Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret
Hale, Christopher
ISBN: 9780752459745
YEAR: 2011-10-01, earlier edition published in 2009
PUBLISHER: History Press

It's certainly difficult to miss Christopher Hale's book with its provocative title.

What drew us to it, on the one hand, was that in his introduction Hale named historians with whom he corresponded in the course of writing his book, for example, Andrew Ezergailis. Serious students of the Holocaust in Latvia would immediately recognize him as the foremost authority on the subject. We were also gratified to see mention of the new generation of respected scholars, such as Matthew Kott.

On the other hand, paging through for citations of Ezergailis' works, we found this caveat nestled among the book's endnotes (our emphasis):

Ezergailis (1996), pp. 242–3. The ‘Landgericht Hamburg’ holds records of a number of war crimes trials of German and Latvian SD recruits who served in Latvia, including testimony by Hemicker. StA Hamburg 141 Js 534/60 Anklageschrift vom 10.5.1976 gegen Viktors Arājs. I have made significant use of Ezergailis’ detailed account of the Latvian Holocaust throughout this chapter. I have, however, drawn different conclusions from his evidence.

Hence our curiosity. What different conclusions? On what basis? We leafed through Hale's narrative for clues.

Updated: September, 2023
  • HITLER'S FOREIGN EXECUTIONERS — Hale's contacts with recognized experts on the Holocaust in Latvia hold the promise of an informative work.
  • False false equality — Hale's contention that the Baltic and European peoples seek a false moral equality of their suffering under Stalin with that of Jewry under Hitler's unprecedented industrial extermination is, itself, false.
  • Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism — What it says, the argument for equal value of life—versus what Hale says it says, that it paints Hitler's unprecedented industrialized genocide of Jewry as no more evil in conception or execution than Stalin's class genocide inflicted on the Baltics and Eastern Europe.
  • Für den Führer nur — Hale sees only SS-Latvian Nazis in bed with Himmler. Once the Latvian Legion donned German uniforms they were fighting for Hitler only, for everything he stood for, for all the evil he inflicted. Anti-Soviet heroism? A nationalist fiction to paper over the moral calamity of an entire people.
  • Himmler's grand plan — Hale dismisses the work of historians and proposes his own convoluted SS uber alles conspiracy theory to tar the Waffen-SS not as Eastern Front cannon fodder but as essential components in the evolving Nazi racial supremacy theory and goal of world domination.
  • Latvians backed USSR — Hale contends Latvia as a microcosm of the life-and-death struggle on the Eastern Front as Latvians, divided, allied and joined to support both Nazi and Bolshevik causes.
  • A different conclusion — Anything Nazi or cooperating with Nazi advanced Himmler's "evolving genocidal strategy." Period.
  • “Deluded” Latvians — Hale contends Latvia has no right to exist and that Latvians were delusional incompetents who had no idea where to draw their country's borders.
  • Appraisal — Hale repeatedly jettisons the conclusions of historians, dooming his work to be one of rhetoric, not research.
  • View All
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