Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944

Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein
Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944 (The "Final Solution" in Riga: Exploitation and Extermination 1941-1944)
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007
ISBN: 9783534191499

This work with certain differences covers the same ground as my The Holocaust in Latvia, published ten years ago. While my work gave information about Latvia at large, Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein’s study concentrates on Riga, and especially the fate of those Jews brought to Latvia from Central Europe in late 1941 and early 1942. To that topic I devoted only one chapter but the German authors devote at least three quarters of their book.

This study had a tortuous beginning and was slow to come to term. It began as a project of Professor Wolfgang Scheffler in early 1990's to document the fate of German Jews in Latvia, went through at least one lawsuit, was dropped, and then restarted and finished by two of Professor Scheffler’s younger associates. Grudgingly I must admit that, superficialities notwithstanding, it was worth the wait. My work when it first came out was simultaneously praised and cursed and so will be theirs, although perhaps not by the same people. We can, however, say that on most points a consensus is emerging about the Holocaust in Latvia.

Both works on the whole take the topic away from tabloid headlines. I was criticizeded for relying too much on documents from the trials of Nazi perpetrators, and Angrick and Klein’s work displays no hesitation about their use. I was told that more than 80,000 (some claim 300,000) Jews were brought from Europe to Latvia instead of the 22,000 I had calculated, but Angrick and Klein’s number is very close to mine. I was told that by arguing that the Holocaust was a German project, with Latvians playing an auxiliary role I was whitewashing Latvians. The German authors, not very happily, but nevertheless, taking their treatise as a whole, seem to agree with me by showing over and over again that the Latvians were not in commanding positions. Of the twenty chapters, there is only in one in which the Latvians are presented as exceeding the Germans in their anti-Semitic rage. In my book I argued that the Holocaust was a matter of organization, not of passion and except for that one chapter, Angrick and Klein agree with me. They are dubious about the rationalism of Latvians, but certainly the Germans are presented as rational, careful organizers, and obedient to the chain of command. I have no quarrel with 90 percent of the book: It is a detailed, meticulous study, which like a mighty German river flows to fill in crevices of ignorance and valleys of curiosity.

It is in the first part of the book, however, specifically in the chapter “From Pogroms to the Establishing the Ghetto,” when Angrick and Klein write about the natives, that the authors lose their footing, become restrictive in their selection of sources, and rely on folklore and also on glosses of Nazi propaganda. They present the natives as savages, subject to lower appetites, and strive to argue that Latvians were more violent and less restrained than their German superiors. Specifically my objections concern their presentation of native anti-Semitism, nationalism, and revenge, a concept that was dear to Hitlerites and one Angrick and Klein seem compelled to use when describing the behavior of the natives. The authors without debating alternative evidence argue that the Latvians were ready to kill Jews immediately upon the German occupation without any orders or even prompting from the Germans. All of this is recycled folklore that has been examined by historians and also adjudicated in the courts of Germany, the United States, and Canada. Long before Angrick and Klein the pogrom thesis was articulated in an even in more spectacular way in 19611 by the KGB in the pamphlet Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They?. The booklet became a sort of handbook for war-crimes prosecutors of Canada and the United States, and they lost every case they initiated on the basis of the information in the booklet. The best specific examples I am thinking of are the Vilis Hazners case in the United States and that of Peteris Vitols in Canada.

The First History of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe

Angrick and Klein show no awareness that it was the Nazis themselves who wrote the first “history” of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, whose influence, as their own work shows, did not end with the Götterdämmerung in 1945. As the intertwining Barbarossa- Holocaust project matured during the spring of 1941, the Nazis felt propelled to prepare a public relations version of the crime they were contemplating. When on June 22, 1941 the killing began, the Nazis in small droplets began to leak information to their own people and to the foreign diplomats and journalists who still resided in Berlin. This was the original revisionist history in which it was proclaimed that it was the local inhabitants, including Latvians, who in Germanless pogroms were killing their neighbors. The Wochenschauen (the weekly news-reels) perhaps were the first vehicle for this information “spillage.” The operative words in the first telling of the Holocaust were self-cleansing, revenge, and pogroms. A further amplification of the Nazi line we can learn from the reports that the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, Walter Stahlecker, wrote to Berlin and a variety of memos and reports that German officialdom wrote about their “observations” in the Baltic territory, such as those of Rosenberg’s emissary Trampedach and Jelgava Gebietskomissar Freiherr von Medem.

