Reichelt’s Elephants

1. Problems of Truth
2. Historiography
3. Occupation, No?
4. Occupation Determines Collaboration
5. Impossible Collaboration
6. Appropriation of Jewish Goods
7. Auction
8. Dr. Bernhard Press & Jürgen Kroeger
9. Führerbefehl
10. Latvians in Uniform
11. Slogans to Murder By:
12. Truth to Power…
13. Portrait of a “Collaborationist”
14. Parting Shot

If there is a German-friendly case to be made about the murder of Jews in Latvia, Dr. Katrin Reichelt strives to make it in her lengthy study of the Latvian role in killing the Jews of Latvia. She accomplishes this mirage by breaking with the analytical/empirical method, a tradition that in the study Nazi occupied Latvia was established by Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm in his magisterial Die Truppe des Weltanschaungskrieges (1981), and by shading the deeds of her forebears but piling up on those of Latvians. The work is a kind of a skyriding Valkyrie hit job from the heavens, revenging clueless people for breaking an oath that mortals were forbidden to understand. However, notwithstanding that her case is an absurd one, as is her use of historical tools—mauling up sources, eliding some and foreshortening others—she manages to score some points. Even some disbelievers in her thesis may give her an “A” for a spirited effort.

Problems of Truth

Though truth is always problematic, Reichelt and other German authors seem to be unaware that, for an augur of truth, the Holocaust, especially that in Eastern Europe present some foxy pitfalls. To wit:

1. The semi-hidden nature of the killing operations, and Nazi propaganda that accompanied it—and the interpretive turn that Soviets gave to it—our knowledge of it isn’t always as clear and accessible as a historian in a hurry would wish it to be. Those historians who are not ready for a deep immersion, unwilling to go under the frozen surface of sources, or be capricious in their use are unlikely ever to see the object of their search in full.
2. In addition to official orders, Hitler also delivered unspoken ones, asking his comrades to create a reality on the ground, to hide their strategic goals.
3. Application of quellenkritik1 to Holocaust sources, especially in Germany, has been either too restrictive or too liberal. In Germany, it seems it is bad style in Holocaust matters to believe in sworn trial evidence and disbelieve in “eyewitness” accounts.
4. Some “eyewitness” accounts like those of Sidney Iwens, Edward Anders, Kalman Linkimer, and Frida Michelson are priceless sources, yet others are not fact- but anger-based and like the famous book by Max Kaufmann2, have been overused and abused. They speak about events that the author could not have witnessed or understood. Their veracity has been tested in a variety of war-crime trials in USA and Canada and were found wanting.
5. A historian ought to be aware that the East European “blood lands” from the very beginning became the object of conflicting territorial claims by Nazi Germany and the USSR and neither power showed any moderation in maligning the true heirs of those lands. For example, in Germany it appeared to be salon-proper to take Goebbels's prepared Wochenschau3skits as truth.
6. Reichelt seems to be unaware that the Nazis willfully manufactured “eyewitness” accounts that were deposited in the archives. It is known that the Nazis endeavored to misinform the future. For example, von Medem wrote in a report of August 1941 that “lawless, uncontrollable locals” killed Jelgava Jews. However, if Medem is right, then a great injustice was carried out by the Landgericht of Köln by punishing Lt. Alfred Becu for killing 1500 Jelgava Jews.
7. Although a great deal of Holocaust history does meet the highest empirical and conceptual standards, too frequently some writings, as they did half a century ago, still tend to swing between righteousness, denial, and revenge. In Reichelt’s work, arguing that Latvians did not need Germans to molest and kill their Jews, we encounter all three attitudes.

Historiography

Historiographically, Reichelt’s work falls within that post-War German school of Holocaust history that for the last sixty years has worked hard not to find the Führerbefehl. This school claims to possess the right to reject, as if with a flick of a finger, all “wrong” evidence and sources. For example, whilst claiming to search for the “Führerbefehl”, they a priori reject all sources that would give the answer. Ironically, the plan to kill Jews that they failed to find in Germany, Reichelt and her associates, now seem to have found in Latvia.

In a broader sense, Dr. Reichelt, as if she herself were of a “von” family, also stands in the intellectual lineage of fire-breathing German authors that have vowed to take no prisoners of Latvian extraction. This tradition started with the 1905 revolution, with works such as Die Lettische Revolution by Astaf von Transehe-Roseneck (1908) through Anatol von Lieven’s study The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (1993).

My disagreements with Reichelt exist at least on three interconnected levels: ideological, historiographical, and factual. How many errors of fact and omissions is one allowed and still call the work a history and still claim it to have covered the field? The ethics of history require one to confront the “inconvenient” not avoid it. One doesn’t need to be a Wittgenstein4 to know that commitments for a cause, obtained knowingly or by osmosis, create blindness that in turn butchers up the world of facts. In no case do I remember Reichelt confronting eyewitness evidence with that of documentary or trial records.

Occupation, No?

Reichelt fails to inform the reader about the extraordinary features and consequences of the Nazi occupation: the Lebensraum5 and racial policy aims. The work does not convey much evidence that she has mastered the sizable literature about the German occupation of Latvia. Some of the basic works on the subject are missing in her bibliography. For example, the works of Žanis Unāms, Arnolds Aizsilnieks, and Ādolfs Blāķis are not listed. The most serious omission is Alfreds Bīlmanis, ed., Latvia Under German Occupation, Washington (1943).6 The volume consists of reports that OSS men in Stockholm had obtained from their contacts in Latvia. It is one source that contains information without German or Soviet filters, and if genuine Latvian opinion was desired, this was the book: it represents the thoughts and feelings of intellectual and politically minded Latvians who were living under the conditions of occupation. The fingers of the spy network reached all strata of Latvian society and did not exclude the offices of the members of the Land Self-Administration and the personnel of the Legion.

