenets, however, the new view can be traced to the Soviet Agitprop.

There is one positive aspect to the school of the 1970s: the original Nuremberg legalists, basingtheir indictments on the paper trail left by the Security Police and SD forces, had failed to notethat in the eastern territories (except for Poland) the native police units had been heavily involvedin the killing of their countrymen. In books like Alan Ryan's The Quiet Neighbors, the school ofthe 1970s revived the idea of general and collective guilt, but this time the accusation ofcollectivity was not turned against the Germans, as in the 1940s and 1950s, but against the EastEuropeans, among them the Latvians.

To trace the origins of this new school for all of eastern Europe is beyond the scope of this work,but as far as the accusation of collective guilt against the Latvians goes there are two sources.

The first is Max Kaufmann's Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands, published in 1947. One of theearly Holocaust memoirs, it vividly brought forth the travails and cruelties that the Jews of Latviasuffered during the Nazi occupation. It is also a sweeping indictment of the Latvians. The basicpremise of the book is that the Latvians were rejoicing over the killing of the Jews:

The cruelties of the Latvians grew from day to day. They were accompanying the Jews to thevarious work places and on the streets they not only beat them horribly, they even murderedmany.

Kaufmann attributed to Latvian police and authorities all of the Nazi atrocities: anti-Semiticpropaganda, the Jewish laws, sidewalk rules, food-supply regulations, yellow star rules, and thekillings themselves.

In 1971 Kaufmann assessed the Latvian role in the Holocaust in these terms:

But shortly after the German occupation of Latvia the Latvians, too, prepared their versionof the final solution of Latvian Jews. While the Germans were still busy with occupationquestions, Latvian volunteer groups were organized with German blessing; and thesevolunteers rounded up Jews in the provinces and to an extent also cities. Later these Latviansalso organized voluntary military formations, and together with German units theymurdered Jews inside and outside Latvia. In so doing the Latvians won the confidence of theGermans, and therefore the Germans did not hesitate to transport thousands uponthousands of Jews from other countries to be murdered in Latvia. This was confirmed in1946 at the Riga trial of the former German commissioner for occupied territories, Jeckeln,and five other generals who were tried simultaneously.... Much archival research is beingconducted on the number of Latvian and other Jews killed in Latvia by the Germans. Ibelieve, however, that the exact number will never be accurately determined since Latvianshad murdered many Latvian Jews even before the Germans took over.... As an eyewitness tothe great tragedy 1 can not minimize the German guilt. But from the Latvians, with whom wehad co-existed for several hundred years, and with whom we had passed through good timesas well as bad, we should have expected human rather than an animal treatment.

The second source for the new history leads to a series of KGB pamphlets written in the early1960s, among which the most significant was Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are they? The surprisingand unexpected consequence was that these pamphlets, especially Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are

They?, entered the scholarly literature in the West, and were taken as documents by numerousauthors. Daugavas Vanagi. Who Are They? in the Western scholarly works of the 1970s and1980s was much more frequently cited than were Kaufmann's memoirs. The booklet became akind of a handbook for war-crimes prosecutory offices in West Germany, the United States,Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The power of this booklet derived from its descriptions ofsituations, purporting to be based on archival and eyewitness evidence; it listed the names ofseveral hundred Latvian participants in the killings. To unravel all the untruths, half-truths, andexaggerations in Daugavas Vanagi would take a book in itself. Suffice it to say that although 10percent of the facts in it are true, the remainder are false. How false the facts, the pictures, thesituations presented in the booklet are, can be unraveled by examining the details of theassertions. The Western scholars and journalists lacked the patience and knowledge of history topenetrate the deception.

The most interesting aspect of the booklet is that much of the logic and collective accusationagainst the Latvians is based in large part on three statements that Gen. Friedrich Jeckelnallegedly made at his trial in Riga in 1946. "Truth No. 1" is the assertion that Latvians killed alarge, indeterminable number of Jews before the Germans arrived in Latvia. The second is thatthe Latvians had more nerve for killing Jews than did the Germans. And the third is that Jews fromthe West were brought to Latvia "because the Latvians had created the proper conditions for it."The unraveling of these three statements is more than just a matter of passing importance. InWestern works treating the subject of the Holocaust they are the most frequently cited "truths"about the Latvian involvement.

The Three "Truths" of Jeckeln

There are three questions about these alleged Jeckeln "truths": Did Jeckeln actually say them?Could he have said them? Even if he had not said them, could they be true?

SS General Friedrich Jeckeln stands in the dock during his trial for atrocities committed in the Baltic states

The three statements, when they appear in Western literature, sometimes are put in quotationmarks, sometimes they are paraphrased, and sometimes used without any attribution at all.Although those assertions are already found in Kaufmann's book, the Western authors invariablyrefer to Daugavas Vanagi as the source of the quotations. Daugavas Vanagi, however, does notgive the source of the quotations, but asserts that Jeckeln made them at his trial. Considering thatJeckeln, adding up the number of Jewish victims alone in Ukraine, the Baltic, and Belorussia, wasresponsible for a minimum of 300,000 to 500,000 deaths, an unusually high degree ofcredibility has been accorded to the three alleged statements. In fact, the rhetorical point seemsto be that Jeckeln's criminal past invests the statements with a higher believability than if they hadbeen made by a statistician. It could be argued that Jeckeln had a motive to lie, to deflect attentionfrom his own guilt. A skeptical historian could also argue that even if Jeckeln himself had notwanted to make the statements, the NKVD interrogator coerced them from him.

But we no longer have to rely on the KGB-filtered information to assess the truth about Jeckeln'sstatements. By now in the West we have a considerable amount of his interrogation recordsavailable, and of Dr. Indulis Ronis, the Historical Institute of Latvia, who «saw the full file inMoscow». Now we can say with full assurance that Jeckeln did at dodge (or the Soviet prosecutorsdid not allow him to) his responsibility; neither did he try to prevaricate about his crimes. Latviawas a peripheral issue since the prosecutory toe of questioning was much more focused onconnections with Berlin: Himmler and Goring. The Soviet courts, from the point of view of ahistorian, were narrowly channeled to prove one thing and only one — the criminality of the Naziregime. In none of Jeckeln's testimonies did he touch upon Latvian responsibility for killingJews. None of the three statements attributed to Jeckeln is found in the official record. Historiansand journalists who want to continue, as some will, to rely on Jeckeln's allegations forunderstanding the Holocaust in Latvia will have to rely on other than the official documents fortheir assertions.

The purpose of the Jeckeln trial was to convict Jeckeln and the Nazis — not Latvians. PeterisKrupnikovs, now a professor of history at the University of Latvia, served as an interpreter for theSoviet interrogator and prosecutors prior to and during Jeckeln's trial. He did not rememberJeckeln in any context ever making any of the three statements.

The first of the purported Jeckeln allegations has two versions. The first of these is Kaufmann'sof l947:

The number of the Jews brought from abroad to Latvia is not precisely known to me, nor isthe number of Jews killed in Latvia. Already before we Germans took over power, so manyJews were murdered by the Latvians, that no exact number could be determined.

In the Daugavas Vanagi version from 1962, the critical lines are:

The precise number I cannot determine. When I arrived in Riga in the summer of 1941, theLatvians themselves had already killed thousands of Jews. The same had happened inother towns of Latvia.

The Daugavas Vanagi version is the more fantastic and absurd one. Both authors give thecitation as a direct quotation but in the Daugavas Vanagi version Jeckeln claims to have arrivedin Latvia in the summer of 1941, which is an impossibility because at the time he was posted inUkraine, and it is well documented that he arrived in Riga only in mid-November 1941.

The next quotation comes from Jeckeln's interrogation transcript and to a high degree parallelsKaufmann's version. Jeckeln is talking about the number of Jews killed before his arrival,although the exchange came up in an indirect way. He says that he cannot be exact about thenumber of Jews brought to Latvia, and then he gets into the question of Jews killed before hisarrival in the Baltic:

Jeckeln: I must however say, that already before my arrival in Riga, a large number of Jewshad been killed in Ostland and in Belorussia. That was reported to me.

Question: Who reported it?

Jeckeln: Stahlecker, Pritzmann, Generalmajor Schroder, the SS-Police Commander ofLatvia, Generalmajor Moller, the SS-Police Commander of Estonia, and GeneralmajorWysocki, the SS-Police Commander of Lithuania.26

Jeckeln's statement in the transcript corresponds to the facts as they existed in 1941. It is true, ashe asserts, that many Jews were killed in the Baltic and Belorussia prior to his arrival. (In Latviaabout 30,000 Jews had been murdered). It is also reasonable to assume that upon his arrivalJeckeln asked his subalterns to inform him about the situation. The contents of the reports toJeckeln we do not know, but there is no indication that anybody has said that Latvians had killedan unaccounted number of Jews before the German arrival. It is important to note that instructure and content Jeckeln's answer is similar to Kaufmann's statement, except that theofficial version, contrary to Kaufmann's, does not have anything to say about the unaccountednumber of Jews killed by the Latvians. After the war, in 1946, Kaufmann returned to Latvia for avisit, and he claims to have been present at the Jeckeln trial, but it must be noted that in neitherversion, that of 1947 nor that of 1971, when he writes a brief article about the Holocaust inLatvia, did Kaufmann claim to have himself heard the statements from Jeckeln. That Kaufmannbrought the notion out of Latvia in 1946 seems, however, clear. How he obtained the alteredquotation, he did not clarify. As to the source, the KGB pamphlets of the 1960s and 1970s arealso silent.

As there is no reason to think Jeckeln himself to have been the author of "Jeckeln's" firststatement, there are equally shaky grounds for believing that he made the second and thirdstatements.

Did Jeckeln ever say that the Latvians had a better nerve for killing Jews than did the Germans?There is no certified or archival document that connects Jeckeln with the statement, and it isquestionable that this paragon of Nazism, an extreme proponent of the master race, would havesaid it. Even if he had, there are two cases on record in which he could have appointed Latviansinstead of Germans to kill Jews; he chose Germans. The first and the largest was the Rumbulaaction itself. To kill the Jews at Rumbula, Jeckeln ordered his own twelve-man bodyguard to carryout the assignment. Arajs and Latvian policemen at that time performed non-shootingassignments. The second case involves the search for weapons in the ghetto in the fall of 1942.Jeckeln ordered Lange's SD team to make the search and thereafter to execute the Jewishresistance fighters. In general, Jeckeln could not have been a good judge of Latvians as killers: hewas too high in the hierarchy, too far removed from the Latvians. Lange and Stahlecker couldhave given more credible testimony than did Jeckeln, and on several occasions, Stahlecker wasknown to have complained that the Latvians were killing too slowly.

