The Nazi Hunters (34 page)

Beate immediately began calling German newspapers. Using another name, she told them to check out what had happened to Lischka. Their goal, as Beate put it, “was to bring to the Germans’ attention the impunity Lischka and his colleagues were enjoying”—even if that meant going to jail themselves. In Beate’s case, this was exactly what happened when she returned to Cologne to share the documents about Lischka and Hagen
with the German courts and press. She was locked up, but only for three weeks. As happened on several occasions with Beate, the authorities came to realize that putting her behind bars for long only attracted more attention to the Klarsfelds’ cause.

When it came to Lischka, Serge had planned one more touch of high drama. On December 7, 1973, a snowy, freezing day in Cologne, he staked out Lischka’s car, parked in a lot near the city’s cathedral. When Lischka showed up, Serge stuck a gun between his eyes. The German was terrified, convinced he was about to be killed. But the gun was unloaded. For Serge, it was enough that his victim “looked death in the eye.” Serge had written a letter to the local prosecutor saying that his group could kill Nazis, but that it had no such intention. It simply wanted them to face trial.

If Beate’s act of slapping Kiesinger was her most dangerous moment, this was surely Serge’s. But when asked about it four decades later, he casually denied that he had been really at risk. “I knew he had a gun,” Serge admitted. But he argued that Lischka had neither the time to get it out nor, since he was wearing gloves because of the freezing weather, could he have pulled the trigger easily. “I didn’t feel I was risking to be killed,” he said.

For the Klarsfelds, the biggest satisfaction came when Lischka, Hagen, and others who were guilty no longer could live peacefully. As
Vorwärts,
the Social Democratic newspaper, put it: “Several middle-aged men, well-employed gentlemen have not been able to sleep well in the Federal Republic. They have shut themselves up in their apartments. . . . They are not at home to anyone.”

Beate remained in and out of trouble with the law, and she was dismissed as a crazed fanatic on more than one occasion. The Klarsfelds were also at the receiving end of threats and, in two cases, bombs. In 1972, Serge was suspicious enough about a package that arrived labeled “sugar,” especially when some specks of dark powder trickled out, to alert the police. The Parisian bomb squad confirmed that it was packed with dynamite and other explosives. In 1979, a bomb on a self-timer destroyed Serge’s car in the middle of the night.

But slowly the case against Lischka, Hagen, and Heinrichsohn gained momentum.
The three men finally stood trial in Cologne and, on February 11, 1980, the court found them guilty of complicity in the deportation of fifty thousand Jews from France to their deaths. They had “completely and fully understood” the fate that awaited their victims, the judge declared. Hagen was sentenced to twelve years in prison, Lischka to ten, and Heinrichsohn to six. It wasn’t the length of the sentences that was particularly important; it was that they were tried and convicted at all. And there was no doubt that it was the Klarsfelds, with all their agitation and theatrics, who had made that happen.

• • •

In 1934, when aviation was still a novelty in many parts of the world, Latvian Air Force Captain Herbert Cukurs became a national hero overnight by flying a small biplane he had designed from his homeland to Gambia, on Africa’s west coast. Acclaimed as the “Baltic Lindbergh,” Cukurs received adoring coverage in the local press as he then embarked on flights to Japan and British Palestine. Returning from the latter journey, he delivered a lecture to a packed audience at the Jewish club of Riga. Historian Yoel Weinberg, who was still a student when he attended the lecture, recalled: “I remember Cukurs speaking with wonderment, amazement, even with enthusiasm, of the Zionist enterprise in Israel. . . . Cukurs’ tales fired my imagination.”

But Cukurs was a fervent nationalist and, in the late 1930s he joined a fascist organization called Thunder Cross. The Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states at the start of World War II, part of the division of the spoils between Hitler and Stalin under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that made them de facto allies from 1939 to 1941. When Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they swiftly moved into the Baltic states. In Latvia, Major Victor Arajs, a former Latvian police officer, led a unit called the Arajs Kommando, composed of volunteers from far-right groups who were eager to help the new occupiers. His deputy commander was Cukurs. They immediately began rounding up, beating, and killing Jews.

