Hitler's Foreign Executioners (36 page)

At the end of July, Himmler returned to Riga. He must have been impressed by the activities of the Latvian auxiliaries; as we have seen, just a few weeks before Himmler had authorised the formation of Schuma battalions in the east, disregarding Hitler’s insistence that ‘it must never be tolerated that a person who is not a German carries weapons’. Now he was beginning to mull over deploying the Schuma outside their national territories as bandit hunters.
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In Riga, Lange’s SD recruited scores of different auxiliary Latvian police brigades. The most feared were the ‘Schutzmannschaft in geschlossenen Einheiten’ (the closed brigades).
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Lange usually referred to his Latvian murder squads as the ‘Arājs people’. The Arājs Commando (now officially the ‘Latvian Security Police and SD Security Force’) had proved its worth to the SD and Lange soon reduced the numbers of German SD officers responsible for supervising operations, though he personally liked to attend large-scale executions. One of the commando recruits, Genadijs Mūrnieks, described a typical
Judenaktion
: ‘the actions began at 2 or 3 am … From the place where the victims were let off [the truck], they were driven through a ‘corridor’ that consisted of Arājs commando policemen, and they were shot by the pit.’ The Germans always provided generous quantities of alcohol, usually schnapps or vodka to inspire their executioners. Most such operations were completed in time for a hearty breakfast.
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The SD squads faced formidable logistical problems. Outside Riga, many Latvian Jews lived scattered in small market towns, often situated at crossroads. In bigger towns, the SD could make use of local Latvian police – but Lange needed some means of throwing his net deeper into the countryside. For the people of Riga, a fleet of sturdy, cheerful-looking blue buses imported from Sweden had become a part of everyday life. Arājs had commandeered a few of the familiar blue buses to transport prisoners to the Bikernieki Forest. Now at the end of July 1941, he commandeered an entire fleet of the blue buses to convey the ‘Arājs boys’ to every corner of Latvia in style and comfort. Each bus could carry about forty commandos, equipped with rifles and shovels – as well as supplies of vodka, cigarettes and sausages. When the buses rumbled into some remote Latvian hamlet, local police officers had often already rounded up Jewish men from nearby villages. Arājs himself always arrived in a chauffeur-driven car. He was frequently inebriated after the long, vodka-refreshed drive. The job swiftly became routine. The Latvians disembarked from the bus and began excavating a shallow pit. The local police pushed their captives to the edge and the Arājs men began firing. As the pit was covered, the shooters leant casually against the sides of their blue buses, slurped vodka and wolfed down steaming hot sausages. For Arājs’ SD bosses, these blue bus actions proved most satisfactory: the Latvian auxiliaries, fuelled by nicotine, sausage and vodka, efficiently carried out mass executions and burnt synagogues in every corner of Latvia.