Jeckeln's third statement is equally insupportable. The Reich Jews began to be shipped to Latviavery shortly after Jeckeln arrived there, and everyone involved in Latvia, including Lange, whenthe shipments of Jews began to arrive in Riga, seemed to have been unprepared and surprised.The decision to ship Jews to Latvia was made in Berlin, and it is not known whether Himmler,Heydrich, or Eichmann ever consulted anybody in the Baltic. In fact, the plans to send Jews to theOstland were more ambitious than the eventual outcome. The German civilian administration inthe Baltic, especially in the person of Hinrich Lohse, was against the transport of Jews to theOstland. It is a Soviet invention that 240,000 Jews were sent to Latvia and murdered there. Tobegin with, there was not enough housing in wartime Latvia to accommodate numbers of thatscale. The two larger concentration camps, Salaspils and Mezaparks (Kaiserwald), even afterbeing completed could accommodate only about 6,000. And the Riga ghetto, after the killing ofLatvia's Jews, was never again filled up to its original population of 29,000. A makeshift campwas created in Jumpravmuiza, but that housed at its peak no more than 4,000.

Soviet Use of the Holocaust, 1945Source: Records of the Extraordinary Commission, LVVA, P-132-26-1, p. 1.

(table missing)

As the table illustrates, the Soviet political use of the Holocaust began even before the war hadended. The Extraordinary Commission to investigate Nazi atrocities found that 313,798 civilians(among them 39,831 children) and 330,632 POWs had been killed in Latvia. In reality the totalnumber of civilians killed in Latvia, including the Jews, did not exceed 85,000.

Historiography

There are four principal bodies of literature concerning the Holocaust in Latvia. First is thatwritten by Jews themselves, mostly survivors. The Germans have tended to write about theadministrative and organizational aspects, while the Soviets fighting the "Zionists" and"nationalists" have been jealous guardians of the archives and have engaged in ideological use ofthe Holocaust. Latvian emigres have been reluctant in their recall of the event.

Jewish Survivors

Jewish survivors have left us many excellent books about their experiences in Latvia, and fromthem we can learn a great deal about the Jewish fate in Latvia, mostly Riga. It should be noted thatthe most diligent writers have been non-Latvian Jews. In terms of time span hardly any work cancompete with Max Kaufmann's Die Vemichtung der Juden Lettlands. Kaufmann documents hisexperiences from the time of the Nazi entrance into Riga until August 1944, when he wastransported to Buchenwald, then marched to Sachsenhausen, where he was liberated on May 1,1945. He survived the shootings of November and December 1941 because he was a workingJew. His tales of horrors come mostly from the Riga ghetto and the Mezaparks concentrationcamp. Among the many bone-chilling chapters, none is perhaps as horror-filled as the one on"Bloody Sloka," a peat bog near Riga, where Kaufmann witnessed the killing of his son by aGerman SD man, Migge. As a member of a work detail, Kaufmann saw many other camps andlabor sites in Riga and its environs. His book is sizable and purports to give evidence aboutnumerous other locales in Latvia. However, his information about places he did not see himself isgenerally thin. From a scholarly perspective the work is also marred by excessive emotionaleffusions; his accusations are so universal that he fails to draw distinctions among the guilty, thehalf-guilty, and the bystander.

Josef Katz, the author of One Who Came Back (1973), was a Lubeck Jew who ranged far outfrom Riga on work details, on one occasion going to Liepaja (Libau), and on another as far as theLeningrad front to load logs on a train. He arrived in Riga in December 1941, when all of the bigAktionen in Latvia were over. Unlike Kaufmann, he has little to tell us about the killingoperations themselves, but his book is indispensable for learning about Jewish life, the threatsand cruelties, in the "quieter" period from mid-1942 to 1944.

Perhaps the most detailed and accurate of the memoirs is Sidney Iwens' How Dark the Heavens(1990). Iwens was a Lithuanian Jew who tried to seek refuge in Soviet territory, but beforereaching the frontier he was trapped in Daugavpils. His book is written in a diary form and tellsabout all of the important killing actions in the city as well as his own miraculous escapes fromdeath.

Gertrude Schneider was a girl in her early teens when she, her parents, and her eleven-year-oldsister were transported from Vienna to Riga. Schneider's Journey into Terror (1979)31 is quitedifferent from the memoirs of Kaufmann, Katz, and Iwens. As she tells us in the introduction.Journey into Terror is based on her diary, which she has fortified by interviews with her fellowsurvivors. Further, it is the first history of the Riga ghetto. The book is important for itsinformation about the social and cultural life in the ghetto and the Mezaparks KZ lager, and

contains valuable data about the Jewish transports from the Reich to Latvia. Not only hasSchneider broadened our knowledge about the Holocaust in Latvia, she has provided it withstructure.

Of special interest to Latvians is Frida Michelson's I Survived Rumbuli (1979), a painful book toread, but at the same time an inspirational one. Michelson was a fashion designer in Riga, whowas brought to the killing field at Rumbula during the second big Aktion in December 8, 1941.Miraculously, she walked away to tell her story. Her book is important for the information shebrings about the first days of the Nazi occupation, life in the ghetto during Aktionen of Novemberand December 1941, the description of the killing operation itself, and her own fortune in hidingout and surviving the years of persecution.

Among other memoirs, we must also mention Jeanette Wolffs Sadismus oder Wahnsinn (1946),a work of smaller scope than Schneider's and Michelson's; Reska Weiss' Journey Through Hell(1961), though confusing many places and times, tells an interesting tale of her experiences inLatvia in 1944; Greta Gottschalk, Der Letzte Weg, an unpublished manuscript at the Institut fiirZeitgeschichte; a Swedish-language memoir by Betty Happ (pseudonym), Bortom allMansklighet (1945); A. Levin's Cortu Cerez Zubii (1986); Hilde Sherman-Zander's ZwischenTag und Dunkel (1984). We must also include the many-sided collections by GertrudeSchneider: Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remembered (1987) and The UnfinishedRoad: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back (1991).

M. Bobe's Jews in Latvia (1971), an anthology of essays and articles issued by the Association ofLatvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, contains little information about the Holocaust itself, but it isindispensable for understanding several related topics, especially Jewish life in Latvia andLatvian-Jewish relations before World War II. The most industrious Israeli historian working onBaltic topics is Dov Levin. Although most of Levin's works do not deal directly with theHolocaust, they throw much light on Latvian-Jewish relations prior to the Holocaust.

German Works

Very few German-language works deal directly with the Holocaust in Latvia. The most significanthistorical study is Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges by Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm (1981). The second part of the book —Wilhelm's contribution— containsindispensable information about the killing of the Jews and other civilians in Latvia. Although it isa very detailed study, its scope is limited by over-reliance on the Ereignismeldungen of theEinsatzgruppen, the daily reports the killing units sent to Berlin. The book highlights theproblems of using the Einsatzgruppen reports as a source. These reports were a powerful tool inthe hands of the prosecutors in Nurnberg and later war crimes trials, but as historical sourcesthey have weaknesses. They report the rough numbers of Jews and other civilians killed, but theyare not very comprehensive or specific about the killing operations or the locales. They containnumerous intelligence reports about the local population, but say little in the case of Latvia aboutwho collaborated with the killing units.

Among other German works is Seppo Myllyniemi's Die Neuordnung der Baltischen Lander,1941-1944 (1973), Important as it is in understanding the Holocaust, Myllyniemi's book tellsus very little about the atrocities in Latvia. The author gives us a very accurate description of theGerman occupation's administrative structure and its economic policies; he does not, however,

tell anything about the SD structure in Latvia. Myllyniemi's ambition was to fill a gap left byAlexander Dallin's German Rule of Russia, 1941-1944 and he has successfully done so.Although Myllyniemi is a Finn, his work is similar to German works about World War II. LikeWilhelm, Myllyniemi did much of his research at the Institut fiir Zeitgeschichte. In Myllyniemi'sand Wilhelm's books there is too much reliance on Nazi sources, with the result that bothauthors have allowed the sources to some degree to determine their texts. A similar work, but oflesser scope, is H. D. Handrack's Das Reichskommissariat Ostland (1980).

The German literature is very rich in memoirs, although most of them deal with military oradministrative matters. Of special note are the works by three Baltic-Germans. Hugo Wittrock'sKommissarischer Oberburgermeister von Riga, 1941-1944: Erinnerungen (1979) talks a greatdeal about the civilian administration's conflicts with the SD, but fails to mention that for abouttwo months in 1941 the author was the chief administrator responsible for the Riga ghetto.Jiirgen E. Kroeger, an SD functionary, has left two memoirs, Eine Baltische Illusion: Tagebuchernes Deutsch-Balten aus den Jahren 1939-1944, and So war es, Ein Bericht (1989). The mostdenazified of the Baltic German memoirs is Harijs Mamies' KSvi par Daugava (1958). In allthese memoirs the Jewish question is only tangentially present. Kroeger discusses it most fully,although some of his diary passages seem to be later insertions. Both Wittrock and Kroegercontinue mining an old Baltic-German lode, blaming the Latvians rather than the Germans forkilling the Jews, Mamies was an interesting case, a denazified Baltic German who came to like hischildhood Latvian friends more than his fellow-German SS occupiers of Latvia. From thedocumentary aspect, the most important of these books is the one by Wittrock.

Latvians in Emigration

Latvians who emigrated after the war could have collected their knowledge about the fate of theJews in their country and thus broken the KGB stranglehold of secrecy. Had the emigres done so,no doubt they would have improved their standing in the world community. Not only did they failto pursue the question on the official and diplomatic level, they sought to conceal informationabout the Holocaust in Latvia. It must also be noted that most of the emigre Latvians had onlygeneral impressions about the killing of the Jews, while those Latvians who knew the details ofthe killings most likely were involved in them.

Among some emigre journalists the Holocaust in Latvia is considered somehow to be acommunist topic, one that has been exhaustively studied in the Soviet Union. This view is not freeof aspects of anti-Semitism.

