Vilis HāznersKGB-fabricated evidence

On July 1, 1941, the Germans marched into Riga, the capital of Latvia, and the final chapter of Riga's Jewish community, numbering forty thousand men, women, and children, began. 1Many Latvians helped the German invaders by committing unbelievable atrocities against the Jews and even joined the SS in order to be part of the Nazi hierarchy.

On July 7, less than a week after their arrival in the city, Einsatzgruppe A organized a pogrom in Riga and reported that four hundred Jews had been killed. 2As evidenced by photographs, the actual slaying was done by Latvians and not Germans. The 3Nazis described this outrage as a “self-cleansing” operation. In his report to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, Dr. Stahlecker, the head of the group, stated that no other operation of that nature had taken place in his domain.

4Stahlecker must have been referring only to operations organized by the Germans. As it turned out, 5they did not have to make an extra effort, considering the conditions that normally prevailed at Riga's Central Prison, called Zentralka, a site of the most brutal murders, or at the Riga Police Prefecture, which was presided over by Roberts Stiglics. Stahlecker might have 6overlooked the Perkonkrusts. The Latvian Fascists, who, under the able leadership of Sturmbannfuehrer Victors Arajs, a Latvian, murdered at least two thousand Jews during July and August 1941 alone. The Perkonkrusts looked for and concentrated on the well-to-do, in order to be able to confiscate their property. In the Great Synagogue of Riga, a gang led by that same Victors Arajs, 7aided by Herbert Cukurs and Vilis Hazners, incinerated alive several hundred Jews, chiefly women and children.f

The 9Riga press did its best to fan the hatred of the Latvian populace for the Jews. Articles appeared such as that printed on 10July 11, 1941, most fittingly entitled “The Jews-Source of our Destruction.” The article ended with the statement that because the Jews had sought to destroy the Latvian nation, they could not be permitted to survive as a national or a cultural entity; therefore, all the Jews would have to die.h

No one was launching the Holocaust just on the news the Nazis were coming. The Germans immediately established total control and disarmed the populace. There is absolutely no dispute over the collaborators the Nazis subsequently organized, such as Arājs Kommando. However, there is no documentary evidence for the most frequent accusation that Latvians spontaneously killed their Jewish neighbors before the Nazis even arrived, even suggesting collaborator formations had already been created, judging by their German, not Latvian, names in anticipation of Holocaust participation, or, as Schneider states here, that droves of Latvians immediately lined up for jobs to kill Jews.

Nor could any Latvian, not even the Nazis' criminal collaborators, join any "Nazi hierarchy": neither Nazi party nor Allgemeine-SS. Latvia was occupied. Even "collaborators" collaborated on terms totally dictated by the Germans. There was no autonomy under Nazi occupation.

Regardless of illegally conscripted11 or volunteering, the two Eastern Front Latvian Legion divisions were front-line military units formed in 1943 initially from non-Holocaust collaborators already serving in combat under the Wehrmacht. They swore no allegiance to Nazism, and as even Efraim Zuroff stated emphatically in 2012 on Latvian television, they had no role in the Holocaust.

A well-known German-staged scene, purportedly a Lithuanian standing in front of the bodies of all those who he brutally beat to death, identified as such by the German photographer at his own war crimes interrogation — 14 years after the war ended. If he killed them all, where is the blood? The disheveled hair and clothes?

The Holocaust in eastern Europe is documented to have been planned—prior to the Nazi invasion of the USSR—to appear spontaneous and Germanless. That included staging "locals" standing by stacks of bodies, portraying them as having, typically, bludgeoned men, women, children, and infants to death in the most horrific manner. Fortunately for historians, some of these photos accidentally include showing the Germans managing their Holocaust theater production, including hiring and dressing in uniforms local drunks as stooges. How naïve—or blinded by bias—does one have to be to trust the veracity of Nazi photographs and newsreels purporting the Nazis were bystanders to the Holocaust?

Stahlecker confirms the charade in his very report Schneider cites:

"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."

Horrific mass slaughters, such as those at Rumbula, were methodically executed by Jeckeln's hand-picked men. (Schneider never retracted the propagandist lie in her writing that Latvians did the slaughter because the Germans didn't have the stomach for it.) The Germans entrusted industrialized human extermination only to themselves.

There was no "self-cleansing." This portrayal was the hallmark of Berlin's plan to mask German responsibility for the genocide of the Jews. Indeed, in Lithuania, where similar accounts were circulated, a witness confirmed in a letter to Berlin that it was a squad of a dozen German policemen who slaughtered Jews going to village to village, and not the local Lithuanians as the witness had been informed earlier, via official reports, in Berlin. The witness wrote it would look very bad for Berlin's image if the truth—apparently widely known locally—were to surface.