*

The lady doth protest too much.

As Reichelt’s study is about Latvian collaborationism, it may also emerge as a mirror of her doppelgänger. There are worse sources than Reichelt’s book for the study of contemporary attitudes and German success in overcoming the past. Reichelt’s understanding of the Nazi occupation stands in stark opposition to Latvians’ understanding of German times. Contrary to Reichelt’s argument, there was nothing in German rule for Latvians to like. In their memory and history it lives as a brutally duplicitous rule, if not worse, certainly no better than the Soviet one. The author fails to consider German plans and thus to fully understand the Nazi times.

Occupation Determines Collaboration

Was the German occupation goal of Latvia identical with that of France? If the occupations’ ends were dissimilar did that affect the collaborative relationship? Occupation must determine collaboration or the concept is meaningless.

The concept “collaboration,” generally a word with positive weight, took on a satanic meaning as a consequence of Nazi occupation of Europe. The word implies the presence of reciprocity, but can there be one with a trigger-happy gunslinger and an inveterate liar?

Although I am not ready to pronounce on “collaboration” as a tool of analysis for the understanding of occupied France, Denmark, or Norway, but more than a question arises when applied to agreements that have been imposed by weapons. How many lies would it take to obviate collaboration?

Only those historians who are addicted to making errors would want to simply compare the standing of say, the Vichy government with that of Land Self-Administration in Latvia. There are insurmountable differences between the two entities that must be respected and understood. If one wants to compare Petain and Dankers then one also need to explain the differences honestly. For example, one would need to know why the Germans asked the Vichy government to legislate anti-Semitic laws, but nothing like it was asked of Latvians. I wonder whether Reichelt understands the difference? Or cares? There must have been a reason why the Nazis murdered Deglavs, dismissed Valdmanis and incarcerated Perkonkrusts’ members. As a clean, universal tool of analysis, unlike a scalpel dissecting cadavers, collaboration is useless, for by now the term is overladen with moralising and revenge, by which generally the powerless are blamed for losing. Was it proper for Soviets to accuse the Jews who survived the Holocaust as collaborationists?

Reichelt with her fluid use of the concept bedazzles me. In her usage collaboration becomes a synonym for self-occupation. By what logic can one-sided imposition of rules become collaboration? Is rape collaboration? Though one-sided it may be.

By the time she is finished with blaming Latvians with collaboration or self-occupation, the Hague Protocols and Geneva conventions, the laws of war and peace, the responsibilities that the protocols place on the occupying and occupied powers, are in smithereens, left with more holes than a wheel of cheese bought at a Swiss market. In her usage polarities are reversed, the object becomes the subject, the hunted becomes the hunter; the brutalities of the Nazis become those of the Latvians; the occupier becomes the occupied. The conventions mandate that at the moment of occupation, the responsibility for peace, order and welfare of all citizens descends upon the occupier. If Latvians were committing any atrocities, it would have been German duty to prevent them or incur legal and moral responsibility for them. Contrariwise, the occupier has an option to withdraw the military forces, give up the occupation. Is Reichelt ready to assume responsibility for all temptations to which Latvians succumbed and the crimes that they committed?

In the broad, promiscuous way in which Reichelt uses collaboration, it has become a gimmick with which the heirs of Nazism attempt to polish their wounded ego, try to find something good in the deeds of their forbearers. The formula may be: there is nothing good to say about my great uncle, but have you heard what the unarmed and powerless people of Eastern Europe did?

The conceit of blaming Eastern Europeans for Nazi or Soviet crimes is not an invention of overconfident German intellectuals and it did not start with the fall of the wall. The other powers of the pact has been doing it to the Latvians since the dawn of the day.

Impossible Collaboration

It is true that some Latvians, especially during the early weeks of occupation, greeted the Germans as their liberators. (So did all Soviet nationalities, including Russians and some Jews). To greet the incoming occupying army is part of internationally accepted protocol. If, however, we are speaking about a two-sided collaboration in Latvia, and I think elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it was impossible due to Nazi plans and intentions. The military presence gave Germans all the power they needed to annul disagreements and erase lies; if natives offered help, they were ridiculed.

If anyone in Germany, France, Sweden or America is confused by the above, they may try to answer or ask Reichelt to answer any of the questions below:

1. Why did the Germans on the first day—no! the first hour—of occupation discontinue Brīvā Zeme, mandating Tēvija as the Latvian newspaper of occupation?
2. Why did the Germans forbid Latvian representatives to meet Hitler?
3. Why did the Germans murder Viktors Deglavs?
4. Why did the Germans dismiss Arturs Kroders as the first editor of Tēvija?
5. Why did the Germans incarcerate Gustavs Celmiņš?
6. Why did the Germans exile Valdmanis?
7. Why, during the occupation, were there more nationalists in Nazi jails than Communists?
8. Why did Germans reject all Latvian offers of collaboration?
9. Why the Germans never discuss the Jewish question with Latvians?
10. Why did Stahlecker report to Berlin that he made no promises and was successful in disrupting Latvian efforts of centralized organization?