The Nazis also invented a whole “new” vocabulary in which they discussed the killing of the Jews; Endlösung was one of the most notorious words. They reinvented the word “pogrom” and gave it a Nazi twist. Some of the other words that the Nazis introduced or perverted were self-cleansing, self-defense, self-administration, inner enemy, and voluntary. The Germans to this day, as the authors show, have not completely purged this vocabulary from their language. According to the Nazi account, everything that was done in the occupied territories the natives did voluntarily by themselves.

Nazi Vocabulary: Pogrom

Although the Latvians and Lithuanian by now have accumulated a sizable research literature about the Holocaust, looking through their footnotes and bibliography, Angrick and Klein make very little use of it. One especially egregious omission appears in their treatment of the June 27, 1941 “pogrom” in the Lietukis garage in Kaunus, Lithuania. By now Lithuanian historians (among them Alfonsas Eidintas) have made a thorough study of this event (a whole conference was convened to discuss that topic) but our authors would have no truck with them. Instead they relied on a version that the Nazis mocked up in 1941. It is true that the version Angrick and Klein used is part of the Holocaust folklore, especially beloved in Germany. Whatever actually happened in the garage, a historian in 2006 should not stick uncritically with a version was based on the testimony of a Nazi photographer who was likely a member of Stahlecker’s retinue.

Whatever the word pogrom meant in the Russian context, the Nazis, especially Walter Stahlecker, the commander of the Einsatzgruppe A, as his associate Martin Sandberger (Commander of Einsatzkommando 1ab) testified at Nuremberg, was bent on organizing them. Stahlecker’s aim, as Sandberger noted, was to create conditions in which the natives would attack Jews not by shooting them but bludgeoning them with blunt implements. Whatever happened (and something truly horrible happened) at the Lietukis garage, Sandberger and some Wehrmacht officers who learned of it recoiled from it. Stahlecker himself in his text referred to his method as “extreme measures.” Sandberger’s testimony tells us that even in Riga Stahlecker continued to talk about pogroms, and urged Sandberger to do the same in Estonia.

Stahlecker wrote: “It was no less important to establish for the future the firm and demonstrable fact that the liberated populations on their own accord had taken the harshest measures against the Bolshevist and Jewish enemy, without any direction from the German agencies.” In view of Sandberger’s testimony we know what the “harshest measures” may have meant. Concerning Latvia, Stahlecker later wrote that in Latvia pogroms were a failure. When he wrote from Riga “Pogrome laufen an” he must have written that to please Heydrich. Angrick and Klein uncritically take Stahlecker’s theater and present it to us as reality. It is possible, although there is no known order to this effect, that after the Kaunas massacre Stahlecker was told to cool it, for it threatened cooperation with the Wehrmacht. Whatever, there is no evidence that Stahlecker ever attempted to stage anything like the Kaunas incident again.

Collaborationism

On page 113 the authors call Tevija, the largest occupation time newspaper, “the organ of the Latvian collaborationists”. Collaborationism is the teething ring on which young German historians cut their teeth. Instead of studying the conditions of occupation that occasioned collaborationism and that would lead them to a true understanding of it, they begin with collaborationism, the top story of the edifice. The first rule in understanding collaborationism in Latvia is to learn that all offers of collaboration that Latvians made to the Germans were rejected; all collaboration that existed was organized by the Germans. If it had been up to the collaborationists to name their collaborationist newspaper they would have called their organ Briva zeme (Free land—zeme in Latvian can mean land, country, or soil). As a matter of fact, the first Latvian newspaper in Riga on July 1, 1941 was Briva zeme. Stahlecker ordered it shut and he imposed Tevija on them. It was the Germans who hired and fired the editors of Tevija.

By Angrick and Klein’s standard, Zhanis Lippke, the Latvian angel who saved some five dozen Jews, was a collaborationist, because he was working for the Germans, escorting Jews from the ghetto to their job-site. Only as a collaborationist could Lippke have helped Jews. Even more convoluted is the case of Emma Kronbergs, who worked as a typist and translator for Wolfgang Kuegler, the head of the SD detail in Liepaja (Libau in German). During the day she shared the office with the SD chief, and at night his bedroom. However, this SD moll, as some might call her, occupying a privileged perch, used her position to save Jews and Latvian nationalists by notifying them of looming threats. During the December massacre in Liepaja, she provided working papers for the mother of the now well known professor George Schwab, thus saving her and her sons (the father had been killed earlier) from being sent to Skede.

