Hitler's Foreign Executioners (35 page)

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

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

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

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

In 1937, Arājs married Zelma Zeibots and was forced to drop his university studies once again to make ends meet. For the second time, he joined the police. In 1939, he returned to university, dropped out again – then, as the Soviet occupation began, made one last sortie. He took an obligatory course in Marxism and finally graduated as a Soviet Jurist in March 1941. At his trial, many decades later, Arājs claimed that he had in good faith come to believe that ‘Bolshevism was the best of systems’. Historian Andrew Ezergailis offers an intriguing suggestion to explain this anomaly. Although Arājs had inveigled his way into the Lettonia, his exposure to more privileged lives and presumably elitist attitudes of brother students may well have led him to welcome the Soviet occupation and a promise of greater social equality. ‘Indubitably, I was then a communist,’ he claimed after the war. After the
occupation began, Arājs found work with a Latvian lawyer, but, not long afterwards he was arrested and deported by the NKVD. Arājs escaped and fled to the countryside. ‘My communism vanished.’ At this point his account becomes remarkably confusing. By the time the main Soviet deportations began, Arājs may have joined a Latvian army brigade attached to the Red Army.

As the German juggernaut rolled on north through the Baltic, the Russians began withdrawing their Latvian divisions to the east. The retreat degenerated into panicked flight. Chaos and mayhem overwhelmed the retreating Soviet divisions. Many Latvian soldiers deserted, often throwing themselves from the transport trains and, if they survived, joining partisan units. In his final plea to the Hamburg court Arājs said, ‘I too was in one of the [partisan] units.’ On 1 July, Arājs returned to Riga ‘with my partisans’ and made for the police prefecture. On the same day, Stahlecker led his Special Task Force across the Daugava River. At 1 p.m., the Germans too arrived at the police prefecture. A Baltic German officer called Hans Dressler who served with Stahlecker had known Arājs at his gymnasium and then served under him in the Latvian army. He introduced Arājs to Stahlecker because ‘he had a favourable memory of Arājs from the days of his military service’. That afternoon, Stahlecker met a number of other Latvian police commanders who were eager to join up. Lt Col Voldemārs Veiss, an army veteran, had already recruited a 400-strong Latvian ‘self-defence’ unit that had on its own initiative begun to round up Latvian Jews and communists. Veiss was eventually appointed Chief of Auxiliary Police – and in 1944 died serving with the ‘Latvian Legion’. He remains a national hero in Latvia. The following day, Stahlecker appointed Arājs as a ‘Sonderkommando leader’ and, he later told the court in Hamburg, ‘My assignments began on July 3 or 4’.

As a newly appointed commando leader, Arājs had one tremendous advantage: he was a former Lettonia fraternity ‘brother’. As he raced to organise his ‘Special Commando’ and impress Stahlecker, Arājs cleverly called on his old university comrades and transferred his activities to the Lettonia fraternity house, where he set up tables in the street outside to attract recruits. The brothers flocked to join – in such large numbers that Latvian Jews referred to the commando as ‘
Arājsen Burschen
’, from the German word for fraternity,
Burschenschaft
. As the Arājs Commando expanded, leadership positions went to Lettonia old boys like Feliks Dibietis, Arājs’ second-in-command who later committed suicide in Minsk. This was a battalion of murderous frat boys.

To proclaim the elite status of his unit, Arājs soon moved his operational base to a splendid town house at 19 Krišjāņa Valdemāra iela, close to the Latvia National Art Museum. No 19 was one of the best addresses in town; it had previously been occupied by A. Schmuljanš, a Jewish banker who had been deported by the Russians.
Arājs shared No 19 with the Pērkonkrusts, who used the basement to ‘question’ Jews in improvised cells – many were tortured or murdered. In a grand room on the first floor, Arājs arranged German lessons for his recruits, though he himself would continue to need a translator for some time to come. In the leafy Esplanade Park just across the street, Arājs organised rifle drill.

Arājs seemed to have fallen on his feet. But though he was ambitious, to begin with Stahlecker and the SD commanders who took his place remained wary. An Einsatzgruppe report sent to Berlin on 20 July even refers to the imminent ‘dissolution of the Security [i.e. Arājs] commando’.
²⁴
And yet the Arājs Commando would prove to be the most resilient of all the auxiliary units formed by German occupiers in the east. It survived in different forms and under a variety of names until 1944, when it was absorbed by the Latvian SS divisions. It will be recalled that following Heydrich’s instructions, Stahlecker warned that any auxiliary units must not be allowed to become ‘a Latvian militia’. Now Arājs had only the most tenuous connections to Latvian nationalist circles. As a student, he flirted, to be sure, with a fringe fascist faction but had never joined the Pērkonkrusts. To finally complete his legal studies, he had joined the Soviet legal apparatus and then taken up arms to fight the retreating Russians at the last possible moment. In short, Arājs made no bones about seizing the main chance. Stahlecker and the SD powerbrokers welcomed such energetic ‘hard men’ who made it clear that they believed that heartfelt patriotism was for suckers. Arājs swiftly proved himself dedicated and proficient
génocidaire
. And loyalty, obedience and devoted service brought, as Himmler promised it would, rewards.