After the war, survivors of such actions testified before a commission
on Nazi crimes in the Baltic states, and many of them vividly remembered Cukurs’s role. According to Raphael Schub, he “started the annihilation of the Jews of Riga” in early July. He and his men gathered three hundred Latvian Jews in the Great Synagogue, ordering them “to open the holy ark and spread the Torah scrolls on the synagogue’s floor” as they prepared to torch the building. When the Jews refused to follow that order, “Cukurs beat many of them savagely.” His men then poured gasoline over the floor, positioned themselves near the exits, and threw a hand grenade inside. As the synagogue went up in flames, the Jews tried to escape, but Cukurs’s men shot at anyone trying to get out. “All 300 Jews inside the building, among them many children, burned to death,” Schub concluded.

Abraham Shapiro, who was sixteen at the time, was at home when Cukurs showed up, announcing to his family that he was taking over their apartment for his personal use. He forced everyone to leave and arrested the head of the household, who was quickly executed. Shapiro was sent to the Latvian police headquarters, where about a hundred tiny prison cells were jammed with Jewish prisoners. On several occasions, Shapiro saw Cukurs and his men loading hundreds of Jews on trucks. It was the job of Shapiro and others to put shovels and spades in the trucks. The trucks would return empty a few hours later. “The shovels were dirty with dust and soil, and also with blood stains,” he testified.

Later the Germans rounded up about ten thousand Jews and took them to the forest where they were shot. David Fiszkin, another survivor, testified that Cukurs accompanied the Jews on the march to the forest, bringing up the rear of the column and shooting anyone who could not keep up. “When a child was crying, Cukurs snatched him from his mother’s arms and shot him to death,” he recalled. “With my own eyes I also saw how he shot and killed ten children and babies.”

Because Cukurs was such a celebrity in Latvia before the war, survivors had no trouble identifying him, unlike in so many other cases where the murderers were often indistinguishable from one another. His unit was responsible for the deaths of about thirty thousand Jews, and he became known as “the Hangman of Riga.” But after the war, he escaped
from Europe and ended up in São Paulo, Brazil, where he operated a marina and continued to fly his own plane. For nearly two decades, he lived a comfortable life in the sun; he was so confident that he had put his past behind him that he never changed his name. Cukurs was aware of Eichmann’s fate, of course, but by comparison he was “
a low-level sadistic killer,” as one Israeli writer later put it, which encouraged him to believe that he would not be a priority for any Nazi hunters.

On February 23, 1965, Cukurs arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, to meet with Anton Kuenzle, an Austrian businessman who had recently befriended him in São Paulo. Kuenzle had been looking for new investment opportunities in South America, and he had enlisted Cukurs as a partner. The plan was to set up a temporary office in Montevideo, and Kuenzle wanted to show Cukurs the house that could serve that purpose.

Kuenzle led the way into the house, with Cukurs right behind him. As soon as Cukurs stepped into the semidarkness, Kuenzle slammed the door shut behind them. At that moment, the Latvian saw several men, dressed only in their underwear, jumping at him. He immediately realized what was happening—and, although he was nearly sixty-five, “he fought like a wild and wounded animal,” Kuenzle recalled. “The fear of death gave him incredible strength.” But then one of his attackers hit his head with a hammer, splattering blood everywhere. Another attacker finished him off, putting a gun to his head and firing twice.

In reality, “Kuenzle” was Yaakov Meidad, a master of disguises who had been a member of the Mossad team that had kidnapped Eichmann five years earlier; changing his appearance frequently, he had rented the safe houses and cars in Buenos Aires and purchased the necessary supplies. This time, Meidad had posed as an Austrian businessman to ingratiate himself with Cukurs and lure him into the trap he had set. His fellow Mossad agents had been dressed only in their underwear because they did not want their clothing soaked in blood when they had to make their getaway. That had proved to be a wise precaution.

The Israelis loaded Cukurs’s large body into the trunk of a car that they had brought for that purpose. Before closing the trunk, they placed a sheet of paper on his chest with a message written in English:

VERDICT

Considering the gravity of the crimes of which HERBERT CUKURS is accused, notably his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 men, women and children, and considering the terrible cruelty shown by HERBERT CUKURS in carrying out his crimes, we condemn the said CUKURS to death.