Angric and Klein make no effort to decode the Nazi semiotics of collaboration, and thus misread the use by Latvians of the red-white-red armband as an identifying sign of anti-Semitic nationalism. In reality the choice was made by the German authorities. Upon the entrance by the Germans, the Wehrmacht ordered Latvians to organize “self-defence” teams and mandated that they wear Latvian national colors on their sleeves.

July 1941 in Riga

In the introduction of the book Angrick and Klein promise to explain to us that there was no distinction between the anti-Semitism and rage of the Nazis and that of Latvians. The Latvian activities they call by the Nazi name “pogroms”. And more—they also claim to know why the Latvians behaved the way they did: It was the Soviet occupation and deportation of Latvians to Siberia that enraged the Latvians against the Jews. Angrick and Klein write:

It was also immediately [after the occupation] apparent that anti-Semitism and violent nationalism was no import by German troops, rather that a broad part of Latvian society had built up their hatreds earlier. A significant factor in this was the Soviet occupation of the country that followed the Hitler-Stalin pact. Without considering the fact of annexation of the country into the Soviet Union with its political consequences and deportation of, real or imagined, opponents of the regime to the Gulag, one could not explain the later uninhibited explosion of violence and destruction, the revenge-war of Latvian nationalists in July 1941. [p. 8-9]

The following two statements are also by Germans, but of an earlier generation: “Therefore now the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians are wreaking bloody revenge on them [Jews]. The Soviets from these countries deported children....” And “In the light of the consideration that the population of the Baltic countries had suffered most heavily under the rule of Bolshevism and Judaism during the period of integration into the USSR, it could be expected that after their liberation of this foreign domination they would eliminate the enemies who were remaining in the country after the retreat of the Red Army." Both statements were delivered in 1941: the first by Hitler, the second by Stahlecker.

Where is the distinction between Angrick and Klein and the statements of the infamous Nazis? Well, there is one significant difference: Hitler and Stahlecker delivered their precepts as a hope, and Angrick and Klein present them as fact. But why should Latvians have believed a Nazi fiction? Where is the proof for it? If Latvians were as hate-filled as Angrick and Klein think they were, why did the Nazi public relations men after they arrived in Latvia see the need to persist in countless different ways to saturate the airways and the press with one phrase—Jewish-Bolshevism? It is indeed true that the cliché was not without its influence in Latvia, but Angrick and Klein’s cavalier treatment of the issue does not do the topic justice. There was more than one kind of anti-Semitism, and more than anti-Semitism was required for mass murder of Jews.

Angrick and Klein were not the first to describe the July-August days in Riga. Before them it was been done by Jews, Latvians, and Germans. This time has been examined by journalists, jurists, and fiction writers. When I examined this period I did two things that Angrick and Klein did not. I did not allow myself to be victimized by Nazi vocabulary (I knew that inner enemy was not a Latvian slogan, for example); and I relied on about eleven basic sources that could yield information about this period. These sources were:

  1. memoirs and depositions of Jewish survivors,
  2. memoirs of Latvian writers,
  3. the Nazi- time Latvian- and German-language press (both under offical censorship and control, and therefore reflecting German policy),
  4. Latvian diplomatic dispatches abroad,
  5. Nazi orders and propaganda,
  6. the reports of Walter Stahlecker,
  7. police records of Riga and the provinces,
  8. documents from postwar German trials,
  9. documents from Soviet trials, including show-trials,
  10. Soviet newspapers and historical/political writings, and
  11. documents from American and Canadian war-crimes trials.

The rules of occupation and the institutional framework that the occupying forces brought to Latvia is no secret. For example, did the declaration of martial law, curfew, and the order to surrender weapons mean something different in Latvia in 1941 than in other places, other wars, and other times? If they did not, then many of the episodes that Angrick and Klein present as true could not have happened. Riga on July 1 and the following days was not only occupied, it was still a battle zone where enemy fire was not fully suppressed. Those who have been in war would know that people toting unauthorized weapons could only do so at their own peril.

For me it was significant to discover that two major German sources did not support the narrative line that Angrick and Klein adopt. First, Stahlecker himself in his reports said nothing about spontaneous (as opposed to organized) pogroms in Riga and spoke of difficulties starting one. Second, I relied on German court documents, especially from the trial of Viktors Arajs (one Latvian whose guilt is far beyond any dispute) in Hamburg. For example, describing the synagogue burning on July 4, 1941 in Riga, Angrick and Klein chose a version in which Latvians incinerated 400 Jews in the Gogol Street synagogue. This story was considered by the Hamburg court but rejected. Instead the court accepted the evidence provided by two Arajs commando men, Jansons and Murnieks, who were eyewitnesses of the event. I chose to follow the court, presumably expert at recognizing hyperbole and rejecting it. The Angrick and Klein version of the burning of the synagogue has a history of its own that emerged slowly and only after the war. Max Kaufmann, for example, who seems to have had a remarkably panoramic view and enormously broad sources of information when he wrote his book in 1946, did not know about the 400 Lithuanian Jews burned in the synagogue.

