Vilis HāznersDOJ INS Post-Trial Brief—Annotated

Voitkus' and Parups' accounts most closely track to Hāzners's memoir. That there are inevitable contradictions is understandable when testimony of Hāzners's duties does not come from someone directly in his command structure. The INS could have cleared up the question of Hāzners's duties if only it referenced the records in its possession. Instead, it contended that the uncertainty of some witnesses constituted contradiction of others who were more certain, and painted expected inconsistencies as indicating deceit.

Gertrude Schneider brought the fabricated Soviet charges against Hāzners back from the USSR, having danced with the KGB operative who passed them off to her, and who mentioned Hāzners to her by name. Even so, even with U.S. authorities entering Soviet propaganda into evidence, the judge disallowed consideration of the concerted Soviet campaign to discredit Hāzners.

What is far more questionable than inconsistencies in the responses of defense witnesses is that the witnesses the INS found were all recent Soviet émigrés, all found in the same manner, all prepared for trial by the same Israeli investigator. All after German investigators had cleared Hāzners. Nowhere is this more troublesome than with the government's leading and star witness, Ber Mendelkorn, who testified:

1. Hāzners beat him so hard (at the Prefecture) his teeth fell out later; and
2. Hāzners herded Jews into a synagogue and burned them.
3. Hāzners was a major, four diamonds on his collar, when he brutalized Mendelkorn.

Testimony so gripping that scholar Gertrude Schneider added Hāzners to the names of accused Latvian collaborators burning the Gogol Street synagogue.8

Our first instinct would be to attribute Mendelkorn's testimony to mistaken identity. (The in-courtroom identification was a farce because Hāzners attended every day of every hearing and sat next to his attorney the entire time.) However, in examining evidence introduced from witnesses, we found a Latvian-language Soviet propaganda treasure trove prominently featuring Hāzners, including photographs, in the Mendelkorn exhibits:

• "Vini Bez Maskas"—They, Unmasked
• "Kas Ir Daugavas Vanagi"—Daugavas Vanagi, Who Are They
• "Politiskie Begli Bez Maskas"—Political Fugitives Unmasked
• "Mes Apsudzam"—We Accuse

Hāzners's portrait in a 1984 Soviet propaganda publication, There Shall Be Retribution. Note the four diamonds, a rank Hāzners was promoted to only near the end of the war, also the rank he was accused of having in 1941 in witness testimony.

As far as we are aware, all bear the same picture of Hāzners as we reproduced in his biography. At right is the same picture in the English-language "There Shall Be Retribution." Clearly, Mendelkorn recalls Hāzners's rank from propaganda, not from personal experience. If someone is close enough to beat you so hard your teeth later fall out, as the fight or flight response is searing every moment of the event into your mind, this is not the sort of thing you can possibly get wrong in your testimony.

Indeed, Mendelkorn was quite emphatic regarding Hāzners's rank. Therefore, there are only two possibilities, that Mendelkorn was mistaken regarding Hāzners's identity (nearly all the witnesses honed in on one particular photograph of Hāzners) or he was spinning a tale to put away someone whom publications in Latvia and the Israeli investigator had assured him was a war criminal guilty of killing hundreds. In either case, Hāzners was innocent.

If there were any doubt as to the fabrication of charges against Hāzners or that the Soviets were determined to discredit him, twenty years after first naming Hāzners in Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They?, and well after Hāzners's vindication, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations accused Hāzners9 by name as a war criminal who herded Jews into a burning synagogue, no longer in Rīga—given the failure of those bogus charges—but now in Belarus.