He was executed on 23 February 1965

By “Those Who Will Never Forget”

After they left Uruguay, Meidad and his team waited for the press to report the discovery of Cukurs’s body. When nothing happened for several days, they tipped off the news agencies in West Germany, even providing the address of the murder scene. The story ran in papers around the world, mentioning the fact that the mysterious group responsible called itself “Those Who Will Never Forget.” As
The New York Times
pointed out, “
Like the Eichmann case, the Cukurs case had its cloak and dagger aspects.”

But for most of the press, this was a one-day story, with no follow-up. Outside Latvia, Cukurs was hardly the household name that Eichmann was, and of course there was no trial to make him and his crimes more widely known. Even in Israel today, many people are not aware of this Mossad operation—the only one that was triggered by an official decision to assassinate one of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

So why was Cukurs targeted? His crimes were horrifying, but no more so than those of countless other murderers who were still enjoying quiet lives at the time. In 1997, Meidad finally published a book in Hebrew describing the Cukurs mission in detail; a British edition appeared in 2004 titled
The Execution of the Hangman of Riga: The Only Execution of a Nazi War Criminal by the Mossad.
But he still took the precaution of writing it under the name of Anton Kuenzle.
Most readers only learned his true name when they read his obituary after his death on June 30, 2012.

In his book, Meidad recounted his initial conversation with the senior Mossad officer who gave him the assignment. The officer, whom he only
identified by the first name Yoav, told him the government was alarmed by the possibility that West Germany’s statute of limitations would allow such criminals completely off the hook, since the outcome of the debate whether to extend the statute was still uncertain. He also noted that the Eichmann kidnapping and trial four years earlier had “
raised public consciousness throughout the world of the Nazi horrors, but it seems that the strong impact . . . is losing its effect.”

Yoav insisted that it was the obligation of Israelis “to stop this sweeping trend.” Success in the Cukurs operation, he added, would “put the fear of death into the hearts of tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals. . . . They must not have one single moment of peace and tranquility until their last dying day on earth!” Although he conceded that Israel did not have the resources to go after many such criminals, Cukurs could serve as an example for lower-level killers.

Those are all plausible explanations, but not necessarily the full explanation. Rafi Eitan, who was the leader of the team that pulled off the Eichmann kidnapping but was not involved in the Cukurs operation, pointed out during our meeting in 2013: “
To kill a man, it’s easier to shoot him from a distance. No need to make an operation.” The fact that the Mossad decided to send its agents to kill him at close quarters, so that he would know what was happening, suggested that “personal ambition” was involved, Eitan added. By that, he meant that someone high up may have had a personal score to settle with Cukurs.

It was only after Cukurs was killed that Meidad learned that one member of his assassination team had had a large family in Riga. “
They were all killed by Cukurs and his men,” Meidad noted. But a low-level member of his team would not have been involved in the original decision to go after the Hangman of Riga. The lingering questions about the decision making that triggered this singular event have never been fully answered.

There is a recent postscript, however. In 2014, Latvian audiences were treated to a musical about Cukurs. While there was a brief scene at the end where he was surrounded by people shouting “
killer,” the production focused on his role as a celebrity aviator before the war. Because Cukurs never was put on trial, producer Juris Millers argued, he “is still innocent
if we are looking at him from a court system point of view. There are a few people who testify that he was a killer and others who say that he was a hero.”

The Latvian Council for Jews, Israel, Russia, and others promptly denounced the play as the whitewashing of a mass murderer. “
There must be no tolerance for any attempt to turn a heinous criminal into a cultural hero,” an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman declared. The Latvian government, which had rejected efforts by Cukurs’s family to clear his name, left no doubt that it was unhappy with the production. While pointing out that the country’s commitment to free speech meant it could not try to stop it, Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs said: “Being a member of the Arajs Kommando is not worth singing about. Let those who attend the performance appraise the production for themselves; however, the position of the government is that this is not in good taste.”