If Reichelt would answers the ten questions with one and the same answer, I would owe her an apology, for that would show that she knows more about the German occupation than she has allowed her text to convey. The correct answer is that all these questions skirted the one and same issue that, above all, the Germans considered to be theirs alone: Latvian and Latvia’s sovereignty.

Two predatory provisos underlain the Nazi occupation of Latvia, ones that made collaboration impossible, and that were not in the cards for France, the Low Countries or Scandinavia: Latvia does not exist and Riga is not its capital/center.

Historians are prone to forget that the war in the East, before anything else, was about Lebensraum. Not the Holocaust itself, though it would not have happened without the German eliminationist anti-Semitism, but neither it would have occurred at the time it did without the German plan to free-up Eastern Europe for German habitation. Among Nazi ideologues the planning about Latvians was more flexible than that about the Jews, but they too, had the Germans won the war, were doomed for extinction: some were slated for Germany to be reconditioned as Germans; the larger part, deprived of education, would be reduced to manual worker status. All markings of the Latvian state would be extirpated, the land, subdivided into latifundia7, would become German property.

Study of the German administrative structure of Latvia shows that the highest power center was the district ("apriņķis"). For example, there was a Latvian Police Chief of a district, but no Latvian authority above that, except their German overseers.

It is true that the war occasioned some unexpected consequences that made Germans alter their tactical plans without changing their ultimate goals. To some degree even the killing of Jews was slowed down and thus some Latvian and German Jews had a chance of surviving the Holocaust. Concerning educational plans for Latvians, a sudden turn occurred in the autumn of 1941 for which I know no explanation. It is known that Germans entered Latvia with the intention to keep all schools closed in 1941/42, and thereafter limit Latvian education to four years of grammar school. However, after a small delay Elementary schools were opened. Later in the fall of ’41 even some university departments (that of medicine was the first one) were allowed to open. In the spring of 1942 even the history department was allowed to restart some activities under strict supervision.

In less than three weeks, by July 18, the Latvian political elites knew that nobody will collaborate with anybody or will be asked to do so. Germans rejected even the appearance of collaboration. The murder of Deglavs was the educational moment at least for the elites. Collaboration without quid pro quo? How dumb, then and now, did the Germans think the Latvians were?

Appropriation of Jewish Goods

Of all the Holocaust issues, I am least informed about the dispossession of Jewish properties.

To get to the bottom of it, it seems, however reasonable to conclude that those people who made the decision to kill the Jews also made decision to take control of their properties, personal, and communal: bank accounts, buildings, apartments, furniture, clothes, down to tooth brushes. Those people who have a problem acknowledging the order to kill can be expected also to have a problem with property issues. Reichelt does not disappoint us. As Nazi/Germans did not ask anybody’s permission to kill the Jews they were not likely to collaborate with anybody in sharing the wealth of the victims. The Nazis started to struggle with Jewish property issues already in the 1930s.

For most of my life I thought of property as an unresolved issue. That it just was! Reichelt’s discussion of the issue has made me discover that there was no Jewish stuff for Latvians to steal. It turns out that the property that Latvians stole and pilfered belonged to the German Reich. That may explains German aggressive possessiveness about Jewish goods. When the Germans found out that Latvians were purloining Jewish property, Germans threw the book at them, made Latvians pay for the things that some Latvians thought they had earned by helping to kill Jews. One must however also note that—avarice plays no second fiddle to ethics or law—the situation was too complicated for Germans to control.

Reichelt in general is correct, for it is true that an unknown amount of Jewish belongings during the Holocaust years, did pass into the hands of some Latvians. And it happened in various ways all of them illegal from the German point of view.

1. It may not be known in Germany that Jews before going into the ghetto, left some valuables for safekeeping to their neighbors, or friends. Germans didn’t like it, issued warning but could not stop it. A Riga musician told me that in this way some Latvians had inherited some valuable instruments. I have also heard that some Jewish mothers left their children to Latvian families.
2. Some Jewish belongings Latvians received for services rendered: supplying of food or even securing a hiding place. It must be noted that all of the illegal food items that working Jews brought into the Ghetto, got there through Latvian connection. I’m certain that Latvians were corruptible easier than were Germans.
Some Jewish goods, Germans lacking enough eyes, were out rightly stolen from vacated Jewish abodes before the Germans got to take control of them. As far as I know most of the possessors of stolen belongings were police associated people or had keys to those apartments.
3. Some Jewish valuables got into Latvian pockets on the killing days at the killing sites. The most valuable belongings, gold watches, rings, bracelets and strings of pearls, those Jews who had anything like it, would be hanging on to their valuables to the last. But seeing no way out, instead of dropping the valuables in a box, as Germans had arranged, they would throw them in surrounding ditches and in the high grass. Thus the killing sites became a kind of a Klondike, that the knowing would scour over on the days of the killings and years thereafter. For example, I heard a story from my neighbor, that an acquaintance, who had been called out to assist in the Viesite massacre upon return had told his father that he had found enough gold to make a fishing lure (bļitka). I would not be surprised that on occasion these sites are still revisited, even today. In later years a ghoulish variant was the digging for gold teeth at the massacre sites.
4. Then there was also the stuff that, Germans, being parsimonious people, sold to or wanted to sell to the Latvians at the celebrated, so called, auctions. This was second hand stuff that was too seedy to be transported to Germany. Had the Americans been in charge of the operation, they, as health hazard, would have incinerated it.