Post-war Soviet investigations and German legal proceedings have provided a great deal of information about the men who served with Arājs. His deputy commander Herberts Cukurs was a celebrated long-distance pilot, sometimes called the ‘Latvian Lindbergh’. After 1941, the ‘Eagle of the Baltic’ acquired a second reputation as the ‘Hangman of Riga’. After the war, Cukurs fled to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived openly under his own name. The Brazilian government turned down a succession of requests by the Soviets to extradite Cukurs for war crimes. On 23 February 1965, Mossad agents, posing as agents of an aviation business, lured Cukurs to Uruguay. In a beach house called the Casa Cubertini in Montevideo he was tortured and then killed. His decomposed body was found, weeks later, locked in a trunk. It is regrettable that Herberts Cukurs was never brought before a court.
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When Latvia became independent, the Cukurs family and supporters launched a campaign to restore his name. In 2005, an exhibition opened in his home town of Liepaja proclaiming ‘Herberts Cukurs – Presumed Innocent’. Even Latvian historian Andrew Ezergailis has made statements backing the rehabilitation of Cukurs. Ezergailis is alleged to have said that ‘MOSAAD killed an innocent man’.
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But Ephraim Zuroff, Director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem, has discovered eyewitness accounts in the archives of Yad Vashem that prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Herberts Cukurs was an ardent anti-Semite and killer. This ‘Latvian Lindbergh’ burned to death the family of a Riga synagogue sexton. According to one eyewitness, Cukurs molested and tortured a young Jewish girl; another observed Cukurs shooting and torturing numerous Jews at Arājs commando headquarters and asserts that he tried to force an elderly Jewish man to rape a 20-year-old Jewess. At the end of November, Arājs and Cukurs took a leading part in the Rumbula massacre – as we shall see shortly.
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The trial records also tell us a great deal about the commando rank and file – who did the digging and shooting while Arājs and Cukurs sipped vodka. Most recruits were aged between 16 and 21 and the majority had completed secondary level education; 21 per cent had gone on to university. Latvian historians describe the educational practice of the Ulmanis period as ‘conformist’. These were bright, relatively ambitious young men, used to following orders – and awash with testosterone. At their post-war trials, some of these young men tried to explain their motivation for joining Arājs: one ‘did not wish to do manual work, was eager to advance in life’; a second ‘was hostile towards Jews because they had arrested many Latvians [sic]’; another ‘wished to enter the University of Latvia, for which he needed a background of 1 year of service in police, German army or RAD’; many ‘yielded to the influence of German propaganda’. Other recruits had more mundane reasons: one had ‘lost his warm clothes in a card game’. These statements make it quite clear that anti-Semitic propaganda, spewed from SD backed newspapers, had a significant impact on Latvian ears and minds. Many of the volunteers parrot German-inspired mythology that linked the hated Soviets with all Jews – and a few refer to Jews as ‘parasites that must be eliminated’. When Arājs led the attack on the Gogol Street synagogue, he is reported to have bellowed: ‘Since the people of Riga hate Jews, we must demonstrate our position by setting fire to the synagogue so that nothing of Jewish culture remains.’ Anti-Jewish rhetoric rather than opportunism inspired many of the young men who joined the Arājs Commando; these men were not just thrill-seeking hooligans.
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In September 1941 Himmler made another visit to Latvia and this time toured the port city of Liepāja (Libau) in the Kurzeme, which had been turned into a German naval base. Since early July, as elsewhere in Latvia, SD and Latvian Schuma brigades had been carrying out executions of Jews, gypsies and suspected Soviet agents, most notably in the Rainis Park shootings. In Liepāja, these actions
usually took place in open public places rather than nearby forests. At the end of the month, the Arājs Commando had arrived in Liepāja and carried out a number of much bigger-scale mass executions. But in September, Himmler was appalled to discover that many thousands of Jews remained alive in Liepāja – many of them in the Liepāja ghetto, where they worked as forced labourers for German companies. Himmler vented his spleen on the HSSPF Prützmann, who had plainly not shown quite the same zeal as Stahlecker and Lange. But the bigger stumbling block was the Commissar ‘Herzog’ Lohse and his boss, the despised Alfred Rosenberg. Their plan for the east depended on extracting maximum profit from Jews incarcerated in ghettoes. So far Lohse had resisted Himmler’s importunate demands that every Jew must be liquidated; when profits could be made, murder was simply wasteful. At the end of October, Himmler’s patience ran out. He replaced the allegedly ‘soft’ HSSPF Prützmann with a dedicated and efficient SS killer who could be relied on to ignore any bleating protests from Hinrich Lohse.

The new HSSPF was SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln.

Himmler admired Jeckeln a great deal. Sometime between 11 and 12 November, he summoned the inventor of the ‘sardine packing’ method of mass murder to Berlin. The time had come, he informed the new HSSPF, that every Jew in the Ostland Commissariat must be liquidated, ‘
bis zum letzten Mann
’ (‘to the last man’). ‘Tell Lohse that it is my order, and also the express wish of the Führer.’
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Jeckeln returned to Riga. On 25 October, he ordered that the Jewish ghetto in Riga be sealed – and so too was the fate of some 33,000 Jews who ‘lived’ behind its walls.