We know for certain that in 1941 Jews were a or perhaps the major issue for the Germans and a fixation for Stahlecker and Hitler—but were they for Latvians? The major issue for Latvians, on the contrary, was Latvia and Latvians: the one issue that agitated their thinking was the sovereignty of Latvia. That is evident not only in the pronouncements of Latvian diplomats abroad but also of even of those collaborating with Germans like Alfreds Valdmanis, Gustavs Celminsh, and Oskars Dankers.

Angrick and Klein by accepting the pogrom concept have resuscitated Stahlecker and Heydrich’s dream that from their viewpoint failed in the Baltics and metamorphosed it into a “historical reality”. If Angrick and Klein’s revenge-war had taken place it is unlikely that Stahlecker would have been able to resist the temptation to detail this in his reports. That would have been a fulfillment not only of the Führer’s orders but also his wishes. The Latvians did of course have a role to play on the streets of Riga and the burning of the synagogues, but it could have happened only within the rules of the Nazi occupation and directives of Stahlecker to Arajs.

In describing the street scenes of Riga, Angrick and Klein relied on some Nazi sources but mainly on two Jewish memoir writers, Max Kaufmann and Bernhard Press. Their books are not without merit, and there is nothing wrong with using memoirs of victims. But the two authors engage in some bizarre assertions that seriously undercut their credibility. Both, for example, posit the existence of an anti-Semitic “Latvian center” that orchestrated a Germanless murder of the Jews in Latvia. The existence of this “center” has been as elusive as the Trotskyite ones in Moscow show trials—all attempts to find them have come up dry. It helps little that both authors, Kaufmann and Press, associate this center with the Perkonkrusts (Thundercross), a Latvian anti-Semitic organization of the early 1930s.

Perkonkrusts was an anti-Semitic organization that peaked in 1932, about the time when the National Socialists were riding high in Germany. The difference between the two is that while the fortunes of the latter soared, those of Perkonkrusts went from worse to worst—they were jailed by the Latvian government, exiled, and then the identifiable remnants deported to Siberia after the Soviet occupation of 1940. However, it is true that during the beginning weeks of the occupation many of the erstwhile members thought that their day had arrived. It is a stretch to attribute an organizational framework to Perkonkrusts in 1941, though. In 1941 the remnants of Perkonkrusts existed at the mercy of Germans and were manipulated by them; Germany had been the place of exile for the most prominent of the surviving members. In August of the same year they were deemed too nationalistic and the Wehrmacht, too, ordered the organization shut down. Their participation in Arajs killing squads was minimal. The principal Latvian collaborationists, men like Voldemaars Veiss, Viktors Arajs, Herberts Cukurs, and Oskars Dankers, names that Angrick and Klein mention as Latvian activists, were not Perkonkrusts members, contrary assertions notwithstanding. Gustavs Celminsh, Andersons, and Rikards were Perkonkrusts members, but their positions in the occupation administration were of a lower order.

Perhaps, enough said. A book review is not the right venue to deliver a tutorial on an arcane and complicated topic. In short, I must reject Angrick and Klein’s description of Riga in July 1941, as conceptually and factually faulty. Their version of the events and use of terminology asks me to make a major accommodation with remnants of National Socialism. This problem perhaps may not be as well understood in the center of the former empire, as it is in the former colonies, the objects of German domination.

If readers want to learn about the fate of 24,000 Central European Jews in Latvia, I recommend Angrick and Klein’s study to them. If on the other hand they want to learn about the Holocaust in Latvia and the fate of 70,000 Latvian Jews they should consult my published works.

Andrew Ezergailis, Ithaca College
Andrew Ezergailis is Professor Emeritus of History at Ithaca College, author of The Holocaust in Latvia (1996), The Stockholm Documents: The German Occupation of Latvia (2002), and Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Latvia (2005).

1First published as Kas ir Daugavas Vanagi? in Latvian. Also translated into German, as Daugavas Vanagi, Wer Sind sie?.—Ed.
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