Yad Vashem condemns Latvia’s exoneration of ‘the butcher of Riga’
Baltic nation says it couldn’t find evidence against Herberts Cukurs, believed responsible for killing tens of thousands of Latvian Jews during the Holocaust
Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance center, condemned on Tuesday the decision by the Prosecution Office of the Republic of Latvia to close its case against Herberts Cukurs, the “Butcher of Riga,” believed to be personally responsible for killing tens of thousands of Latvian Jews during the Holocaust.
“The decision is baffling because Cukurs’s horrific war crimes are indisputable,” Yad Vashem said in a statement, adding that it was ready to provide documents from its archive to prove his guilt.
Latvia’s prosecution said it could not find sufficient evidence of Cukurs’s involvement in Holocaust crimes to implicate him. Right-wing nationalists in the country have long sought to exonerate Cukurs and establish him as a national hero for his prewar accomplishments as a pilot.
Yad Vashem denounced “repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’s image in Latvia by those distorting and ignoring historical truth.”
The closure of the case may allow Latvia to seek to exhume his remains from Uruguay, where he was assassinated by the Mossad in 1965, and bring them for burial, the Haaretz news site said. Other implications of the decision are not yet clear, it noted.
Cukurs held a senior, operative position in the Arajs Kommando, the unit that from June 1941 until March 1942 carried out mass killings against Jews and other civilians, Yad Vashem noted. Among other crimes, at the end of 1941 he personally participated in murder operations in Riga’s ghetto and the nearby Rumbula killing site, where Jewish men, women, children and infants were murdered indiscriminately.
Numerous witnesses and survivors have recounted his direct participation in atrocities, including beatings, shootings, and deportations.
According to Stephan Talty’s book, “The Good Assassin: Mossad’s Hunt for the Butcher of Latvia,” eyewitnesses remembered Cukurs in the ghetto to which Riga’s Jews were herded “laughing devilishly… shooting the people like a hunter in the forest.” One recorded him at the notorious villa at 19 Waldemars Street where the Arājs Kommando held wild drunken parties as they tortured and murdered Jews.
After the war, Cukurs fled to South America via the ratline escape routes and lived in Brazil until 1965, when his presence drew the attention of Mossad, which was working to track down and bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
Mossad agents lured Cukurs to Uruguay under the pretense of a business venture and assassinated him in a rented house near Montevideo. His body was found in a trunk, accompanied by documents outlining his crimes against humanity.
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