Although they have attempted to ignore the subject, the Latvian emigres have written more aboutthe Holocaust in Latvia than they themselves realize. Among the important memoirs andpolemical treatises we could name the works by Unams,32 Dankers,33 Blakis,34 Valdmanis,35 andCelmins.36 no single work gives us any complete understanding of the tragedy, or even a portionof it. This is partly owing to the lack of sources available to them but there are other, deepercauses. They have not known how to approach the subject nor have they known how to apportionthe guilt. In general they have not felt that the killing of Jews was in any way their responsibility.Numerous Latvians have insisted that Latvian-Jewish relations before the German invasion weregood, even exemplary.37 They have rejected any notion of collective guilt as Soviet propaganda.On the other hand, some may have been hiding their deep shame about Latvian collaboration.Numerous Nazi-era journalists entered and managed the emigration press. In effect, the

accessories to the crimes were later in charge of what was said about the crimes.38 There areemigre Latvians who were so overwhelmed by their own grief and the loss of their homeland thatthey failed to become in any full sense acquainted with the Nazi assault on Europe's Jews. Finally,the Latvians who were the direct participants in the atrocities, and could write with authority,were obviously not likely to broach the subject. Nor were they likely to be the sort to composememoirs. That, however, does not explain the reticence of those who saw and heard much, butwho, for unexplainable reasons, have felt some sense of solidarity with the Latvian criminals.

Latvian emigres have nevertheless written voluminously about the German occupation inhistories, memoirs, polemics, and novels. In fact, they have written about everything except thekilling of the Jews, or any other killing that took place under the Nazis. The Latvians have treatedall other issues, but have avoided the cancerous center. Emigre literature has extensivelyexamined the German administrative structure in Latvia and the Latvian participation within it.

Emigre literature is also rich in information about the origins of the Latvian military formations,from the partisan fighting units at the time of German entrance into Latvia to theSchutzmannschaften and the Latvian Legion. The military literature is immense; among the mostimportant works are Silgailis' Latviesu legions (1962) and the multi-volume Latviesu karavirsotra pasaules kara laika.39 There are several publications that for many years have printed WorldWar II reminiscences, studies, and documents on a regular basis.40

Karlis Siljakovs, the chief of Liepaja SD political police, left a two-volume memoir called Manaatbilde (1982 and 1985). Siljakovs' effort, however, failed to live up to the promise to tell thewhole truth.

Among the academic studies that have unearthed a great deal about the Nazi era are those ofHaralds Biezais, Arnolds Aizsilnieks, and Karlis Kangeris. Biezais assesses the work of the highcollaborators in Latvia, especially Dankers and Bangerskis. The latest Biezais works that havebeen published are Kurelieli (1991) and Latvija kaskrusta vara: Svesi kungi, pasu laudis(1992). Aizsilnieks documented in more detail than anyone else the Nazi economic policy inLatvia; and Kangeris has engaged in documenting the Nazi labor policy and the evacuation ofLatvia in 1944. A study on the resistance in Latvia that the late Edgars Andersons began is to bepublished soon.

Of Latvian emigre fiction writers, the prolific Gunars Janovskis is exceptional with his noveldevoted to the killing of the Jews in Krustpils. His Pilseta pie upes (City by the River) wasserialized in the newspaper Laiks (1990-91) and will be soon published in Latvia. The novelistwho has most directly and powerfully confronted the killing of the Jews in his native Kuld_ga isEduards Freimanis, especially in his novels Ticiba (1978) and Visadais Jepis (1990). In both ofthese novels the incarceration and the killing of the Jews are described, though not in realisticdetail. Other authors who have touched upon the subject are Arnolds Apse in Klosterkalns,Richards Ridzinieks (Ervins Grins) in Zelta motocikls,41 and Valentins Pelecis in hisreminiscences Maleniesu pasaule.42 Aivars Rungis43 and Martins Ziverts44 have written playswith references to the Holocaust. In his fictionalized memoir Pakapies torni, Uldis Germanisdepicts a friend serving in the Arajs commando.

Soviet Writings

After the war the Soviets were in possession of the physical evidence: grave sites; capturedGerman documents; and witnesses, survivors, and participants in the killings. The Soviets fromthe very beginning double dealt with the history of the Holocaust in Latvia, as they did with theHolocaust in general. They had already begun the trail of disinformation during the war. On theone hand the Soviets came close to denying the existence of the Holocaust, on the other theyincriminated all of eastern Europe, except the Russians, for killing the Jews. As the Soviets weresinking into anti-Semitism after the war and even the survivors of the Holocaust were beingpersecuted and sent North, the authorities began to manage the information about the Germanatrocities in the East by publishing selected evidence —snippets of documents and books—containing misinformation or incomplete information about the role that the peoples of easternEurope played in the atrocities. In the hierarchy of Soviet crimes, participation in a war againstthe Red Army or the Soviet partisans weighed as heavily, sometimes even more so, thanparticipation in the killing of the Jews. Membership in the Nazi killing apparatus was nodetriment for later participation in a NKVD or KGB network of spies, agents, and informers. InLatvia there are some well-known cases of Nazi-era activists and journalists who were engaged inKGB work.45

Even before the war had ended, the Soviets convened an Extraordinary Commission of theRepublic46 to investigate the crimes of Nazism. The commission sat from August 23, 1944, toJuly 27, 1946, established 5,562 (sic.) local commissions of inquiry, and employed about50,000 people. The commission's reports vary in quality from location to location. On the onehand they reveal punctilious attention to detail, but on the other a tendency to exaggerate, evenfabricate data. Especially, the number of victims was increased without any substantiatingevidence. In addition to the Extraordinary Commission's inquiry on the political and criminallevel, the NKVD and SMERSH in Latvia and in the USSR at large interrogated thousands ofLatvians and Germans about Nazi crimes. Only now that the archives are open do we see themountain of information accumulated by the Soviets. After the war the Soviets captured at least344 members of the Arajs commando and they all were interrogated, tried, and convicted.47 TheWorld War II documents are cross-indexed and filed in accordance with the most demandingarchival standards.

Only after perestroika did the KGB start to open some of the information for limited public use.After the fall of the Soviet Union, with the exception of those files taken to Russia, full access tothe once-secret holdings is possible. The Extraordinary Commission's archives were opened toforeigners in 1989, and other archives previously controlled by the KGB, such as the documentsof the local police, have gradually been made accessible. The NKVD and KGB war crimes trialfiles came under civilian control only after the failed coup in August 1991.

The level of secrecy that the Soviets imposed upon the Holocaust archives is difficult tounderstand,48 because the Soviets, too, claimed to want to root out the Nazis. Only in 1970s didthe Soviets begin to release selected documents (now we know that the released documents wereselected and sanitized) to the German and American prosecutors in war crimes cases.Nevertheless, numerous documents that could have helped to prosecute war crimes in the Westwere withheld by the Soviets,49 who subjugated the Holocaust to considerations of internal andinternational politics. All the Soviet-era publications are colored by these considerations. Thememory of the Nazi crimes was drowned out in the Soviet dialectic.

The Soviets never gave an accurate accounting of the number of victims during the Germanoccupation. They did not even count up the number of communists killed, which would havebeen easy to do. It was left to the Agitprop offices to determine the numbers, and they came up

with a count that bordered on the fantastic. Some of the numbers, as they appear in the reports ofthe Latvian Extraordinary Commission, were falsified at the grass-roots level. The reportednumbers were frequently tripled, in comparison to the actual data from the field.

The general tendency of the Soviet works on the Holocaust has been to minimize, sometimeseven eliminate, the German role in the killings, and attribute the responsibility for the murders to"nationalists." The Soviets picked up and continued the Nazi theme of the spontaneity of"native" forces in the killing of the Jews. The cornerstone of Soviet historiography was to dividethe Latvian people into communists and nationalists. In Soviet usage the term "nationalist" moreoften than not meant non-communist. While collective guilt ceased to be attributed even to theGermans, the Soviets and their successors continued to operate with the concept until our ownday. These writings have de-emphasized the German occupational grip, the martial law rule, theWehrmacht, the SD and the multiple layers of civilian and Nazi Party control in Latvia. Latvia isportrayed as if Latvians themselves were in control, governing the country. As this view wasfostered, access to the sources of information and archival evidence about the Germanoccupation was suppressed.50

The Holocaust was a taboo subject even among the survivors of the Holocaust.51 Jews were notallowed to write about the years of their torment. The Soviets suppressed information about thecrimes and frequently persecuted those who had suffered under the Nazis, even Jewish survivors.As the Soviets were compiling mountains of evidence about the Nazi crimes, they forbade thesurvivors a forum to discuss the crimes and remember the victims.52

In general, we can say that in pre-glasnost Latvia, it was even forbidden to write about Latvian-Jewish relations. For example, the word "Jew" was edited out of Latvian Marxist texts; JanisRainis' classic drama Joseph and His Brothers was banned for long stretches from the Latvianstage, and his diary about his trip to Palestine in 1929 was excluded from his collected works.Only with the advent of glasnost did the Soviet information barrier begin to crumble. But noteven today has the Kremlin leadership, now that of Russia, recognized that Jews in the Russianterritories were killed as Jews, nor have they made any acknowledgment of Soviet-Russianparticipation in the Holocaust.53

In spite of the strictures, the Latvians living under the Soviets wrote about the Holocaust, simplybecause they lived on the site of the crime. Information about the Holocaust in Soviet Latvia mustbe found in the peripheral literature: the histories and memoirs of war, partisan struggles, andresistance.

Among the Soviet Latvian books that include information about Nazi crimes are Latviesu tautascina Liela Tevijas kara (The Latvian Peoples Struggle in the Great Fatherland War) 54 and Reizcelas strelnieks sarkanais (The Rising of the Red Strelki), 55 an anthology. Furthermore, there is aseries of communist resistance and partisan movement works: J. Dzintars, Neredzama fronte(1970); Alfreds Raskevics and Olga Spoge, Avangarda komunisti (1979); and a whole series ofstudies and reminiscences by the academician Vilis Samsons: Kurzemes partizani, Kurzemes mezisalc, and numerous other works. 56

There are only three Soviet-Latvian books that more or less deal with the Holocaust issuesdirectly: a document collection, Mes apsudzam (1968); an anthology of reminiscences, Salaspilsnaves nometne (1978); and a monograph by Margers Vestermanis, Ta rikojas vermahts (1973).Within the Soviet Holocaust library one may also include Tiesas prava (1946), which contains a

description and partial transcript of the Jeckeln trial in 1946. During the Soviet occupation themost careful and industrious compiler of documents was Margers Vestermanis, a Holocaustsurvivor who did much to keep propaganda out of his writings. KGB works written for foreignconsumption must be considered separately, for they were not available locally and they wereintended to influence Western opinion. Starting with Khrushchev in 1959, Moscow organized acampaign and ordered the respective KGB branches in the satellite republics to issue pamphletswith the specific purpose of implicating the borderland peoples — Ukrainians, Lithuanians,Latvians, and Estonians — in Nazi crimes. The centralized origin of these pamphlets is evidentfrom the style and contents of the text. The purpose was not to reveal information about theHolocaust, but rather to compromise, sometimes deservedly, the respective nationals who hademigrated. The pamphlets dealt in half-truths, and among the faked documents and pictures theyincluded true archival documents previously not seen in the West. The impact of these pamphletson Holocaust studies and Western prosecutory offices cannot be underestimated. The pamphletthat created the biggest impact was Kas ir Daugavas Vanagi? (1962).57 It was translated intohighly literary, free-wheeling English as Daugavas Vanagi. Who Are They? And also into Germanand Swedish. A significant part of the impact of the pamphlet in the West was the result ofpurporting to name Latvian war criminals. Of the approximately 300 names listed in the booklet,about three dozen have turned out to have been people with criminal pasts. This Sovietpropaganda genre, as M. Zvonov's pamphlet, Po evrejam ogon (Riga, 1993) shows, has beentaken over by the Russian secret services.