On 2 July, Stahlecker ordered the Latvian police auxiliaries to begin rounding up Jews in Riga and then bring them to square in front of the police prefecture. Stahlecker assumed that ethnic Latvians, attracted by the hubbub, would spontaneously turn on the Jews. But this did not happen – and both Stahlecker’s consolidated report and the Einsatzgruppe morning reports sent from Riga described the Latvians as ‘absolutely passive in their anti-Semitic attitudes’.
²⁵
Stahlecker turned for help to Arājs who took immediate action. He published an appeal in a semi-official newspaper
Tevija
for ‘all nationally conscious Latvians – Pērkonkrusts members, students, veterans and others to participate in the cleansing of our country of destructive elements’.
²⁶
Stahlecker had supplied the words. The response was ‘overwhelming’; thousands of young Latvians volunteered. Many were no doubt lured by the thought of plunder. German propaganda that associated the Soviet terror with ‘the Jews’ had also done its insidious job. Many Latvians, like the death dealer of Kaunas in Lithuania, now sought revenge. A former policeman, whose family had been arrested by the NKVD, promised ‘I will kill every Jew in sight’.

On a warm evening at the beginning of July, Arājs unleashed his pent-up paramilitaries. Armed bands rampaged along streets with known Jewish residents. Like the Lithuanian snatcher squads, they kidnapped anyone they believed was a Jew. Arājs and his men dragged their captives, both men and women, back to their headquarters, where they were beaten in basement rooms and left to die. They raped and tortured Jewish women. Arājs’ headquarters soon acquired a terrible notoriety. No 19 had become a house of horrors.

This first action was much too tentative for Stahlecker. A week later, he ordered Arājs to begin attacking Riga’s synagogues; this new campaign would be murder by arson. All over the east, images of burning synagogues would provide potent emblems of German power over life and death – a signal that Jews had forfeited any protection from the law and their fellow Latvian citizens. Arājs commenced operations with the Gogolu iela Synagogue (the Gogol Street Choral Synagogue). He sent Jewish prisoners into the building to remove valuable Torah scrolls and candelabras. Then the Arājs men herded hundreds of men, women and children inside the synagogue, emptied cans of gasoline around the high alter and made their getaway. Arājs himself gleefully fired the shots that ignited the fuel and rapidly set the entire building on fire. His men then formed lines to prevent any firefighters from trying to damp down the inferno. The Arājs men incinerated other synagogues that same evening – as well as the prayer house in the Smerli cemetery. As the synagogues burnt, the killing escalated. By the end of the second week of the occupation, 8,000 Jews had been murdered in central Riga.
²⁷
Arājs and his Pērkonkrusts friends began hoarding looted treasures at No 19, eventually acquiring enough artefacts to set up an ‘Anti-Semitic Institute’ modelled on the German museums that displayed Jewish books and artefacts as evidence of their eternal perfidy.

Stahlecker was under pressure to report the most impressive figures to SD headquarters in Berlin. This meant that large-scale ‘special actions’ needed to be moved outside the centre of Riga so that victims could be easily disposed of in the soft Baltic sands. In the centre of Riga there was no single ‘Jewish Quarter’ and before the establishment of the ghetto in October, attacks on Jews had necessarily been patchy. Arājs or one of his Latvian officers suggested transferring operations to the Bikernieki Forest, a thickly wooded area 5 miles to the north of Riga. The forest encircled a garden city called the Mežaparks, which German residents called the Kaiserwald. Affluent Latvians had built scores of luxury villas dotted about in bucolic forest glades, but Arājs tracked down a secluded spot close to the Riga road. Here he would carry out Stahlecker’s instructions. Over a period of several weeks, the Arājs men arrested Jewish men and alleged communists and held them ‘for questioning’ at their headquarters. They then drove them in batches (usually
about seventy individuals) to the execution site. During the first phase of operations, between 6 and 7 July, the Arājs men murdered at least 2,000 Jewish Latvian men in Bikernieki Forest. As they refined the operation, the numbers rose steadily through July, August and September.

By mid-July, Stahlecker had moved on (he stayed in Riga just two weeks) and the commander of Einsatzkommando 2, Dr Rudolf Lange and his assistant Arnold Kirste, assumed overall command of the Latvian auxiliaries. Under Lange, the SD became the dominant occupation agency in Latvia. The ‘intense and dedicated’ Lange hated Jews so much that, according to Joseph Berman, a Holocaust survivor, ‘he could not look at them’. A favourite of Heydrich’s, Lange was a fervent ideological anti-Semite. In January 1942, Heydrich invited him to attend the Wannsee Conference – called to plan the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ – and he was congratulated on his ‘success’ in Latvia. Short and dark complexioned, Lange was a vain man who toured his fiefdom decked out in capacious military greatcoats with fur-lined collars. He rejoiced in his demonic legend as the ‘Bloodhound of Latvia’.
²⁸
Lange was a German ‘officer and a gentleman’ – and a killer. Under Lange’s management, the SD reached into every nook and cranny of Latvian society. His SD men, with their field grey uniforms, black ties, yellow shirts and peaked caps bearing the death’s head motif, became all too ubiquitous.