As compared to her thesis, Schneider accentuates the trope of the Germanless Holocaust, that the Germans controlled only their own actions, that they allowed armed Latvians to roam free on their own to perpetrate anti-Jewish actions. On the contrary, there was no independent Latvian action. Even the Nazi-organized Arājs Kommando had to check their non-automatic arms out in the morning and check them back in at night—or risk being shot by their German masters.

Schneider continues with the myth that Latvians were in charge even while Latvia was occupied, having just suggested Stahlecker spoke only for German actions and not those at the Central Prison under Roberts Štiglics, the Rīga prefect. She appears unaware that Stahlecker had his office at the Prison and had brought Štiglics to Rīga and installed him in his position. Štiglics was no more than another "Sicherheitsdienst" ("SD") operative. Everything Holocaust-related that took place at the Rīga Central Prison was subordinated to Stahlecker from the start. Schneider echoes the factually unfounded contentions of Bernard Press and Max Kaufman, who contend there was a central Latvian authority independently organized and operating in Rīga following the Nazi invasion. As contended even by the U.S. government in its brief against Hāzners, this supposed authority was organized within hours of the Soviet departure, preceded by a call to arms on the radio by Voldermars Veiss and the killing of Jews before the Germans arrived—all a complete fiction, including the alleged "broadcast." That false storyline includes the additional allegation that the Nazis permitted the Latvian authority to continue operating after the occupation was established because Nazi and Latvian aims—the wholesale murder of Jews—were the same. Alan A. Ryan, Jr. has vehemently insisted that the Department of Justice did not use unsolicited Soviet materials—despite the DOJ parroting blatantly false Soviet propaganda verbatim in court briefs and introducing KGB propaganda materials as evidence via the witnesses possessing them. With the passing of the Professor Ezergailis (1930–2022), we may never see Ducmanis's bequeathed personal list of duped Nazi-hunters.

"Political Refugees Unmasked," cited, is another KGB propaganda tome, similar to "Daugavas Vanagi—Who Are They?"

Involvement of the Pērkonkrusts in the Holocaust is hearsay. Even KGB records—documented to contain fabricated anti-Latvian show trial evidence such as word-for-word identical "testimonies" from multiple witnesses—indicate that only perhaps four individuals of Arājs unit, 300-500 during the Holocaust, and some 300 tried and convicted in Soviet courts immediately after the war, were former members of the fascist Pērkonkrusts. The Ulmanis regime had jailed the Latvian fascists and exiled their leader Gustavs Celmiņš before the war. As Latvian ultra-nationalists, former Pērkonkrusts members represented a threat to the prior invading Soviet regime. Most were hunted down and killed or deported to Siberia. Nor were relations with the invading Nazis much better. Celmiņš did return to Latvia, accompanying the Germans as a translator, and there were some Pērkonkrusts members who aided the occupation authoring propaganda. However, their organization was already outlawed by August, 1941 for their nationalist—including anti-German—views. Tellingly, rather than organize to kill Jews, Celmiņš petitioned the occupational authorities for the right to organize armed Latvian units to pursue the Russians on the Eastern Front.12 As the Nazi occupation took hold, even the leader of the pre-war Latvian fascist Pērkonkrusts cared only about securing the Eastern Front against the Soviets. The Nazis eventually jailed Celmiņš for his pro-Latvian nationalism.

Regarding Arājs's "leadership," we have mentioned the checking out and in of arms—the Germans directly supervised all actions of their criminal collaborators. No collaborators organized or operated independently. All offers of "collaboration" were refused; the Germans managed collaborators only on their own terms. What Arājs did lead was his men's drinking binges while also operating a lucrative black market of items the Germans had authorized them to steal from Jews. Arājs's men were ordered to wear civilian clothes while rampaging through Jewish property to mask German culpability and appear to be the local populace run amok.

Schneider accuses Hāzners of being a leading Holocaust perpetrator. (Both the KGB officer, later defector, dancing with Schneider in Rīga and Schneider both confirmed he had mentioned Hāzners to her by name.) Schneider's thesis was her opening salvo launching her life-long campaign against Latvian Nazis.

One Hāzners witness identified him as being a major when herding Jews into the cathedral to be burned; that was only Hāzners's rank at the end of the war — and in the Soviet propaganda materials he possessed and which the DOJ entered into evidence. Meanwhile, testimony at trial proved Hāzners could not have been present. Nevertheless, Schneider's denunciation of Hāzners nearly 20 years after Hāzners's vindication (1981, Journey into Terror published in 1979; this is from the 2000/2001 "new and expanded" edition) indicates she never lost faith in the KGB propaganda and bogus show trial materials she brought back from the USSR. There was no possibility of Latvian innocence.