In the broader context of Soviet-Latvianhistoriography one must also include theSalaspils memorial park, which is one ofthe most grandiose in Europe. Althoughthe park was not built to commemorate theJewish victims alone, the Jews certainlywere subsumed under the victims ofNazism. Even during the darkest days ofBrezhnevite anti-Semitism the touristguides did not fail to mention that Jewswere killed in Latvia.58

Only after perestroika could fully honestpublications about the Holocaust in Latviaappear. The publication in 1989 of VilnisZarins' study of Nazi ideology was anoteworthy event.59 Up to now numerousHolocaust-related articles and materialshave appeared in the press and the leadinghistorical journals Latvijas ZinStnuAkademijas Vestis, Latvijas VesturesInstituta Zurnals, and Latvijas Vesture.Among the authors of the post-perestroikawritings have been Vilis Samsons,Andrievs Ezergailis, Haralds Biezais,Karlis Kangeris, Heinrihs Strods, andAivars Stranga.

Witnesses

Witnesses might not intentionally lie or dissimulate but their testimony is often of only limitedimportance. In general they remember little, and tend to have tunnel vision.

Like historians they universalize and over-generalize from the little that they experienced andremember. While it even denied it, it is also equally true that, with few exceptions, those who sawthe killings at close — is true that many Germans and East Europeans have attempted to forgetabout the killing of Jews or quarters either as victims or victimizer — remember little; if theyremember, their memory is frequently incomplete and faulty.

Some witnesses are better than others. The best first-hand evidence comes from trial witnesses;among those, the most credible testimonials came from those who had been tortured orpunished. This means that the best evidence for the writing of this study has come from the SovietUnion, especially from depositions that were obtained for litigation in West Germany or theUnited States, where some cross-examination was part of the deposition. The Nurnbergtestimonies have been of a more limited value because they dealt with the upper echelon ofcriminals, only rarely focusing on the grass-roots activities.

The most significant documentation about the killings in Latvia was gathered during the 1970sby the prosecutors of the Hamburg and Hannover Landgerichte, who were the first to penetratethe Soviet concealment of evidence. Both jurisdictions obtained documents from the KGB andSMERSH archives on a limited and selective basis, and the right to question and cross-examineSoviet witnesses. The work begun by the German judiciary has been continued by the Office ofSpecial Investigation (OSI), a prosecutory agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Without theevidence that these organizations have collected, this work could not have been possible.Especially noteworthy is the compilation of documents by the Landgericht in Hamburg, where, inaddition to Viktors Arajs, a series of Germans with a past in Latvia were tried and investigated:

Friedrich Jahnke, Gerhard Maywald, Arno Besekow, and others. Also to be noted is thedocument collection in the Landgericht Hannover, where Einsatzkommando Commander ErhardGrauel and other Liepaja SD functionaries were tried.

Another valuable source has been the testimonials of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. After thewar various Jewish agencies attempted to collect depositions and memories from the survivors,who were scattered worldwide. Much of the evidence has been deposited in the Yad Vashemarchives in Jerusalem. These depositions are in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, English, and Russian;a few are in Latvian. The survivors' evidence has the shortcomings of eyewitness accounts ingeneral: they are very uneven and narrow, limited to the witness's own experience. Thenarrowness of the recollections and the remembered details are the most useful aspect of theirdepositions. No deposition of a Jewish survivor, however, surprises with a plenitude of evidence.The survivor testimonials, for what they remembered and what they forgot, are a significant partof the Holocaust experience itself, but little is gained by expecting too much from any single oneof them. Every survivor may know the truth of the Holocaust but not the total truth. As witnessesof the Holocaust, the Jewish survivors labor under a number of problems: they were forced to livein confined and brutal circumstances; their mobility and ability to get real news wascircumscribed; usually their only encounters with Gentiles was with the guards; they were livingunder terror and duress; and, the survivors did not experience the killing operations themselves.About the killing operations, the murderers themselves, if they can be coerced to talk, often aremore informative than the survivors. Regarding these shortcomings of Jewish witnesses a certainIda Bocian testified in the Grauel trial:

"Wir hatten Angst, den Kopf zu heben, die Augen zu offnen, zu atmen" ("We were afraid toraise our heads, to open our eyes, to breathe").60

With a few exceptions, the survivors' testimonies, those of foreign Jews more than of Latvianones, have been especially deficient in pinning down and describing the role of the Latvians. If ithad been left to the Reich Jewish witnesses, the roster of Latvian murderers would not exceedthree or four names.61

The memoirs of Jews transported to Latvia (and there are a considerable number of works)present a special problem: these Jews were closer to Germany and Germans than to Latvia andLatvians. Their language was German, and their communication with Latvians was limited. Thisgroup of memoir writers often leaves the impression that they liked the German supervisors, withwhom they could communicate better than with the Latvian guards they did not know. In certaininstances European Jews were not free of racist thinking, and on the racial-evaluation scale theyplaced the Latvians about where the Germans placed them.62

Some of the survivors' testimonies about the Holocaust in Latvia have been spectacular andunique within the whole of Holocaust literature. Among them one must include the book of FridaMichelson, the testimonies of Ella Medale, and Matiss Lutrins,63 and many parts of MaxKaufmann's book, such as his account of the killing of his son in the Sloka peat bog.

Another potential source that could have revealed a great deal about the Holocaust in Latviawould be the Latvian emigres in the West who were employed in important posts in Nazi-occupied Latvia, especially the police. But these emigres, in part because of the war crimes trials,have not been very forthcoming. Even this writer, who in general can be said to have had deeproots in the Latvian emigration, has not been able to tap into this source.

Who Killed the Jews of Latvia?

Although the question sounds simple, the answer to who killed the Jews of Latvia is far from easy.The murder of the Jews began with the German occupation, and the chief executors of Hitler'sorders were the men from the Security Police and SD units. 64 There is many-leveled evidencethat had it not been for the Führerbefehl the Jews of Latvia would not have suffered any harm.Whatever role the Latvian partisan forces may have played in the slaughter of the Jews, it was theNazi invasion of Latvia that made possible the killing. Clarity about the lines of authority and theorganizational framework of the killings goes to the heart of the spontaneity versus inducements,or orders, issue.

Spontaneity Versus Orders

The earliest mention of the idea, even before any Latvian Jews were killed, that there should be aspontaneous murder of Jews in Latvia, is found in Heydrich's directive to the Einsatzgruppenleaders. The theme was picked up by a variety of German functionaries in their reports,directives, memoirs, and depositions. After the war, the Soviet Agitprop, for purposes of its own,also found the spontaneity accusation useful. It was incorporated in Max Kaufmann'sreminiscences and numerous other Western journalistic and historical works. None of theclaims, however, of spontaneous pogroms has been specific as to location, date, units, or personsinvolved. 65 The minimum case for establishing a spontaneous Latvian engagement in the killingswould require the date and location for murders. The spontaneous killings could not haveoccurred in Riga, Liepaja, or Daugavpils, because for these three major cities there is muchGerman, SD, and postwar persecutory documentation that points up the difficulties of inducingthe Latvians into pogroms. 66

The most direct way of double-checking the validity of the spontaneity claim is to visit the LatvianState Historical Archives in Riga and examine the files of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission of1944-48. The commission's standard of data-gathering was not without lapses of integrity, butthe archives are very clear and specific about the locations and, most of the time, about the datesof the atrocities. The archives are organized by districts, and each district file is subdivided intosmaller, sometimes raw, data files from pagasts and towns. The murder sites are usuallyillustrated by charts, indicating their geographical location and size of the graves. Frequently,lists of murdered Jews are also part of the file. If the Jews were killed locally, it is indicated in therecords, but usually Jews from smaller locations were sent to larger towns, and that is alsoindicated. Lists of people participating in the killings or arrests are also in the files, and it is notedwhether the killings were done by locals, Germans, or some other unit. The commission'sreports contain voluminous raw data that could serve as a basis for detailed and specific studyabout the murder of the Jews in Latvia's localities. On the precise numbers killed, theExtraordinary Commission's data were unreliable, because the investigators for numerouslocations were engaging in double bookkeeping, one list for reported deaths and another foractual murders. 67

Hardly any Latvian opinion preserved from 1941 is untainted, for there was hardly a breakbetween the Soviet and Nazi rule. While the powers were changing hands, however, a group of

journalists in Riga managed to put out a one-page newspaper, BnvaZeme, on July I. 68 Amazinglyenough, the editor addressed the problem of killing enemies.

Give welcome to the heroic German Army which has smashed our biggest enemy and hasdriven out the inhuman communist looting gangs. This army, pitiful and defeated, now fleein panic from our land. Latvians, do not kill these pitiful people, disarm them, and takethem prisoner, and only in cases when you find resistance, be quick to avert it. 69

Though the writer is full of hate for communism, he discourages his countrymen from killinganyone. There is no mention of revenge, and that is one reason, we may presume, why Stahleckerhalted any further publication of the newspaper.

