The Crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police
In early July 1941, immediately following the arrival in RÄ«ga , Latvia, of the first units of the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppe (EG) A, a small group of Latvians under the leadership of a former police lieutenant and law student named Viktors ArÄjs volunteered for service with the German security forces. Officially, it was designated the âLatvian Auxiliary Security Police,â but unofficially it was dubbed the âArajs Kommando,â after its leader whose name meant âplowman.â After a rampage in the first days following the Germansâ entry that killed several hundred Jews on the streets of RÄ«ga , the capital of Latvia, and burned down its synagogues, the Arajs Kommando was deemed worthy of new tasks by its Nazi masters. These included the arbitrary invasion of the cityâs Jewish homes and the terrorization, robbery, and arrest of the residents; the routine shooting of Jews and Communists in the BiÄ·ernieki forest outside of the city in early morning mass executions; and mobile operations, traversing the Latvian hinterland and acting as the triggermen in the organized âliquidationâ of the Jews of Latviaâs small towns and countryside.
Over these first few months of the German occupation, the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police became better organized, its initial core of about 300 rowdy volunteers expanded while becoming ever more experienced and disciplined, and its uniforms and equipment became standardized. On 30 November and 8 December 1941, the Arajs Kommando was instrumental in providing the cordon for the notorious Rumbula Action that took place in the Rumbula forest outside of RÄ«ga . This was the second largest mass shooting of the Holocaust up to that point, the 25,000-plus victims of which were exceeded in number only by the victims at the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev the previous September. German, Austrian, and Czech Jews deported to Latvia then became the Kommandoâs next targets, the Jews of Latvia having already been killed except for a small remnant reserved for slave labor. After selected members of the Kommando had been sent to formal Security Service (SD) training in Germany and returned, rotating sections of the newly professionalized unit were deployed to German-occupied Belarus . There, the Latvian Auxiliary Security Policeânow a permanent, militarized, mobile, hardened, battalion-strength appendage of Nazi powerâparticipated in ghetto clearings, mass shootings, anti-partisan operations , and reprisal actions against the local population. By 1944, the war having turned against the Third Reich, the unit was effectively disbanded. They could then better serve Hitler as soldiers than police paramilitaries, so the Arajs Kommandoâs personnel were absorbed into frontline combat units of the Latvian Legion along the rapidly approaching Eastern Front.
At warâs end, Viktors ArÄjsâs Kommando had itself directly killed no fewer than 26,000 people in Latvia, while its very substantial death tally in Belarus is simply impossible to estimate but may have equaled or even exceeded the tally in Latvia. Considering its participation in the Rumbula cordon and other shootings, the unit also abetted the killings of tens of thousands more. The members of this Latvian police unit, operating under the command of Einsatzkommando (EK) 2 and later the Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei (KdS) Lettland , participated as volunteers in practically every signature aspect of Nazi oppression in occupied Eastern Europe. They were quintessential actors in what is now recognized as âthe Holocaust by bulletsââold-fashioned killers who shot their targets one at a time, creating their death count without need of the techno-industrial horror of the gas chambers.
All of this, however, was only the first part of the story of the men of the Arajs Kommando. Much of the actual historical record of their crimes was not established by historians through normal analysis of period records in archival repositories. The Nazis often avoided committing anything incriminating to paper and they deliberately destroyed all they could of the documentary evidence that did exist before they were defeated. Thus, much of what we know about the Kommando is the result of decades of painstaking work by prosecutors around the globe who, to make their cases against the unitâs killers, augmented the scarce wartime material at hand with witnesses of all types: survivors, bystanders, and the perpetrators themselves.
It is upon these sources that the present study is based.
To answer the deceptively simple questions of whether, how, by whom, and with what results these men were investigated, tried, and punished requires deeper examination. Hundreds of cases were tried in multiple jurisdictions on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the entire span of the vast contest of the Cold War. The legal aftermath of the crimes against humanity committed by the Arajs Kommando can therefore be used as a prism through which to view a spectrum of very different justice systems at work at different times, and how they attempted to match atrocity with justice amid a radically new post-war order. In this regard, this study assesses the efforts of the Soviet Union, both West and East Germany, and the United States. Using these hideous crimes as a backdrop, the following chapters examine both Communist and liberal-democratic legal systems, and their intermittent dialogue with one another, from the 1940s through the 1980s, as they dealt with Nazi crimes while operating in the context of the global superpower struggle.
The Historiography of the Holocaust in Latvia
This study connects two of the currently expanding major subfields of the subject of the Holocaust: Eastern Europeansâ participation in it and the Holocaustâs aftermath. More specifically, it examines the legal ramifications of Latvian Holocaust complicity, the social and political effects of the functioning of the legal apparatus in each national case study, and their interaction in an international context.
Particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reassertion of national histories in the erstwhile formally monolithic Eastern Bloc, historical scholarship has concerned itself increasingly with the investigation of Eastern European Nazi auxiliaries and Holocaust co-perpetrators. That many participated is not in doubt. What is less well understood is the degree to which Eastern Europeans actively sought to participate and what motivated their fateful volunteerism. All told, as many as 300,000 Eastern European police auxiliaries had been recruited to the German side by the end of 1943. Not all of them colluded with the Nazis to carry out the Holocaustâindeed, relatively few to the degree that the men of the Arajs Kommando didâbut all of them tied themselves to the fortunes of Hitler and the Third Reich. As JĂŒrgen MatthĂ€us has written: âGerman policy is key to the understanding of non-German involvement,â but âthis astonishing degree of involvement in murder was not merely the result of German instigation; there were other, indigenous factors at work.â1 The major debate on the Holocaust in Latvia is precisely upon this point: to what degree were Latvians complicit, why, and how should their complicity be regarded vis-Ă -vis German policy? Like other examples in the wider field, assessments in this case also vary fairly widely from sweeping accusatory generalizations to polemical apologetics, and disagreements have been attended by considerable acrimony.2 Because the subject has become something of a lightning rod, this study cannot avoid addressing it as one of four overarching points.
The Latvian-American scholar Andrew Ezergailisâs sweeping yet admirably detailed overview, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941â1944: The Missing Center, published in 1996â provided the starting point for an objective, detached, and apolitical assessment of Latvian involvement in the Holocaust, and it remains to date the definitive work on the subject.3 The âmissing centerâ referred to in Ezergailisâs titleâand which he tries to fill with his bookâis what he correctly identifies as a general problem of perception: between exaggeration of Latvian complicity (in its most extreme form: a âGermanlessâ Holocaust in which events were dictated by eager Latvian killers) on one hand, and the elisionânot to say denialâof Latvian participation on the other. In a case of strange bedfellows, variants of the former line have been put forward by some Jewish scholars, Soviet publications, and extreme Holocaust ârevisionistsâ alike.4 The second was adopted as a strategy by some post-war Latvian exiles living in the West and has since also been advanced by post-1991 Latvian nationalist apologists.5 Ezergailis is right to insist that the reality fell somewhere in between these extremes.
Another overview of the Holocaust in Latvia has been published more recently in German, and in English translation. Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein have produced a remarkable work about Jewish life and death in RÄ«ga during the German occupation, from ghettoization to the mass shootings.6 It is a fairly comprehensive study of the Holocaust in Latvia, although its focus is on RÄ«ga and German policies as seen through their effects there, rather than in Latviaâs provinces. However, in the work of Ezergailis as well as others, the Arajs Kommando is only peripherally mentioned.
Several historians have focused more on Latvian participation but have somewhat undervalued German decision-making and overall orchestration or overstressed Latvian anti-Semitism as a motive factor for collaboration. These historians as well, however, have relegated the Arajs Kommando to incidental mentions or small sections within larger works. Latvian, German, and Jewish historians such as Modris Eksteins , Katrin Reichelt , and Menachem Barkahan have to varying degrees overvalued Latvian autonomy while underplaying the role of the Nazis who were in command.7 This tradition is generally still being followed in the most recent scholarship from Germany.8
Much serious Latvian language scholarship has also been done since 1991, most importantly by the blue ribbon Symposium of the Commission of the Historians of Latvia , which produces periodic volumes. The present study draws upon the findings of several of the participants in this perennial symposium, most significantly RĆ«dite VÄ«ksne , who almost alone has dedicated herself to the study of the Arajs Kommando.9
The Historiography of the Holocaustâs Legal Aftermath
Aftermath studies is a very broad and somewhat nebulous field. It can encompass studies of memoirs, memory, museums, and memorialization; post-war Jewish diaspora and migration to Israel ; the Holocaust in art and cinema; trauma and survivor psychology; survivor literature and Jewish generational difference; the post-war Jewish relationship with, say, Poles, or that between the Soviet government and the ârefuseniks;â reparations; and every aspect of German VergangenheitsbewĂ€ltigung [âactively coming to grips with the pastâ].
This study focuses on the legal aftermath. In fact, this is a rapidly growing area of research and is garnering considerable interest from top-level scholars and institutions, including Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .10 One of the most important contributors to this arena of thought is Devin Pendas .11 He starkly emphasizes the importance of judicial investigations into Nazi crimes, while struggling to reconcile the disappointing and totally incommensurate penalties applied as a rule to convicted perpetrators with the great benefit to knowledge and truth that even such flawed proceedings could yield. As a unit, an exceptionally high proportion of the men of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Policeâbetween one-third and one-halfâeither did not survive the war or faced some form of justice thereafter. Yet, in view of the enormity of the crimes they committed, the results for âjusticeâ remain palpably unsatisfying while the cause of âtruthâ was well-served. In this sense, the fate of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police stands as compelling evidence in support of Pendasâs paradox. Because it is the area in which the law was most successful, underscoring the significance of the record established by legal investigators is the second goal of this work.
Yet in this rapidly growing area of study, few works have been dedicated to the legal aftermath of Nazi crimes in the Baltics.12 On that score, the necessary starting point has again been supplied by Ezergailisâspecifically, h...