Latvia claims insufficient evidence linking 'Butcher of Riga' to Holocaust atrocities, as Yad Vashem calls decision 'baffling'

The Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem on Tuesday condemned the decision of Latvia’s Prosecution Office to close its investigation into the actions of Herberts Cukurs.

Cukurs was a Latvian pilot, Nazi collaborator and war criminal, who participated in and contributed to the murder of more than 30,000 Latvian Jews during the Holocaust, as part of his senior position in the so-called Arājs Kommando.

The kommando was a Latvian auxiliary police unit created by the Nazi occupational authorities and led by Viktors Arājs, a Latvian German collaborator and Nazi SS officer. Before the Holocaust, Cukurs was famous in Latvia for his pioneering solo flights to Gambia and Japan.

“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 stated in its press release. “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.”

Yad Vashem went on to say that the decision of the Latvian prosecutor was incomprehensible, as there is no dispute about Cukurs’ war crimes.

“The decision is baffling because Cukurs' horrific war crimes are indisputable and Yad Vashem is ready to provide documents from its archive,” Yad Vashem noted, adding: “Yad Vashem denounces the repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’ image in Latvia by those distorting and ignoring historical truth.”

The small Baltic nation, for its part, says it could not find sufficient evidence of Cukurs' war crimes.

Latvian efforts to exonerate Cukurs of his Nazi crimes and hail him as a famous pilot have been ongoing for many years. In 2014, a musical portraying the infamous pilot as a hero toured theaters all over Latvia to the great disappointment and outrage of Jews in and outside the Baltic state. At the time, the producer of the show, Juris Millers, made excuses for the production by claiming it was “unclear” to what extent Cukurs had participated in the ruthless killings of Jews by the Latvian Nazis.

“Herbert Cukurs is still innocent if we are looking at him from a court system point of view,” Millers told the Associated Press at the time. “There are a few people who testify that he was a killer and others who say that he was a hero.”

Many witnesses have given testimony to the extreme brutality with which Cukurs directly participated in the killings. According to author Stephan Talty, who chronicled Cukurs' story in his book The Good Assassin: Mossad’s Hunt for the Butcher of Latvia, witnesses recalled seeing Cukurs in the Riga ghetto – where the city’s Jews were confined – “laughing devilishly... shooting the people like a hunter in the forest.”

Others had seen him at a villa in Riga where the Arājs Kommando “held wild drunken parties as they tortured and murdered Jews.” Survivors have also detailed how Cukurs directly participated in various atrocities, including beatings, shootings and deportations.

Cukurs managed to escape justice by fleeing to Latin America. He lived in Brazil until 1965, when the Mossad caught up with him. The Israeli foreign intelligence agency lured him to Uruguay and later assassinated him.

The closure of the case by the Latvian Prosecution Office raises the possibility that Latvia could repatriate Cukurs’ remains from Uruguay and bury him on Latvian soil, potentially honoring him in a way that some fear could be interpreted as treating him as a national hero.

Ninety percent of Latvia’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, with the Arājs Kommando playing a crucial role in the genocide.