The records of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission showed that mass killings in Latvia's smalltowns did not begin during the first days of occupation, but only during the second half of Julyand throughout August. In other words, the killings in Latvia began weeks rather than hours afterthe arrival of the Nazis, well past the time that the post-war Soviets had said was the limit for theinterregnum in Latvia. The Latvian local police files in the same archive also contain a timetableand evidence of the structure and orders under which the police forces were organized andoperated. A comparison of the two timetables concerning the dates of the killings and theestablishment of the police force reveals that the killing and the organization began in the reverseorder from that publicized by the Soviets. The archives show that the German organizationalefforts began hours after the Wehrmacht's entrance into Latvia. And the slaughter began onlyafter a chain of command had been established. Considering the dates of the murders alone, thereis sufficient reason to say that killings could not have occurred in a fit of anger or as spontaneousrevenge, but that they were organized, ordered, and directed.

The killing of the Jews took place in a context different from the one promoted by Sovietpropaganda. No evidence about the killing of the Jews in Latvia should be considered as final, butin light of the new, glasnost evidence, the Soviet assertion that there was a spontaneous killing ofthe Jews in Latvia, and that the Latvians carried out murders without the German orders ispatently wrong.

If we probe the Nazi mind and the system of controls that was established from the early hours ofoccupation, there is every reason to think that the Nazis, in spite of what they said, did not wantthe Latvians to act spontaneously. Had there been any real spontaneity, punitive measures wouldhave followed it.

Historians with a predilection for perceiving predetermining historical forces should alsoconsider the absence of pogroms in Latvia's past. No Jewish synagogue had been burned inLatvia until after the Germans arrived. Among anti-Semites Latvia was known as a "Jewishcountry," not one where pogroms took place. The Latvian-Jewish relationships in the 1920swere not without their problems, but there was nothing that would have predicted the murders of1941. 71

Summing up the debate about the responsibility for the killing of the Jews of Latvia, there is someunclarity about the lines of authority in ordering the murders. There is the problem ofpartitioning the responsibility between a variety of German forces: the SD and the Wehrmacht.And there is also the problem of partitioning the responsibility for the murder of the Jewsbetween the Germans and the Latvians, especially as it pertains to the relationship between the

Einsatzkommando 2 of the German Security Police and SD and the Arajs commando.

The Causes of Latvian Participation

Relatively speaking, the Latvians were new to literary culture. There was no tradition of anti-Semitism such as existed in Germany and France. The anti-Semitic incidents that can bedocumented in Latvia do not predate 1919. In comparison with the frequency and consistency ofthe incidents in France, the Latvian incidents are minimal. On the other hand, Latvians were notnaive about anti-Semitism. Riga was an international metropolis, where even Wagner had spentsome youthful years. Everything known in Germany and Russia, the two major producers ofmodern anti-Semitism, was also known in Riga. But in Latvia's past there were no great minds,such as Wagner or Gobineau, who were tainted with anti-Semitism, and there were noarchitectural monuments with anti-Semitic images. The greatest of Latvia's poets, Janis Rainis, 72

was a philo-Semite, as was Karlis Balodis, the internationally known economist. 73 Up to the timeof the Nazi occupation, although Henry Ford's anti-Semitic opus was printed, only excerpts ofthe Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been translated into Latvian. It is unlikely that the Latvianswho participated in the killing of Jews had read, or even heard about either of the classics of anti-Semitism. The kind of anti-Semitism that demonized the Jew as a world conspirator, whichNorman Cohn documents in his magnificent study74 of the genesis of the Protocols of the Eldersof Zion, had no counterpart in Latvian culture.

Anti-Semitism in Latvia still awaits its historian. Once the full account is written, themes ofhostility towards Jews will undoubtedly be found, for the Jews by and large lived apart from theLatvians and were far from being integrated. However, if we give any credence to the Latvian anti-Semitic writers, the Latvian government and culture were friendly to Jews. They found hardlyanything in Latvia's past or then-present that showed sufficient awareness of the "Jewishproblem." It must also be noted that during Ulmanis' dictatorship, anti-Semitic writings werebanned from public life. This means that the majority of the young men who participated in thekillings were preteens or teenagers in 1934 and were not likely to have read up on the topic. Insummary, we can say that the demonization of the Jew, as it had evolved in France, Russia, andGermany, did not take place in Latvia before the German occupation in 1941.

Considering the "newness" of the Latvian culture and the absence of the image of the Jew as ademon, we must rely on more traditional, more pluralistic historical analysis to explain theLatvian participation in the Nazi crime: the impact of Nazi propaganda, the principle of higherorders, and a collective madness, brought on by the occupation of their country and the war.Above all, the Germans obtained Latvian participation in the killings by popularizing the idea ofJewish Bolshevism. Though the linkage was false, the propaganda was relentless andconcentrated. In effect, the Jewish Bolshevism label was the blood libel of old, which related tothe killing of Christ in antiquity.

Propaganda

The first Nazi propaganda gambits in Latvia did not in any public way call for the death of Jews.There was no direct radio call to kill Jews, as is sometimes asserted, but there was a great deal ofanti-Semitic propaganda coming over the radio waves, which began with the Latvian-language

broadcasts from Konigsberg in the predawn hours of June 22, 1941. 75

The more serious anti-Semitic propaganda began on the streets: posters announcing restrictionson the Jews; they were forbidden to stand in lines; they were forced into labor gangs. Anotherimportant early step was the disinterring of the corpses of victims of the communists andaccusing the Jews for their death. During the first weeks of occupation the major news in the Nazipress in Latvia was pictures showing the victorious German army and the half-rotten corpses thathad been dug up in a variety of massacre sites. 76 The identification of these corpses was part ofthe on-going activity. Anti-Jewish sentiments were further inflamed by repeatedly referring to theJews as Chekists and associating Jews with communism. The dominant phrase in the Nazi pressin Latvia was Jewish-Bolshevism. 77 In addition to the "news" in the press, Latvians were invitedto visit the communist torture chambers. One such tour through the Cheka cellars was describedby a medical student:

The Germans were quick to show up communist atrocities. And then everyone dug up thecorpses of relatives and took them away. And there was "Baltezers" and the Cheka cellars[...] At the time I was still studying in the medical school. Then from the school we were takento an excursion to the Cheka. We were not taken to the cellar, but the guide told us what hadhappened there. There had been an entrance from the corner, I remember, and we went inthrough it, then we went through a room and came into a garage —there was a rectangular,slightly elongated, garage. The exit from the garage was directly to the yard. On the oppositeside of the garage there was an iron gate, that now leads out to Stabu iela. Along the wall inthe garage there were enclosures (boksi). It seems I saw two such enclosures, where theshooting had taken place. You could see the wall riddled with bullets, and splattered withgray matter and everything else. The drain that washes the blood away was also shown. Theguide told us that the shooting took place therein and then the bodies were piled into a truckand taken away. 78

The anti-Semitic propaganda was a many-leveled, coordinated assault. Visits to a torturechamber, such as this medical student was given, were intended to deliver an anti-Semiticmessage without saying so in so many words.

Higher Orders

Both the Wehrmacht and the SD, as they entered Latvia, were careful not to allow any competingcommand structure, regardless of how small, to remain under Latvian control. The Nazissimultaneously militarized the police and made police forces out of the military units. In bothcases the Germans were the important link in the structure. Until January 1942, all Latviansserving in police units, the SD, or the Schutzmannschaften were volunteers. During the first twomonths of the occupation it was possible to resign from the unit. No Latvian was coerced toparticipate in the atrocities. The attrition within the Arajs commando, as well as theSchutzmannschaften forces, in the beginning was very high. Why some left and others stayed toparticipate in killings is more a question for a psychiatrist than a historian. All of the activities,however, took place within established structures. That is, nothing happened in Latvia without anorder. 79

Numbers of Latvian Participants

As the exact number of victims of the Nazi occupation will never be known, neither will thenumbers of people participating in the killings. First of all, it is not so clear what should be calledparticipation. If one includes only the people who did the actual killings, that is one thing. Underthose criteria, the numbers of Latvians carrying out the bloody assignments perhaps would notreach 500. It took only twelve of Jeckeln's men to kill the 24,000 victims in the two-dayRumbula action. Yet the Rumbula action required about 1,500 men to stand guard and lead thevictims to the killing grounds. One frequently hears that the killing of the Jews was such animmense assignment that the Germans could not have done it without Latvian or other "native"help. Still, in terms of manpower it did not take very many people to liquidate the 65,000 LatvianJews. Himmler, knowing the psychic damage that the assignment would inflict, did not want tocontaminate an undue number of his troops. Further, the killings were never intended as publicevents; a certain secrecy was observed. As it was, the SD received criticism from other Germansfor letting Latvians do the killings: they talked and drank too much, and they became witnesses ofthe murders. The Gebietskommissar of Liepaja suggested that, if the Latvians were allowed to killJews, they must be murdered afterwards. 80 Most of the killings occurred during early morninghours and, with some exceptions, 81 in isolated locations. Thus the need for secrecy kept thenumber of people involved in the killing low.

There were two types of killing actions: one, such as Rumbula, was manpower-extensive; othersused very few. The numbers of people used in the killings of course depended on the number ofvictims. As already stated in the Rumbula action there were about 24,000 Jews whom Jeckeln haddecided to kill in two days. The ghetto was about ten kilometers away from the killing field, andthe Jews were driven there on foot. This required a very large number of men to guard theperiphery of the killing grounds and to drive the victims to it. In the Rumbula action as many as1,500 Latvians might have participated as guards and expediters of the action. At least 800 of theLatvians were drawn from the Riga precinct police force. In this action perhaps more Latvianswere complicit than in any other action during the occupation.

Most, if not all, other killing actions in Latvia involved a much smaller number of participants.Jews were driven from the camps to the killing grounds in groups of twenty to thirty, dependingon the size of the trucks. Upon arrival, the group was quickly killed. This method required veryfew guards. One dozen guards would have sufficed. The killing would be done by twenty to fortymen, sometimes fewer. This was the method used by Arajs commando in the Bikernieki murdersand in most small-town killings. The massacres in Liepaja and Daugavpils fell somewhere inbetween, but in general the Bikernieki pattern was followed. In comparison to Jeckeln'sprocedure and the conveyor-belt methods in the killing camps of Poland, this was a slow process.Nevertheless, the numbers added up: about one hundred Jews could be killed in one hour. Itwould take about one day to kill 1,000 people. The Arajs team, traveling in its infamous blue bus,on occasion stopped in several places on the same day. Not all of the small-town Jews were killedby Arajs' men. Sometimes the killing in places such Madona, Nereta, and Kuldiga, was done bylocal policemen. That was an exception, and in the small towns of Latvia the complicity of theLatvian policemen consisted of their standing guard at the detention centers and the killinggrounds. Perhaps no more than 1,000 Latvian policemen, in addition to those in Riga, wereinvolved in the killings.