Auction

At age ten, I was a witness of one of these auctions. My mother had sent me to the pagasts cooperative store (about 5 km distance) to check for the availability of sugar, July being berry time. Sugar wasn't there but as I was lingering in front of the store, a truck pulled up with some used clothing (women's dresses, men's jackets) on a hanger and household goods (brooms, pails, brushes, and a shovel or two), altogether some 50-100 items. In front of my eyes an auction was organized. Some two dozen people materialized and bidding, or rather non-bidding, started. I don't know how, I may be wrong, that I knew that the goods were Jewish property from Viesīte. The sale was a total fiasco—not a single bid was offered. Finally the auctioneer asked if there is anything there that somebody wanted. Nobody stirred. Considering that Germany had no native source of oil, (the truck having traveled over 50 km.) the venture must be competing for the most cost ineffective commercial washouts ever , and one that must have hastened the inferno to come. I don't think much would have change, if the goods had been offered gratis. I am sure the sales were more successful in other places, yet it would have been a stretch to make the auctions profitable.

Dr. Bernhard Press & Jürgen Kroeger

The weakest part of Reichelt’s work, an inheritance from her German colleagues, is excessive reliance on eyewitness literature. And worse, failure to apply the stringency of quellenkritik to this literature, to notice that so-called eyewitness accounts frequently are a copy or close imitation of each other or of political tracts put out by Hitler’s or Stalin’s, the Pacts, functionaries.

She does not want to believe, as I showed in my study Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Latvia, that in the 1970s a great part of Holocaust experts in the West, including some fair minded Nazi-hunters, became victimized by their, self-inflicted, fascination with a Soviet counterfeit, Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are They? The forgery, as argued elsewhere, operated as a template for many memoirs, and even for legal indictments in the USA and Canada. The author has given us little to no analysis of her sources. Her persona appears to be averse to the possibility that some witnesses might have lied or given formulaic statements without having any direct knowledge.

A specific point can be made about Reichelt's reliance for the narrative of much that happened in Latvia on the “memoirs” by Dr. Bernhardt Press Judenmord in Riga that came out in two editions in 1988 and 1993 and more than one revision. I put “memoirs” in quotation marks, because its readers, save for Reichelt, could readily see that only the last part, in which he tells us about his survival by hiding out in his father’s Latvian colleague’s apartments during the Holocaust years, is a true memoir. The beginning part is a collage: in part reliance on Goebbels Wochenschau skits and in part plagiarism from Ducmanis’s pamphlets, mainly Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are They? At this point, I also want to confess, that at the time, long distance, still by snail mail, I too had a hand in shaping the second edition of Press’ “memoirs.”

Believing that we are fighting for a common cause, during the early 1990s, I had a brief correspondence with Dr. Press. He sent me a copy of his Judenmord in Riga, and a rare Ducmanis pamphlet, for which I thanked him, but I also told him that I saw too much Ducmanis in his memoirs and that he overdid the Latvian anti-Semitism theme. At first I thought that the eyesores in Press’ memoirs were inadvertencies, faux pas of memory, not premeditated fiction. I advised him that if he wants to write about Latvian anti-Semitism, he shouldn’t forget about the student fraternities about whom he had written nothing. In the next letter he cracked a couple of jokes, did not like my Ducmanis dig but said nothing about the anti-Semitism reference. As it happened soon after, perhaps just a year, I received a copy of the revised edition of Judenmord in Riga. I saw that in the new volume he had downplayed the general Latvian anti-Semitism, but spun some extended stories about student fraternities—tales that could have no basis in reality. To be noted, Press had translated my advice that was theoretically abstract, into concrete stories of Latvian fraternity men killing Jews during the first night of occupation, stories that mangled up addresses and ones that could only have happened in imagination, not under martial law, during the first hours of occupation. Latvia by that time had been occupied enough times that even bombed fraternity men would know that carrying unauthorized weapons during martial law, is like pronouncing a death sentence onto oneself.

The plagiaristic character of Press’ two books and display of bitter hatred towards the people who saved him and his father is a puzzle, for neither comports with his intelligence, disposition, or earlier contacts with Latvians. He certainly was capable of writing his own memoirs without borrowings from somebody else’s works. I suspect that some parts he did not write himself. While earlier his dispositions tended to be anti-Soviet, now he was doing the work of the Soviet Liaison Committee with Compatriots and Foreigners Abroad, an affiliate of the KGB, trying to establish the reality of a Germanless Holocaust by “memory” that could not be done with documents.

We must note that his life was a tragic one for Soviet liberation contradicted principles of freedom. After liberation in the fall of 1944, his father, Communists disappointing him, committed suicide. Bernhard managed to finish his medical education, but the Soviets, suspected him, for having survived the Holocaust, of harboring bourgeois sympathies and blocked his career development. Consequently, he tried to flee to Sweden. However, the plan was discovered, then he was tried in 1951 and exiled. However, he received an early reprieve and thereafter his career took off. The greatest miracle was that in the mid-1980s he was allowed to leave the USSR and live in Berlin, where he began writing his “memoirs”.