The ‘wish of the Führer’ was no rhetorical flourish. In the autumn of 1941 Hitler had begun racking up anti-Jewish rhetoric with a barrage of public speeches and private harangues; it was, says historian Saul Friedländer, ‘an explosion of the vilest anti-Semitic invectives and threats’. By September 1941 the German armies had pushed over 600 miles into the Soviet Union along a front line that extended 1,000 miles from north to south; they had occupied the most heavily industrialised Soviet regions – home to over half the Russian population and extending over an area the size of Britain, Spain, Italy and France rolled together. Millions of Soviet soldiers had fallen into German hands, along with many tens of thousands of tanks, guns and artillery pieces. But by the end of September, the German military behemoth was beginning to run out of steam – and Hitler and his generals squabbled bitterly about future strategy, in particular when, and in Hitler’s mind
if
, to attack Moscow. Goebbels’ diaries provide many insights into Hitler’s fluctuating state of mind, and that autumn it would appear that his moods were extremely volatile. At the end of September, Hitler finally resolved to go all out for Moscow. In the first weeks of October, Operation Typhoon achieved spectacular success. Hitler was, it was
reported, euphoric. Panic gripped the Soviet capital, and the communist elite and other big wigs began fleeing the city. A special train was put at Stalin’s disposal and after considerable vacillation, he decided not to join the flight east. It was the most important decision the Soviet dictator ever made. Sometime after 17 November, as it reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, the German attack unexpectedly faltered. Hitler’s war had exhausted his troops. As the German divisions rumbled ever closer towards the great prize, the capital of Jewish-Bolshevism, abysmal roads, chronic food, fuel shortages, and, worst of all, rapidly deteriorating weather sapped morale. As his war machine stumbled, Hitler’s public invective against the Jewish ‘World Enemy’ intensified. The records show that he referred obsessively to the ‘extermination of the Jews’ on 19 October, 25 October, 12 December, 17 December and 18 December.
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This poisonous flood of invective seeped down through the German high command. Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau urged his men to exact ‘just atonement from the Jewish sub humans’. General Hermann Hoth preached the extermination of the ‘spiritual supporters of Bolshevism’ and Erich von Manstein urged German soldiers to avenge all ‘atrocities’ perpetrated by ‘Jewry, the spiritual bearer of Bolshevism’.
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On 14 November 1941 HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln descended through thick fog towards a landing strip on the Gulf of Riga. He was preoccupied not with Operation Typhoon, but the Führer’s order to escalate the war against the Jews. As soon as Jeckeln had settled into Stahlecker’s old headquarters, the Ritterhaus (where he liked to sit fondling purloined jewellery), Jeckeln began searching for a suitable location where he could begin carrying out Himmler’s new orders.

German execution sites pockmark the great belt of sand that stretches from East Prussia to the Urals.
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In Riga, Jeckeln had one special requirement. He knew that in the autumn water seepage could wreak havoc with his ‘sardine packing’ methods. He would need to find and select a site situated on raised ground. Shortly after his arrival Jeckeln and his aides drove out of Riga in their gleaming Mercedes, along the right bank of the Daugava where the Jewish ghetto was situated, to inspect a new concentration camp under construction at Salaspils. They had just left the city boundary when, a few hundred metres to the left side, Jeckeln spotted a few low, rounded tumuli, dotted with birches sandwiched between the highway and the main railway line that linked Riga to Daugavpils. The place had a name – Rumbula Pines. Although it was not especially secluded, the site had many advantages since it was located next to both the main road and railway. Himmler had ordered Jeckeln to liquidate the ghetto – and that meant he needed to ‘process’ more than 30,000 ‘pieces’ in a very short time. He was also aware that transports of ‘Reich Jews’ had already been dispatched from Germany to Riga for his attention. Jeckeln made a decision: the site of the ‘great action’ would be Rumbula.

Jeckeln commenced detailed planning. Like modern German management practice, his system depended on breaking down every operation into manageable segments, run by different specialist teams. Jeckeln assigned SS-Untersturmführer Ernst Hemicker, who had been trained as an engineer, to supervise the excavation of an appropriate number of pits. Hemicker testified that he was ‘shocked’ by the number of people Jeckeln planned to do away with, but ‘chose not to protest’. Jeckeln drafted in 300 Russian prisoners to dig the pits, each one the size of a small house. Temperatures had fallen below zero so the sandy ground was frozen hard. Work was back breaking. Jeckeln often visited Rumbula Pines to check that construction work was proceeding according to his precise instructions. He was often observed staring down intently into the pits.