Assigning responsibility to the local policemen is a difficult if not impossible problem. Thedensity of the population of Jews in Latvia differed greatly from district to district. In localities ofhigh Jewish concentration the participation of Latvians could be expected to be higher. But,those were also the cities most frequently visited by the Arajs commando. Nine locations with thehighest concentration of Jews in Latvia accounted for about 85 percent of Latvian Jews.Consequently, most of Latvia's policemen had no dealings at all with Jews. Soviet propaganda hasattempted to link the Schutzmannschaft battalions to the killing of the Jews, but it must be notedthat the first of these battalions were organized only in late 1941 and early 1942, when the Jewsof Latvia were already dead.

The Latvian Guilt

The question of Latvian guilt in the killing of the Jews is more subtle and more complicated thanthat of the Germans. Latvia was an occupied country. Unlike in Belgium, Holland, and Denmark,martial law prevailed. The Nazis asked for no Latvian advice about the Jewish question. NoLatvian was in a position to perform the role of a Petain. The General Directors and the Latvianquisling administrators were too far removed from any decision about the Jews. The calculus ofguilt must include Latvians as Nazi victims. No genocide against the Latvians, thoughcontemplated, had been carried out; about 15,000 non-Jewish Latvians in all were killed duringthe Nazi occupation. It could be argued that the German engagement of Latvians in the killing ofJews was a type of victimization. It is, however, a historical fact that the Arajs commando,consisting mostly of Latvians, was a unique unit with no exact counterpart in occupied Europe.

Latvian writings about the killing of Jews in their country exhibit several levels of remorse. Thereare definite generational attitudes involved. Younger Latvians who experienced the Holocaust aspreteens or teens, or even those who were not born then, seem to feel a higher degree of guiltthan those who were adults during the occupation. No generalization can be safely made, becausethe topic has not been studied and samples are very few.

The Latvians in Latvia pose a special problem. For a half a century they were gagged by the KGBas it dealt with the Holocaust on its own terms. Indeed, there is a triple problem: the topic wasdriven underground and was not discussed and clarified as it has been in the West; the Sovietsused the issues of the Holocaust to beat down the Latvians — the Soviets were taught to refer tothe Latvians as fascists and Germans; and many glasnost historians and journalists are too youngto know or care much about the Holocaust. Long after the notion of a collective guilt ceased to beapplied to countries in the West, the KGB continued to use it against people in Soviet-occupiedterritories. The basic thrust of today's independent Latvia is to recreate the Latvian-Jewishrelations as they were during Latvia's parliamentary times. Latvia's Supreme Council hasaccepted a resolution of regrets, but as yet no wide-ranging debate about the Jewish fate in Nazitimes has taken place.

Janis Lejins epitomizes the attitude of the older generation of Latvians, those who were in a moreor less administrative position during the occupation. Lejins was the manager of the IrlavaCorrection Farm for Adolescents when, on July 24, 1941, eight Jews who worked there weretaken away by policemen to the pagasts center. From there, the Jews were taken to Tukums, and,as Lejins heard it, they were killed on the following day. Lejins regards, in spite of the specificcircumstances, the killing as an act of the Germans:

The Germans somehow were rushing the "action," but did not divulge the reason for it. Thesame was happening in Riga. This information bothered me a lot. To read of Hitler'srantings about the purity of the race is one thing, but to find out that murder has takenplace among us was another matter. Eight people, who just yesterday were working for me,without a crime and a trial — killed!... Could we have saved them? A thought like that theneven did not arise, because nobody knew that they needed to be saved from anybody. Myclerk had received the order to surrender the Jews. I questioned the clerk, whether he hadasked for the reason why the people were taken away, when we needed them here. He hadasked, but the policeman did not know it either, except that it was stressed that it was a

strict German order that must be carried out without delay. 83

Lejins also notes that "it was not within Latvian power to start that action or to end it."

It is difficult to say how much remorse Lejins feels about the Jews. He implies none. He tells usthat the Latvians could not have helped the Jews and that at the time, late July, no one was awareof any dangers to the Jews. The problem of knowledge is the pivotal one: though Jews were notkilled in the open, could Lejins, a man who had contacts with Riga and other centers, claimignorance? Whose guilt may he be hiding — his own? His nation's?

We have virtually no good samples of Latvian opinion about the killing of the Jews from the timeof the German occupation. The few underground mimeographed publications available do notaddress the question frequently or forcefully. In 1943 Latvian trade unionists sent out an appealto the International Federation of the Trade Unions, explaining the Latvian attitude towards thekilling of the Jews:

The German terrorism was even more ruthless than the Russian had been. We have no exactdata about the number of persons executed in and deported from the Baltic states by theGermans. However, according to conservative estimates, from Latvia alone about 10,000have been executed and some 50,000 deported. Many thousands are imprisoned andinterned in concentration camps. Moreover, in all three Baltic countries there have beenmurdered practically all citizens of Jewish race who lived in the countries at the time whenthe Germans invaded the Baltic states. Latvia had about 90,000 Jews; perhaps 20,000 ofthis number escaped with the Russians; in the ghetto of Riga there are now some 3,000Jews; the rest have been murdered by the Germans. Significantly, the Germans are nowspreading the lie that it was the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians who had killed theJews. In Latvia, the Germans' cynicism went as far as to film the execution of Jews. In thefilm, by the side of the victims, guards in Latvian uniform are to be seen. These were eitherhooligans bribed or intoxicated by the Germans or persons who had been placed under thethreat of execution. All these mass murders are on the German conscience, the localpopulation condemns them with abomination. The persons responsible for these massacresare:

Gruppenfuhrer Schroder, the Leader of the German SS, and Sturmbannfuhrer Lange, theChief of the Security Police in Latvia. 84

Among Latvian writers abroad, the deepest sense of regret has been shown by novelist EduardsFreimanis, but he was closer to the killing action than Lejins, and fully aware of the facts.Freimanis is from Kuldiga, where as a young man he was a member of the local self-defensegroup. He worked in the weapons storeroom, and among other assignments he had to pass outweapons and ammunition to the murderers of the Jews. He knew the people who did the killingand also many of the local Jews who were killed. Among the victims was a school friend.Freimanis returns in many works to the July days in Kuldiga. 85 The killers in his works search fora solution in alcohol, God, and insanity.

The crimes of the Latvian past also weigh heavily on the conscience of Richards Ridzinieks. Theprotagonist of his novel, like a Freimanis hero, ends up in an insane asylum. The ever-recurringquestion for Ridzinieks' protagonist is: ".... and then?" 86 Among the literary works in which thequestion of the murder of Jews is placed at the center of Latvian collective consciousness are apoem by Qjars Vacietis, "Rumbula," 87 and one by Voldemars Avens, "Zilais Autobuss." 88

If suicide and mental breakdown are an admission of guilt, then the life histories of the membersof the killing squads could provide rich data. Although no one has collected them, tales exist onthe level of folklore, and numerous Latvians over sixty years of age would have heard about Jew-shooters who became insane or committed suicide. The two best-known cases of suicides of Arajsmen are those of Lieutenant Dibietis, an Arajs sidekick from the early days of the commando, andLt. Roberts Freimuts. 89

Janis Eduards Zirnis, who served for a time in the Arajs unit, has struggled with his conscience. Inthe 1960s he founded a bureau of war crimes investigation — Comité international de laresistance et des victimes du fascisme — and wrote long letters to Nazi-hunters. Egons Jansons, amember of the commando who testified in the Arajs trial, has lived in Germany and been in andout of jails and mental hospitals all his life. On the other side of the ledger, Jazeps Linarts, aresident of Latvia who participated in the Liepaja killings, denied feeling guilt when questionedin the Grauel trial. 90 In general, the surviving witnesses of the Arajs commando in Latvia,questioned by a variety of Western prosecuting attorneys, do not seem to show much remorse.But questions of conscience were not much probed by the interrogators. The witnesses in Latvia,as a rule, had been punished, and most of them had spent time in Siberia. 91

The emigres who tend to reject Latvian guilt have a number of arguments that in general relate toLatvian powerlessness under Nazi occupation:

• No public defense of Jews, e.g. a pastor's plea for mercy, was possible. To show any sympathyfor Jews would have meant dismissal from one's position, as the cases of several pastors indicate.

• Hiding a Jew was a crime punishable at the very least with imprisonment, and thus the wholefamily would suffer.

• The Jews of Latvia were killed fast, and there was no time or means to react to the massacres.

• Western and Soviet radio, the only lines to the outside world, were silent on the issue. Theintelligence services of Great Britain, the United States, and Sweden, who could have issuedwarnings, clarified Nazi policies, and warned Latvians of the price for collaboration, had nothingto say. Under Soviet pressure, the Allied and neutral foreign affairs offices in London,Washington, and Stockholm denied the Latvian diplomats and democrats abroad access to theradio waves.

• The Nazis managed to penetrate Latvian society with spies and collaborators, and thus greatlyundermined any native resistance. It took some time for the Latvians to discover that the Naziswere as dangerous to their country as were the Soviets.

• Numerous European Jews had found refuge in Latvia when the doors of many other countries,including Sweden, were closed.

• Proportionally, whatever their guilt, more Latvians have been punished for Nazi crimes thanGermans.

• After everything is said and done, numerous Latvians risked their lives to save Jews, somesuccessfully, others not. 92

There is a sizable group of emigres who not only reject any question of Latvian guilt, butendeavor to turn the tables by arguing that the Jews themselves are responsible for their fatebecause they brought it on themselves by collaborating with either the communists or the Cheka.93

Regardless of what one could say about the defenselessness of Latvians under the Germans andthe difficulties of helping Jewish victims, the inner guilt that many Latvians suffer arises becausethere was a commando of Latvians who killed the Jews, and because numerous Latvians lostneighbors and friends. This guilt is both personal—the loss of a neighbor, friend, school friend,student, employee—and national—Latvia's body politic, crushed and broken as it was, washelpless in defending its citizens.

Analyzing German guilt in 1946, Karl Jaspers posited that there were four types of guilt underwhich the German people were laboring: criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical.