Another aspect of his life in in the 80s was that he began to associate himself with Jürgen Kroeger, an ex-SD man, and in a different and more distant way also with Paulis Ducmanis in Riga. Kroeger was a Baltic/Latvian German, who during the war had worked for the SD intelligence section in Riga. After the war he had immigrated to Canada. However, by the late 1980’s, he was back in Germany and like Dr. Press was also writing “memoirs”, one level below that of the doctor. I was told that both of them, an odd-couple, tandem were touring Germany making a fair living from lectures, telling the German public what they wanted to hear. Kroeger wrote two pamphlets, So War Es: Ein Bericht (1989) [translated into Latvian, Neatkarīga Cīņa 5.11.93] and Eine Baltische Illusion: Tagebuch Eines Deutch-Balten aus den Jahren 1939-1944 (1993) that timewise coincided with the publications of Dr. Press. Kroeger’s booklets purported to be Nazi-time diaries, with sequential dating, as it would be in a diary. However, the claim turned out to be bogus: for one, the sequence of events in the “diary” was at odds with that of historical events. After Paulis Ducmanis translated the So War Es and published it in Neatkarīgā Cīņa, I wrote an article about Kroeger’s flimflammery. In the correspondence that followed, Kroeger admitted that I was right and that it had been the publisher who had imposed the diary format on him. Since, at the time both of us were in Riga, Kroeger invited me and Dr. Indulis Ronis for a cognac in Hotel Riga. At the time Kroeger was of advanced age, had a problem of locomotion, but faultlessly dealt with the cognac. On that occasion he was attempting to rehabilitate the SD, persuade us, Ronis and me, that it was Lohse, the Reichscommissar of Ostland, not the SD who had ordered the killing the Jews of Latvia. As an intelligence officer he swore to have seen Lohse’s signature on a secret document.

How do you like them apples?

The urquelle for most of the memoir writing on the Holocaust in Latvia and the reason why so many war-crime cases were lost, was Max Kaufman’s Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands. Ducmanis' pamphlets, which in time became the standard, in part were a summary of Kaufman’s 1946 opus. Reichelt, although her documentation is much fuller, in part continues this trend.

Führerbefehl

Dr. Reichelt must have dreamt not reasoned that the Führerbefehl does not exist, that Hitler and thus the German nation at least, were not responsible for killing of the Jews in the Baltics. It must be a liberating sensation for a German, to perceive, if only in a dream, that something happened in the Holocaust that was Germanless. Yet, an introspective German would have also known that this kind of a sensation can only be obtained by a contortion of history and at the expense of Germany’s neighbors, specifically people of those territories that Timothy Snyder has called the “Bloodlands”.

The evidence that Hitler, through his intermediaries, ordered Einsatzgruppe A to “clean out” the Jews from the Baltics is very strong. At least nine Nazi leaders who had responsibilities within the geographical area of Reichelt’s study, have left evidence or have testified that the Führerbefehl was read to them. Among them were Martin Sandberger, Arno Besekov, Karl Tschierschky, Rudolf Lange, Herbert Bartz, Eduard Strauch, Walther Münch, Müller (RSHA) and Walter Stahlecker. I feel that Dr. Reichelt, even as a disbeliever in the Führerbefehl, at least should have made an edifying gesture to the believers, to show off her forensic skills, and once for all spell out the disbelievers’ case and cause.

The Führerbefehl question will bug her for ever and with time it may become an embarrassment. For a rationalist the most difficult task would be to obliterate Stahlecker’s evidence. In four sentences in the October Report he summed up the order, the manner it was carried out and the problems it encountered: From the outset, it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the Baltic was not going to be solved through pogroms alone. Yet, according to the basic (grundsätzlichen) orders, the Security Police's cleansing activity had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews. Special commandos, reinforced by specially chosen forces in Lithuania, partisan troops, in Latvia, units of the Latvian auxiliary police, performed extensive executions in the cities and the outlying areas. The operations of these execution commandos went smoothly. ...

Articulation of the order:

It was desirable, however, that the Jewish question not be raised immediately, as the unusually tough measures would also have created shock in German circles. It had to appear to the outside that the indigenous population itself reacted naturally against the decades of oppression by the Jews and against the terror created by the communists in its recent history, and that the indigenous population carried out these first measures of its own accord.

For the Führerbefehl deniers, Stahlecker is a special problem because his testimonies come from the documents that he penned in 1941/42, [His Consolidated Reports and his letter of August 6, 1941] when he could not have known about the trial testimonies of his colleagues. His evidence shows not only that he received an order, but also that those Nazis did not lie who after the war testified of the order’s existence. To fully understand the Stahlecker paragraph it would help to know the context and how the order coordinates with the activities on the ground.

The second sentence contains the crucial text, the order, that only Hitler could have given.

Yet, according to the basic orders, the Security Police's cleansing activity had to aim at a complete annihilation of the Jews.

He tells us that he operated with the understanding that the German Security Police should carry out a total killing of all Jews: men, women and children. That the killing should be complete and expeditious carried out without pity and hesitation. Stahlecker’s rendering of the order does not allow us to second guess that the order might have come into existence as a consequence of conflicting power blocs within Nazi leadership or that Himmler might had misread the wishes from the eyes of Hitler and issued an order before Hitler had meant to do so. It stretches my credulity, and I would wonder about those historians who think otherwise, how the most important decisions of the Nazi state could have been made without Hitler’s orders—understanding that the Nazis operated within the “cloud of deniability”, as do all democratic and dictatorial states and business corporations. If the Nixon tapes illustrate anything they show that only the utter trivia—if that—may escape the leader’s knowledge.

The first sentence addresses the problem of the pogrom:

From the outset, it was to be expected that the Jewish problem in the Baltic was not going to be solved through pogroms alone.

