Black Earth(73)

The Nazi conviction that Jews were inhuman and east Europeans were subhuman could not provide anything like a technique to destroy the former and subjugate the latter. Only through politics could people be brought to do what the Germans could not do on their own: physically eliminate large numbers of Jews in a very brief period of time. Lithuania had shown what was politically possible; Latvia would reveal what was technically feasible. As with Lithuania, the Soviet destruction of the Latvian state in June 1940 opened an enormous political opportunity for the Germans, providing them with a pool of refugees from which to recruit. The Germans began their occupation of Latvia with about three hundred Latvians of their own choosing. One of these was the former head of the Latvian political police, whom they reinstalled. As in Lithuania, the arrival of the Germans was accompanied by a multimedia propaganda campaign in the local language. Newspapers published gruesome photos of prisoners killed by the NKVD, identifying the victims as Latvians and the perpetrators as Jews. Radio announcements and newspaper reports in the Latvian language associated the Soviet regime with the Jews, and liberation with their removal from Latvia.

By now Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, had found a formula. As always the idea was, as he put it, to “make it appear that the indigenous populations reacted naturally” in attacking Jews and “carried out these measures of [their] own accord.” He spoke of the need for “channeling” the experience of Soviet occupation into pro-German actions. As in Lithuania, the purpose of the local-language propaganda, delivered by media and by word of mouth, was to dig that channel. Stahlecker treated the pogroms that the Germans inspired as a kind of recruiting exercise. The result was a new model in doubly occupied Latvia: a shooting commando led by locals who, following German orders, would perform most of the killing. Its leader, Viktors Bernhard Arājs, would become one of the most accomplished mass murderers in the history of Europe.

—

Arājs was born in the Russian Empire in 1910 to a mother who spoke German and to a father who was repressed by Soviet authorities after the October Revolution. Like Stahlecker and other German mass murderers, Arājs was trained as a lawyer. He enrolled in law school in independent Latvia in 1932 and then joined the police two years later to pay the bills. He married an older woman for money to continue his studies, and then took a younger lover. When he returned to law school just before the war, he earned good marks in English constitutional law. His studies continued after the Soviets occupied and annexed Latvia. He adapted his biography to their ideological matrix, emphasizing in his applications to continue his studies his humble background and the journeyman labor he had performed. He earned his degree in Soviet Latvia, and therefore in Soviet law, with coursework on the Stalin constitution. He seems to have had some sympathy for the Soviet project and even for a time to have thought of himself as a communist. Then an employer he liked was repressed. As the Soviets retreated from the Germans in summer 1941, they seem to have killed Arājs’s lover and her family. It is unclear whether he knew this at the time, or would have cared.

The major theme of the private and the public life of Arājs was social advancement. He served three quite different systems: the Latvian, the Soviet, and the German. He showed no sign of being pro-communist until the Soviets arrived, just as he showed no sign of being pro-Nazi until the Germans arrived. Indeed, as a policeman in independent Latvia he had arrested members of illegal right-wing groups. Arājs was able, perhaps by chance or perhaps by prior arrangement, to make contact with Stahlecker right after the German forces arrived. Stahlecker’s personal translator was a German from Latvia who had known Arājs in the Latvian army before the war. Arājs and Stahlecker spoke on the first and second of July 1941, as anti-Jewish violence was under way in Riga. On July 3, Arājs and his men were already making their first arrests of Jews. The next day, they were burning the synagogues of Riga.

In Riga, Arājs was allowed to use the house of a Jewish banking family as his headquarters. The bankers had been expropriated and deported—not by the Germans, but by the Soviets. The wealthier Jews were already in the Gulag when the Germans arrived. This created a rather special material resource. Besides disposing of property rights as such, the Soviets had disposed of many of the property owners. If prior Jewish owners were still physically present, as some were, they would never regain their property under the Germans. If Jews even made a gesture toward Sovietized possessions they were treated by the Germans as looters. Non-Jewish inhabitants of Latvia—Latvians, Germans, and others—reasoned the way many people do in such situations: The only way to be sure about keeping stolen property is to make sure that no one with a legal claim can ever appear again. What had been the Sovietization of Jewish property now became, under the Germans, its Latvianization. The Germans, even as they claimed choice properties such as the banker family’s house, could not possibly oversee this process throughout the country. The combination of Soviet expropriation and Nazi antisemitism created a clear material incentive for non-Jews to murder Jews.