Regarding Pērkonkrusts, both Soviet trials of Arājs Kommando members and that of Arājs in Germany confirmed minimal — perhaps three or four — Pērkonkrusts in the Kommando.

Lastly, Herberts Cukurs, assassinated by the Mossad as the alleged "Butcher of Riga" was not in Riga, either, when the Gogol Street synagogue was burned (July 4th), arriving only later on July 14th. Schneider is mistaken on both accounts.

CIA documents prove the Soviets launched a concerted campaign to discredit Hāzners and other prominent Latvian émigrés, Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? and a full length "documentary" film about their atrocities both being released in 1963—followed by the KGB's specific mention of Hāzners, by name, to Schneider in 1971, launching the "Latvian Nazi" witch-hunt. Moreover, the author of the allegations and the KGB agent who handed the allegations to Schneider both subsequently and independently confirmed the Soviet plot and fabrications. Lastly, Hāzners lived in a modest farm-house with a view of Lake Champlain—Schneider's evocation of "baronial splendor" is the instantiation of her own rage and indignation.

There was no "Rīga press," as if it were somehow Latvian. The only "press" published was that produced, controlled, and censored by the Nazi authorities and their quislings. Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was on the whole a failure in its attempt to incite the Latvians. That Latvia had been the only European country in which anti-Semitic literature was banned, that pre-war Latvia had been a welcoming transit point for Jews escaping Hitler, are far more accurate measures of Latvian attitudes. Indeed, as preserved in Nuremberg trials records, reports back to Berlin after the invasion bemoaned the Latvians' apathy to the Nazi's anti-Semitic agitations, in line with anti-Semites denouncing Latvia as a "Jewish country" before the war because of the positive image and role of Jews in Latvian society.

The conclusion of the article mentioned, facsimile.

Anti-Semitic articles appeared starting with the very first issue of the occupational Nazi newspaper Tēvija ("Fatherland"), published the same day the Germans entered Rīga with Red Army still retreating. Jews, "bastards," the English, the French, were all denounced. The article mentioned was written as a first-person opinion piece, signed "Albatross," believed to have been the paper's first "editor," Arturs Kroders. Kroders was a historian and political activist. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, his memoirs conclude before the events of the war, so the true nature of Kroders' relationship with Tēvija is likely to never be known, however, we do know his fiery nationalism brought him into conflict with the Germans, who dismissed him.13

As to the article content, the representation quoted per Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They? and cited in Schneider's thesis, is nearly accurate (our translation follows, our emphasis):

"He [the Jew] will earn [his] bread in the same manner as have our labourers. The sins of the Jews are overly grievous: they wished to annihilate our nation, therefore they must die as a cultural nation. [That is, Judaism can no longer exist as a culture and Jews must be assimilated into the secular working class. — Ed.]

"So states and testifies a person, who, hair now turned grey, had not cared in the least regarding the Jewish question. Now he comprehends the nature of the Jew, and that there must be no Latvian compassion. Albatross."

Schneider's relates the passage as written in her thesis, while subsequently in Journey she removes the quotation and purports it called for killing all Jews which, while grossly anti-Semitic, it clearly did not. The dead cannot continue to earn their daily bread.

Tēvija ("Fatherland") was a Nazi occupational authority newspaper published in the Latvian language. It arrived and departed with the Nazi occupation. It was no more the "main Latvian," meaning a Latvian enterprise, paper than was Cīņa (the proletarian "Struggle"), published under the Soviet occupation. Indeed, as soon as the Russians were gone, the Latvians launched the newspaper Brīvā Zeme ("Free Country"), which the Germans immediately shut down and replaced with Tēvija.

The notion that Tēvija, a newspaper created and run by the Nazi occupational authorities, was "owned" by a Latvian, as implied, is fantastical. The paper was produced by the Nazi Reichskommissariat Ostland propaganda department. The publisher was Ernests Kreišmanis. Tēvija listed a number of Latvian "editors" during the course of the Nazi occupation: Arturs Kroders, Andrejs Rudzis, Pauls Kovaļevskis, finally Jānis Vītols. Censorship duties, requiring German and Latvian fluency, were assigned to Ernst Eduard von Mensenkampff, editor of the former Rigasche Rundschau ("Rīga Observer"). Latvian authorities had shut the paper down in 1934 for having too many Nazi connections.14

It is worth noting that "there was open conflict between the Latvian editors and their [German] supervisors. On 5 February 1942, editor [sic.] Ernests Kreišmanis questioned the second-class status of Latvians, demanding to know why Latvians received fewer rations than Germans. LVVA/f. P-70, apr. 5, I. 3, 227.15"

The trip by Kreišmanis to Berlin is another Ducmanis fabrication.