Not only Holocaust historians but also the people who call themselves skeptics insist on misunderstanding the Nazi use of the concept/tactic of “pogrom”. To me, the statement above communicates two aspects/problems: that pogroms were intended as the first, hopefully major. step of the total slaughter of Jews; and second, recognition that the tactic failed to deliver what the Nazis had hoped it would. However, he does not tell us why the tactic failed.

Since the Nazis were shy about analyzing their failures, the task is up to historians to solve. Since, according to Stahlecker (and Sandberger), there was only one true pogrom—that in Kaunas—a historian must turn there to find the answer.

The Kaunas pogrom was successful only in one, unanticipated, sense: Stahlecker’s men managed to sell it as an atrocity perpetrated by the Lithuanian people, rather one that his men had managed and choreographed. It must be counted as the most successful illusionist act in history. The Wehrmacht brass shocked by the “pogrom’s” brutality, forbade him to repeat it. Thus to our day Stahlecker’s “wizardry” stands unexposed and unique.

In all other senses the Kaunas pogrom was a failure: it lacked spontaneity; was too time consuming, (it took Stahlecker’s men two days to organize it); the German brass (they weren’t fooled) threatened to break the cooperation agreement; the pogrom had no follow-up; the rising of the Lithuanian people did not happen, as the Nazis had anticipated; Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda had failed: the Jewish/Bolshevism slogan did not have the expected result. Instead of finding friends, the Lithuanian people recoiled from Nazi barbarism. From the Nazi point of view, Lithuania, second to Poland, became one of the unstable areas of occupied Europe. From my reading, more unstable than Latvia, not to mention Estonia.

In other words, Reichelt is not the first one who overestimates the power of the Nazi anti-Semitic slogans: before her there was also Himmler, Heydrich and Hitler.

The failure of the pogrom tactic leads to the organization of the killer Commandos: in Latvia, the Arājs commando; in Lithuania, Stahlecker organized a 300 men group out of some partisan units to perform similar assignments as the Latvian unit.

In the third and fourth sentences, Stahlecker addresses the genesis of the Arājs Commando, the tactical adjustment that was needed after the pogrom method failed. To carry out the Führerbefehl he could not depend on the cooperation of neighbors— a stricter command structure was called for.

Special commandos, reinforced by specially chosen forces in Lithuania, partisan troops, in Latvia, units of the Latvian auxiliary police, performed extensive executions in the cities and the outlying areas. The operations of these `execution commandos went smoothly.

The data collected about the activities of Arājs Commando corresponds to Stahlecker’s statement. There is nothing in the paragraph about a shared responsibility. The initiative came from him, not the Latvians. A study of the variety of killing actions in Latvia would confirm that the order in Latvia was carried out with determination and swiftness. In Latvia all Jews: men, women, and children were killed from the first week onward.

The Nazi plan, however, was much more varied and clever with more tricks in the RSHA quiver—killing two enemies with one swat. If we read Stahlecker’s report with some imagination and note the PR messages the Nazis were sending from Berlin, we see that the narratives were worlds apart. Berlin was telling that Jews in the East were killed by revengeful mobs [neighbors?]. In hundreds of different ways, Nazi PR portrayed the Jews as Bolsheviks who were abused by dimwitted, vengeful locals. That is the story we see in the Goebbels’ Wochenschauen, in Hitler’s conversation with Slavko Kvaternik, Medem’s report of August, 1941 and others. Some elements of the mob story are also evident in Stahlecker’s attempt to choreograph a pogrom in Kaunas. It is also crucial to Reichelt’s narrative. I know of no documented spontaneous mob attack against the Jews in 1940’s. Kristallnacht had an appearance of a mob attack, but that happened in Germany and was a party organized event.

Mob action failing, the Nazis considered the possible use of the Self-Defense teams that the Wehrmacht had brought into existence as their auxiliaries. The use of the Self-Defense worked better then the mob idea, but those “unprofessionals” could not be trusted to kill their neighbors or be punctual in carrying out orders. While in Ilūkste District the District Self-Defense Commander Baltmanis agreed to carry out the massacre of Subate Jews, the Commander of Jekabpils, Dzenītis, did not. The Commander of the town of Akniste refused an order to kill. In Auce the Commander agreed to convey Jews to the killing site and a gang of Germans did the killing. Later the Germans ordered the locals to help in the killings.

If thoroughness and speed of killing was important, it was up to Stahlecker to create auxiliaries that were more reliable. He found the answer by organizing the Arājs Commando. The killing record of the Commando corresponds to that of Stahlecker’s statement and also testimonies found in Soviet and German trials: Latvian auxiliary police, performed extensive executions in the cities and the outlying areas. The operations of these execution commandos went smoothly.

But the Arājs Commando was not the team of last resort. There were the Germans themselves—members of the Einsatzgruppe A itself. So far, I have not been able to understand why to some cities they sent teams from Arājs Commando, but to some Germans were delegated. It was EK leaders, in the beginning Strauch and later Lange, who made assignments and supervised the killings. There is no known instance that Arājs’s men would be sent out without German supervision. The German killing teams consisted either of SD men or men of the 9th Police Battalion. At first the Arājs killing teams were put through training sessions, thus, in as much as Stahlecker was ordered to be speedy and efficient, and contrary to frequently held opinion, the first killings in Latvia were carried out by German teams. The German primacy in killing actions is well documented for Daugavpils and Liepāja, but it is also true for Riga, although no one so far has documented it. The longest training period was in Liepāja, where Latvians were introduced to killing sessions only in September. I am making the above argument not so much because I want to say something about the Latvians, but rather to emphasize the seriousness with which Stahlecker and his men, who had received the order to liquidate all Jews, approached their assignment. In general it appears that the more serious jobs, like the killings in Jelgava, not to mention Rumbula, the Germans did it themselves. Only if one disbelieves in the Führerbefehl, can believe in the “mob theory” of killing Jews.