Criminal Guilt

There certainly were numerous Latvians who were criminally guilty. Those who participateddirectly in the murder of the Jews should be criminally condemned, even if to speak ofpunishment for most of them in 1996 is too late for this world. The criminally guilty, using thecriteria of the war crimes trials in the West, would involve about 500 to 600 men, 1,000 at themost. That would include four dozen journalists who wrote, edited, and published Nazipropaganda about the Jews. 94

Political Guilt

Little political guilt should be ascribed to any Latvian. Every Latvian official, high or low, waschosen by the Germans. The Latvian quislings, if we want to attach that name to the members ofthe General Directorate of the Latvian Self-Administration and its employees, were not even truequislings, because they had no decision-making powers except to assent to the request of theirGerman supervisors and occasionally to propagandize German policies. It is not known whetherany measure, regardless of how innocuous, that the General Directorate initiated was accepted bythe Germans. The General Directors perhaps had less independent decision-making powers thandid the elders of the pagasts, the local farmers' communities. None of the General Directorsspoke up for the Jews. To begin with, they were chosen for their Nazi proclivities, anti-Semitismbeing one of the criteria. Had they tried to defend the Jews, retribution would have beeninstantaneous. There are several lower-level Latvians whose signatures are attached to ordersleading to the death of Jews; among them the most prominent are Colonel Lobe, MartinsVagulans, and Lieutenant R. Bluzmanis. 95 In all cases, however, when a Latvian did sign an anti-Jewish law or directive, the paper trail leads to the Einsatzkommando. The guilt of the Lobe,Vagulans, and Bluzmanis was criminal, not political.

Moral and Metaphysical Guilt

In Jaspers' view one incurs moral guilt when one does not make the ethically correct choice. Inmatters of moral choice the principle of higher order is not an excuse for committing a crime. The

moral guilt is incurred by those who were in the proximity of the crime, but did not object whenthey were in a position to do so, or when they did not refuse an order, although in a position torefuse it. In moral matters ignorance is no excuse. Moral guilt, in Jasper's view, is determined byoneself, but also by friends and intimates "who are lovingly concerned about my soul." Onecould add to Jaspers' meditations that community, too, has a role to play in defining one's moralobligations.

Metaphysical guilt comes out of the sense of solidarity of all men "that makes each co-responsiblefor every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presenceor with his knowledge." Jurisdiction for metaphysical guilt rests with God alone. 96 The questionsof moral and metaphysical guilt are subjects more for philosophers and religious thinkers thanhistorians to contemplate. One can, however, register that in the Latvian intellectual communitysince World War II, aside from a handful of literary works, there has been little to nocontemplation of the Latvian guilt in the killing of Jews of Latvia.

Notes

1 For an excellent discussion of various facets of anti-Semitism, see Sander L. Oilman and Steven T. Katz, eds.Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis.

2 Among the general texts on the Holocaust, I include American Jewish Conference, Nazi Germany's WarAgainst the Jews', Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews; Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust',Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution; and Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945.

3 There were numerous mass-murder sites in Latvia, but the Mezaparks KZ, brutal as it was, was not one ofthem. Gilbert is also wrong in saying that in 1944 tens of thousands were transported from Riga to Stutthof. In factthe most optimistic estimates of surviving Jews in Latvia would not exceed 12,000. Mezaparks KZ was opened in late1943, about two years after the killing period in Latvia.

4 Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, p. 398.

5 The administrative structures in various European countries are described in Raul Hilberg, PerpetratorsVictims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, pp. 75-102. About the rescue of Danish Jews see"Danes Commemorate Rescue of Jews from Nazis," The New York Times, 28 September 1993, p. A3.

6 Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, pp. 22-42.

7 Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, p. 67, is pleased with Pritz Fischer's Griff nach derWeltmacht, because it asserted the principle of continuity in German history, and Karl Dietrich Bracher's DieDeutsche Diktatur (1969), because the author was "the first non-Jewish historian anywhere who has recognized thatiron) the start the Nazis assigned primacy of place, in doctrine and in action, to make hatred of the Jews, with all itstragic consequences, a cardinal feature of the state's policy."

8 xxx

9 Wilhelm's work on the Einsatzgruppe A still confirms this view. See Helmut Krausnick and Hans-HeinrichWilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, Teil II.

10 For example, this tendency to blame the Abwehr for the atrocities is found in V. Cherednichenko,Collaborationists, as pertaining to Ukraine. Janis Dzintars' Nere-dzams fronte is a good example of this tendency asit pertains to Latvia.

11 The role of the Wehrmacht has been especially emphasized by Margeris Vestermanis in his essay, "DerLettische Anteil an der «Endlosung»."

12 This is evident from Stahlecker's Consolidated Report of October 15, p. 17: "The Wehrmacht commandershaving been instructed understood such activity, the self-purging actions could progressed without any problems."

13 For efforts to coordinate SD activities with the Wehrmacht see YIVO Archive documents: "fur die miltarischeSicherung und flir Aufrechterhaltung der Ruhe und Ordnung im Ostland," YIVO Occ E3 3, and Keitel'smemorandum of 12 September 1941,YIVO,OccE33.

14 One of the authors who worked in this genre was Helen Fein, Accounting/or Genocide. The premise of Fein'sbook is that the Holocaust is not so much explained by the Nazi occupation as by the social attitudes of the localpeople.

15 Max Kaufmann, Die Vernichtung.

16 Kaufmann, Die Vernichtung, p. 62.

17 Kaufmann, "The War Years in Latvia Revisited," pp. 365-366.

18 The real author of this pamphlet, as of many others, was Paulis Ducmanis, who during the Nazi occupation

worked in the Nazi press. After the war, the NKVD persuaded Ducmanis to work for them. In 1963, the Ducmanisopus came out in Gladys Evans' English translation, Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are They? Thereafter it also appearedin Swedish and German translations. Other pamphlets of similar type were Arvlds Rupeika Politiskie begli bezmaskas (The Latvian Emigrants Unmasked), B. Arklavs, J. Dzirkalis, J. Silabriedis, Vini bez maskas (Riga: 1966); J.Dzirkalis, KSpec vini bega? Patiesiba par latviesu nacionalo fondu Zviedrija (1965); and M. Birznieks, No SS un SDlidz.... (Riga: 1979). A specialized sub-genre was one that picked out Latvian churchmen as guilty of Nazi crimes.See (Anon) Cilveki bez sirdsapzinos. Riga: KGB publication, 1961); and E. Stabins, Kangari talaros (Riga: KGBpublication, 1968). These pamphlets contained much information about the Holocaust in Latvia, but very little,aside from the documents, could be proven, as numerous court cases based on the information derived from thesepamphlets have shown.

19 Among the authors who listed the book in their bibliography, quoted or paraphrased from the KGB literature,and were influenced by its logic were Helen Fcin, Gertrude Schneider, Bernhard Press, Howard Blum, Roschelle G.Saidel, and Christopher Simpson. The most surprising addiction to the KGB literature was shown by Alan Ryan, theerstwhile director of the OSI, in his book Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, in which theguiding metaphor of quiet neighbors is derived from Soviet literature, especially Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are They?Citations from the pamphlets also appear in Dov Levin, Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities.

20 At a certain point in my study of the Holocaust in Latvia, for polemical purposes I asserted that about 75percent of the booklet was true. That was at the beginning; the deeper I have entered the subject, the falser thebooklet has turned out to be; pictures and documents are misidentified, the guilty and the innocent are mismatchedwith the time and place of the atrocities described. Today Bernard Press, Judenmord in Lettland, 1941-1945 (1988and 1992), is the major continuer of the KGB tradition. He has taken pictures from various European cities whereJews were mistreated and identified them as scenes on a Riga street in 1941. He has also printed a picture of burninga Berlin synagogue in 1938 and identified it as the burning of a Riga synagogue in 1941.

21 In November 1941 Himmler dispatched Jeckeln to Riga, appointed him as the HSSPF, and ordered him toempty Riga of its Jews and other ghettos of the Baltic. In November, Jeckeln took over from Stahlecker theassignment to kill the Jews of Ostland and Russia's North. As a minimum, during his stay from November 1941 toSeptember 1944, when he left Riga, Jeckeln was responsible for 150,000 deaths in the Baltic. If one includes all ofthe Jews he ordered killed in Ukraine, before arriving in Riga, and all of the Jews killed in Belorussia, the figure easilycan be doubled or even tripled. In Latvia alone he was responsible for at least 45,000 Jewish deaths. Jeckeln wassentenced to die for war crimes, and hanged on Uzvaras laukums in Riga, on February 2, 1946.

22 Kaufmann, Die Vernichtung, p. 536. The same idea, differently phrased, is also on p. 68.

23 Some of Jeckeln's interrogation documents were obtained by the Hamburg Landgericht in connection with thewar crimes trials of Maywald and Arâjs. Most of them are reprinted in Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe desWeltanschauungskrieges; also in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, pp. 95-100. Some of Jeckeln'stestimony is also found in Tiesas prava.

24 Kaufmann, Die Vernichtung, p. 67.

25 Ducmanis, Kas ir Daugavas Vanagi, p. 12.

26 Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, p. 569.

27 Landgericht Hamburg: Urteil, Hem Georg Theodor Triihe, April 29, 1975, p. 28.

28 The first time the idea of sending Jews to Riga was floated was at the end of September 1941, in Berlin, byHimmler in a letter to Geiser. The idea was again raised by Heydrich in an October 10, 1941, RSHA meeting on the"Final Solution." Heydrich suggested that 50,000 Jews be sent to Riga and Minsk. See Raul Hilberg, TheDestruction of the European Jews, vol. II, p. 402.

29 Gertrude Schneider ("The Riga Ghetto, 194M943") pp. 44-45. She especially documents Lohse'sopposition to the movement of Jews to the Baltic.

30 See Schneider's critique of Kaufmann in "The Riga Ghetto 1941-1943," pp. 9-10.

31 Schneider, "The Riga Ghetto," and Journey into Terror: Story of the Riga Ghetto. In many parts thedissertation is fuller than the book based on it.

32 Zanis Unams has written a whole series of treatises critical of the Latvian leadership during the Germanoccupation. The most important of them are Melna vara (The Black Power), 1955, and Zem Barbarosas skepa(Under the Sword of Barbarossa), 1975.

33 Oskars Dankers has left two books that are highly defensive of his position under the Nazis, and reveal less thanthey conceal: Lai vesture spriez tiesu and a collection of articles about him that include a number of his speeches. Noatminupura. Irma Dankere in her hefty memoir Daudz tu man soliji...(1982), chooses to talk about happier days ofher family's life, before and after the war, reducing the coverage of the war years to about one half of a page.