Like Reichelt, I have made no effort ever to look for the Führerbefehl, but for me, it has always been there, hiding like a lost wallet on top of a dresser.

Latvians in Uniform

To get correct all of the Latvian units and teams that during occupation years served the Germans, one must start with written sources. Relying on oral evidence will create unending confusion, for even Germans amongst themselves were not in an agreement what to call what. They were as prone to confusion as were the Latvians. The basic sources that would clarify the names of Latvians in uniform are Deluege’s guidelines and Jahnke’s trial documents. I have written extensively on the subject as well. First, one must remember that all Latvian forces at all levels were auxiliary and subordinate to a parallel German structure and their overseers. Always Hilfs-Polizei never Polizei. Time and function determined the name of the unit. In reality we are talking only about two organizations and the SD; Arājs Commando was a special hybrid.

The first Latvian teams that served the Germans were Self-Defense (Selbstschutz) forces and they functioned for the first two to three months. If Reichelt will insist that they were Latvian self-created entities, we shall again be in confusion land. Their beginnings are to be found in Wehrmacht documents: the Wehrmacht was responsible for their organization, and determined their size, armament, transport and activities. Every so often the Wehrmacht loaned them out to the SD. The Self-Defense men were ordered to wear civilian clothes and, as a sign of identification, Latvian colors as an arm band. To become a member they had to register and receive a Wehrmacht approved numbered pass. The Self-Defense most frequently is confused with Latvian partisans because in some places the former grew out of the partisans. The partisans, however in general were disarmed; only some were transferred to Self-Defense units. In most places the Self-Defense were new organizations, sometimes Aizsargi structure serving as a nucleus.

The Self-Defense system ended in August with the arrival of civilian government. Then a more professional police force, auxiliary police, came into existence that lasted until the end. Latvians called it kartības policija, but Germans called it Schutzmänner. There were also what Latvians called Polīcijas Battaljoni and Germans the Schutzmannschaft Battalions. They wore stripped-down Latvian Army uniforms.

The SD auxiliaries in the beginning wore civilian clothes, then a Latvian Army uniform and in 1942 those units that were sent to fight the partisans were given German green-gray field uniforms. The Latvian Legionnaires, from the very beginning, wore a variety of insignia, and were dressed in German Army uniforms, frequently with bullet holes in them.

Slogans to Murder By:

Jewish/Bolshevism.

Self-Defense.

Self-Cleansing.

Pogroms.

Neighbors.

Everybody Hates the Jews.

In a time of starvation, the Devil eats flies.

On the Nazi language of murder I have written previously, here I want to jot down some thoughts that in part have been teased out from Reichelt’s superannuated heresies. Contrary to her assertions, Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda failed in Latvia as it did in Lithuania. It failed in spite of the fact that Latvia had no lack of anti-Semites. It perhaps needs to be recalled that during the Kristallnacht pogrom, anti-Semitic propaganda also failed to deliver what Hitler had hoped. In all cases, the Nazis thought that their slogans and their “street theater” would create a riotous mood and people of the street, city, or the country would rise to join their bloody festivities—would start killing Jews with bats, bars, and farm implements. The people never failed to disappoint the Nazis. The Nazis at the time had to fall back on that for which the Germans had been the envy of the world: organization. Reichelt, if ever she writes another book, should try to understand why no Riga mob burned synagogues, but why rather it was done by an orderly SD unit, mostly consisting of Latvians who step by step, in a deliberate way, as tutored by Stahlecker’s men, destroyed, the temples. And if she were to analyze the Kaunas massacre, she would find the same rationalist thread in it. Wherever Germans entered, synagogues burned and Jews were killed. If the Nazis had to rely on spontaneity, the number of killed Jews would have been in hundreds and fallen far short of the 6,000,000.

Goldhagen was right to bring the concept of “eliminationist anti-Semitisms” to the debate. Anti-Semitism in any disguise had been an unpleasant part of European history, but since the Middle Ages violent anti-Semitic outbreaks were rare and controlled by the nation-state. Only in those places where the feudal or the nation state had suspended its protection from the Jewish communities, violent outbreaks took place. In modern times a dramatic failure to protect the Jewish communities occurred within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Anti-Semitism within Nazi Germany went much beyond that: not only was many sided eliminationist anti-Semitism developed by German academics, the whole German law profession was tasked to develop laws that placed the Jews beyond the pale of legal protection. Professors of medicine were ordered to develop curricula on “racial hygiene”. All of that and much more was unique to Germany—nothing like it ever had taken place in any other country in the world. The slogan “everybody hates the Jews” was wrong when Hitler’s men were spreading it to the world, and it is wrong now when German neo-nationalists are hunting for it in non-German lands. That slogan was even wrong for Hitler’s Germany.

*

Reichelt’s attempt to search for accomplices among disarmed and occupied people, are fated to be doomed, end up on a trash heap of ethically challenged projects. Reichelt is likely to know too little about Latvia to know that the history of anti-Semitism developed there in the opposite direction, the reverse, of Germany. While in Germany after 1933 anti-Semitism experiences an unprecedented proliferation, in every which direction, in Latvia its president Ulmanis almost in the same year, personally put a kibosh on anti-Semitism, turned the oxygen off. Reichelt makes no reference to Ulmanis’ dialogue on anti-Semitism with Arveds Bergs.

For a historian to find Latvia a country where everybody hates the Jews is an absurd project that may say more about the level of history writing in Germany than the object of its inquiry.

All of the above slogans experienced a similar fate. The Nazis might have hoped that neighbors start killing neighbors, but experience and common sense advised to do the opposite. Although neighbors are not always friends, they may also have affinities that outsiders may never know, ones that trump ideologies, politics and ethnic differences.

In spite of Nazi threats and laws we learn from articles and announcements that neighbors and colleagues helped Jews in peril: brought them food and information, took in their belonging for safe-keeping and on occasion found a hiding place. Instead of siccing neighbors on Jews, Germans were clever enough not to trust the neighbors; to the maximum they tried to limit the opportunities for neighbors to help Jews. As fast as possible Germans isolated Jews from their neighborhoods. I am sure that the Nazis themselves were more guarded about the efficacy of that slogan than is our author. I am not so surprised that neighbors helped Jews. My admiration also goes out to strangers who did so. Especially that is true in Germany where the population had received a triple dose of indoctrination. Since the “pogrom” alternative was predicated on neighbors killing neighbors, that plan was doomed to fail.

*

By leaning heavily on the Jewish/Bolshevism slogan, Dr. Reichelt demonstrated that she is purblind to—Post hoc ergo propter hoc—fallacy. That what is the result of a process, should not be called its cause. By falling for it, she confirms that she is one of us, not a Valkyrie, cleverer than gods. However, just because more than the majority of historians commit this fallacy and get away with it, it doesn’t mean we’ll let Dr. Reichelt grow wings. The problem with that slogan, regardless of how many Latvians or Germans today cotton to it, is that it is only a Nazi mental construct, with no basis in the empirical world, and Latvians as ur-Bolsheviks knew it as such. There were only a few Latvian families without a dead or alive Bolshevik in it. My family had several. In 1918 my father was posted as a guard on the Kremlin wall and knew all the Bolsheviks crossing the Red Square, by name, surname, and patronymic. He did not need the Nazis, although he rather liked them, to tutor him in Bolshevism. First, the slogan was factually wrong. By 1940 the Party was already Russified—thousands of Trotskyites had breathed their last. Second, the Nazis thrust it on the Latvian public too fast to persuade them that Jews needed to be killed. And third, considering the above, the Nazi assigning of a penalty for being a Bolshevik would be considered excessive if not ridiculous. Goldhagen’s “eliminationist” test had not been met. Reichelt’s snap judgment on her part had failed to meet the test of logic and she flunked the test on Latvian sociology. On the other hand, one must say that as a throw-away-bone that would preoccupy historians of the future, it has worked well.

To the degree Nazis were successful in organizing Latvians for killing actions it was due to a manipulation of the “national issues,” rather than to an appeal to anti-Semitism. Strangely, this was also the position that Arājs took throughout his trial. Before the Germans showed themselves to be liars and monsters there was nothing for Latvians to dislike about them. After all the Germans had liberated them. And the expectation was that Germans would repair what the Soviets had damaged, restore confiscated properties and Latvia’s statehood. It took some time for Latvians to realize that Latvia was in a grip of hostile occupation.

Truth to Power…

Speaking truth to power is rare and for that reason exhilarating to be in its presents when it happens. The scene is memorable when Brünhilde bites the head off Wotan in a Wagnerian Valhalla dialogue, accusing him of lying and hypocrisy. And no less remarkable is the meeting of 29 January 1943, in which Alfreds Valdmanis tells off Nazi General Commissar of Latvia Drechsler. Though, I don’t know what Reichelt thinks of Brünhilde, about Valdmanis her opinion is dismissive, just another Latvian collaborationist. Although the Land Self Administration did not have enough power to do serious harms to anybody, Latvian opinion about Valdmanis’s performance is at variance with hers. Valdmanis’s opportunity to confront the Germans arose in connection with the German decision to organize a Latvian SS-voluntary Legion. The Germans had made the decision and they wanted the Directors to agree with them. As Brünhilde was ostracized, so Valdmanis lost his position and was exiled from Latvia. If there is another “collaborationist” in Europe who spoke more sternly in the face of a German satrap, I would like to hear about it.

Portrait of a “Collaborationist”

Minutes follow [January 29, 1943—Ed.]:

Parting Shot

Enslave the natives and call them savages.

Or was it the other way?

I feel privileged of having never hunted, fired a rifle or served in any army. Although once when I was twenty, I misused a 22 caliber weapon: killed a singing bird that entertained me. I think that Dr. Reichelt and her fellow historians are luckier yet, for they know less about war than I do. The premises of occupation that she posits do not comport with any occupation, even a friendly one, that Clausewitz could imagine. All occupations, and the Nazi one wasn’t an exception, must begin with disarming of everybody. The unresolved paradox of her study is one of arms and evil. How could it be that in World War II there were two warmongering powers armed to their teeth, but if today's Germans are right, all the evil doing accrued to the people who were disarmed and had no dog in the fight.

Andrew Ezergailis