34 Adolfs Blakis, Medalas otra puse.

35 In a full sense of the word Alfreds Valdmanis has not written his memoirs, but many think that Boris' Dienasbaltas nebaltas, a boastful little book, in effect is a Valdmanis memoir. Some insight into Valdmanis' career also canbe gleaned from his letters to Edgars Andersons, "Atminas kavejoties," Treji VSrti, no. 95-98.

36 Gustavs Celmins' memoirs Eiropas krustcefos (1947) deal almost exclusively with his experiences in theGerman concentration camps and not with his encounter with the Nazis in 1941.

37 The fullest discussion of this problem is to be found in M. Bobe et al. (eds.). The Jews in Latvia. For theLatvian point of view, see Edgars Andersons, "Tns bezvalsts tautas Latvija," Treji VSrfi, no. 94, pp. 9-16.

38 There is no reason to imply that all editors were accessories to Nazi crimes. A distinguished democraticnewspaper Latvju Zirias, edited by Dagnija Sleiers, for a brief number of years was published in Stockholm. Amongthe authors who found limited possibility of publication in the emigre press one can mention M. Valters, A. Berkis,and Z. Unams.

39 Osvalds Freivalds et al. (eds.), Latviesu karavirs. Also to be noted are Arnolds Sinkis, Kurzemes cietoksnis; A.Plensners, Informacija par Latviesu le^ionu. Among the full-length memoirs by the fighting soldiers of World WarII there are Vilis Hazners, VarmScTbas lorni; Vilis Janums, Mana pulka kaujas gatlas; Julijs Kilitis, Es karaaiziedams', A. Lasmanis, Ceribas un vilsanas', Rudolfs Bangerskis, Mana muza atminas; Oskars Perro, Holmascietoksnis;Vestures veidotaji; Neuzvareto tragedija, and Varaviksnes loka.

40 Among the periodicals we can mention DV Menesraksts, Kara Invalids, Latvija Ameriks and Treji Vsrti.

41 As a counterpoint to the writers who have confronted the war and the Holocaust we can name Eglitis, Es nebijuvaronis, and Zeitins, Pazuduss paaudze, both prolific writers, who, in spite of the opportunities that the respectiveworks presented to them, failed to deal with the killing of the Jews.

42 Valentins Pelecis, Maleniesa pasaule, vol. Ill, pp. 147-157, briefly told about the internment of the AluksneJews.

43 Rungis, Salaspils in Aivars Rungis et al., Tns lugas (Celinieks, 1980). The Rungis play is a highly stylizedpiece, written in a modernistic mode, intending more to symbolize Latvia's entrapment by its powerful neighborsthan to highlight the concrete Nazi atrocities committed in Latvia's best-known KZ camp.

44 Ziverts, in Pedeja laiva, depicts a situation in a bunker at the Baltic Sea shore, before the last boat left forSweden. A young Latvian gives up his seat so a Jewish woman can escape.

A KGB source lists the following Arâjs commando members (some listed only by their code name) who worked astheir informers in Latvia: Pekavs, Krauze, Feniks, Apse, Grigorevs, Lauks, Edvards, Kaija, Raimonds Zaikalns, Janislezens, Aleksandrs, Andrejs, Zveinieks, Janis, Manfreds, Valdis, Lorencs, Erglis, Kurosins, Karlis Strazds, JanisVitols, Sterns, Boris Kinslers, Brokans, Vitols, TTgeris, Marsans, Vladims Klingeris, Janis Zaiitis, Olgerts Lacis,Haralds Leja, Valdemars Sulmanis, Rolfs Ozols, Beglis, Melnais, Smilga, Julijs (Edgars) Vitols, Manfreds Puzule(^iternoje Delo, vol. 12, an uncatalogued KGB collection of Arâjs commando personnel in Latvian State Archives).

46 The full title of the commission read: Republikas Arkarteja Komisija vacu fasistisko iebruceju un to

lidzdalibnieku pastradato noziegumu konstatesanai un izmeklesanai, ka ari Latvijas PSR pilsoniem,lauksaimniecibai, sabiedriskajam organizacijam, valsts uznemumiem un iestadem nodarito zaudejumu konstatesanai,Latvijas PSR maza enciklopedija, Sejums I (Riga, 1967), pp. 99-100. If anything, the commission overdid itsassignment: it found that during the German occupation in the territory of Latvia 313,798 civilians, among them39,835 children, and 330,032 POWs were killed (Mes apsudzam, p. 6). In all categories these are phenomenalnumbers.

47 The Arajs commando trials comprise only a small part of the 40,000 cases that the KGB archive holds in Riga.

48 The secrecy extended to the Soviet desire even to hide the number of Latvian communists killed during theoccupation. See Samsons, Kurzemes mezi salc, p. 19.

49 For example, the Soviets knew exactly how many men served in the Arajs commando, but the documents werenever given to the Hamburg justices. In the Maikovskis case the Soviets had the rosters of men serving underMaikovskis, but they were never given to the Americans.

50 For Soviet attitudes towards Nazi evidence, see Vilnis Zarins, "Laupitaju filozofija," p. 69. According toZarins, other people advised him to leave the topic alone because fascism had been so thoroughly defeated that itsreincarnation in a scholarly study was no longer needed. He writes: "In accordance with the rules of the times, apublication about national socialism was not allowed to contain precise citations and its sources from the works ofHitler and his followers because that would give a forum to the enemies. I was told to leave out the precise citations,substituting them with paraphrases, and the interpretation of the texts—with cursing."

51 The only reliable work on the Holocaust, more on the peripheral issues of the Holocaust than Holocaust itself,was done by Margers Vestermanis. See Vestermanis, T_ rikojas vermahts. Vestermanis was also responsible for thedocument collection, Mes apsudzam, although his name was not mentioned in the roster of editors.

52 Frida Michelson was not allowed to publish her memoirs within the Soviet Union. See her I Survived Rumbuli,p. 231.

53 For example, it is well established that the NKVD troops at the time of German entrance into Latvia blockedthe Latvian-USSR frontier, preventing Jews from Latvia and Lithuania from escaping to the Soviet interior. Also tobe noted is Stalin's radio speech of July 3, in which he fails to mention the Jews and the special danger that they facedunder the Nazis. A warning by Stalin on July 3, 1941, could not have perhaps saved Latvia's Jews, but with properwarnings and help the fate of the Kiev Jews could have been much different.

54 Latvijas PSR Zinatnu Akademija, Latviesu tautas cina Lielaja Tevjjas kara.

55 Latvijas KP CK Partijas vestures instituts, Reiz celas strelnieks sarkanais.

56 Kurzemes katia (1969) is an earlier version of Kurzemes mezi sale. Among his other works the more significantare Partizanu kustiba Ziemellatvijs Lielaja Tevijas kara (1950), Devinpadsmitais—Sarkano partizanu gads (1970),and Cauri puteniem (1983).

57 See above.

58 The Salaspils Memorial Park (encompassing forty hectares) was opened on October 31, 1967. The parkconsists of an entrance structure ("the boundary line between life and death"), a concrete-clad ceremonialquadrangle, and the Road of Sorrows, which encircles the camp grounds, along which rise seven figures sculpted inrough pebbled concrete: The Undefeated, The Humiliated, The Protest, The Pledge, Red Front, The Solidarity, andThe Mother. On the left side of the ceremonial quadrangle is the spiritual center of the Memorial Park, the wreath-laying platform, with a perpetual metronome pulse, symbolizing the heartbeat of the 7,000 children killed in thecamp. It is located on the alleged site of a barracks where some of the 7,000 children were housed. See Latvijas PSRmaza enciklopedlja, vol. Ill (1970), pp. 277-78. As Soviet historiography of the Holocaust frequently containsexaggerations or lies, unfortunately the stone memorial is no exception. The story of the 7,000 children killed inSalaspils is likely to be false. The Reich Jews built the camp but, when in the fall of 1942 they were returned to theghetto, Gentile prisoners were moved in. It is true that in late 1943 numerous Belorussia children were temporarily

incarcerated in the camp, there is no record that they were killed. Viktors Neimanis, who was an inmate of Salaspilsduring 1943 and 1944, testified that in Salaspils there never were Jewish children housed or killed. The housing of7,000 children was much beyond what the Salaspils camp could accommodate.

59 Vilnis Zarins, "Laupitaju filozofija."

60 The reliability of the survivor witnesses is examined in Landgericht Hannover, Strafurteil gegen Grauel undandere, pp. 37 and 42.

61 The most frequently mentioned Latvian, far exceeding Arajs, is Herberts Cukurs, the famous aviator. Residentsof the ghetto also tend to remember Danckops, the commander of the Latvian ghetto guards.

62 Schneider, "The Riga Ghetto," p. 202, states: "Some [German functionaries] were trusted as well asrespected. It was not so with any of the Latvian SS guards. Here the ethnocentricity of the German Jews reared ithead. They were hated and despised, not only for their cruelty, but also for their alleged backwardness." TheEuropean Jews, as soon as they arrived in the Riga ghetto, germanized the ghetto street names, usually changing theLatvian names to names of German cities.

63 For more details about the Lutrins and Medale testimony, see Chapter 8.

64 In the literature of the Holocaust, the Gestapo was frequently mentioned as the killing agency. In Latvia,however, the Gestapo presence was not very visible. The umbrella organization was the SD, and the Gestapo wassubsumed under it. Jiirgen Kroeger, a Baltic German interpreter for the Riga SD, when introduced to his job, wastold:

"Unsere Abteilung ist eine Nachrichten-Abtellung. Wir sind so zusagen der lange Arm der Gestapo." (Kroeger, So wares, p. 89).

65 Max Kaufmann has been perhaps the only one who has portrayed what he calls Latvian actions in front of andwithin the courtyard of the Riga prefecture. No doubt Kaufmann was correct in describing the scene. But insuggesting that it was a spontaneous action he is wrong, because the prefecture building at the time that Kaufmann isdescribing the scene was occupied by Stahlecker. See Chapter 7.

66 In the case against Grauel et al., the Hannover Landgericht considered this question and came to theconclusion that under the circumstances Arajs could not have acted alone or spontaneously: It is impossible that

"...under the conditions, just a few weeks after the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, in an occupiedterritory, an armed Latvian commando, under independent Latvian orders, more or less under the view of theresponsibility and participation of the local German authorities in the land, could move around and carry out largerexecutions of the Jews." Locally in Liepaja there was a headquarters of the Security Police and the SD, and Kligler'scommando.

67 ???

source: http://vip.latnet.lv/lpra/EZERG_intr.html