Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War IIChristoph Schiessl

Schiessl, C. Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War II, Lexington Books, 2016, ISBN: 9781498529419. LINK

As we investigate scholarly representation of the Latvian Legion, we continue to encounter the case of Vilis Hāzners as a microcosm of war crimes allegations against Latvians and Latvian Legion Waffen-SS units in WWII.

A recent book examining the Holocaust in Latvia and touching on the Hāzners case is Christoph Schiessl's Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War II (March, 2016).

Unlike other books we have analyzed for their historical treatment of the Latvian Legion and its officers and members, Alleged Nazi Collaborators is an academic work, the publication of Schiessl's doctoral thesis1. In studying the Soviet legacy in central/eastern Europe, we have encountered dissertations which have come to be regarded as seminal works in their field, such as

• William J.H. Hough III's "The Annexation of the Baltic States and its Effect Upon the Development of Law Prohibiting the Forcible Seizure of Territory." New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law, Winter, 1985
• Charles King's "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture." Hoover Institution Press, 1999.

We hoped Schiessl's thesis built on this tradition of excellence.

Schiessl's dissertation

Alleged Nazi Collaborators is based on Schiessl's 2009 doctoral dissertation:

Description	317 p.
Note	Advisor: John J. Bukowczyk.
Thesis	Thesis (Ph. D.) — Wayne State University, 2009
Summary	Since the end of World War II, 1approximately 10,000 Nazi war criminals have entered the United States, mostly through the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) have investigated thousands of accusations against individuals residing in the United States, dealing with a variety of Nazi related war crimes, ranging from beatings and shootings of Jews and others by camp guards and policemen to planning and participating in brutal medical experiments on human beings. 2Most suspects were Ukrainian, Baltic, or ethnic German (so-called Volksdeutsche) collaborators, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. For decades, government authorities did little to locate and prosecute these individuals. Only in the 1970s did the federal government intensify its search for Nazi war criminals. First, in 1978, Congress passed an amendment to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which barred the entry of Nazi war criminals and made easier the prosecution of such individuals already in the United States. Second, in 1979, the U.S. government created the OSI, which for over thirty years has worked on trying to locate and then denaturalize and extradite or deport Nazi war criminals.
	Most Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s discussed and contemplated the issue of Nazi criminality in very specific ways. The dominant Cold War atmosphere surely played a role in this, as Nazi Germany seemed defeated and the Soviet Union emerged as the foe that was out to destroy the American way of life. Already at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg the Holocaust was not front and center, and the number of Nazi war criminals imprisoned in Germany dwindled significantly in the early 1950s until almost all had been released by the late 1950s. In this atmosphere it is not surprising that thousands of Nazi collaborators could enter the United States via legal immigration channels. 3U.S. officials at best could not ascertain or at worst willfully ignored the questionable past of such individuals from the Baltic states, the Ukraine, and the many Volksdeutsche. The Eichmann trial in 1961, the series of Soviet trials of Nazi collaborators in the early 1960s, and the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973 in particular changed the dynamic somewhat. Some individuals, like Simon Wiesenthal, started investigating. As a result, the first major case of a Nazi collaborator in the United States, that of camp guard Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, made the news in the 1960s. Finally, the 1970s saw an intensification of Holocaust discourse in general and a focus on Nazi war criminals in the United States in particular. 4Individual politicians like Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY) pressured the U.S. government to act, which led to the formation of the OSI in 1979. The OSI has been responsible for the denaturalization and removal of over one hundred individuals. Since the passage of time will solve the issue of Nazi war criminals eventually, the OSI recently has taken on the task of locating, denaturalizing, and deporting all war criminals residing in the United States.
Added Title		$page = "".smultipage( "level-[012].*-", me2(), 99);
S47?/tWayne+State+University+thesis+%28Ph.+D.%29%3A+History./twayne+state+university+thesis+ph+d+history/-3,-1,0,B/browse">Wayne State University thesis (Ph. D.): History.
OCLC #	320086901
Permalink		$page = "".smultipage( "level-[012].*-", me2(), 99);
S47">elibrary.wayne.edu/record=b3623189~S47 [this page]

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Besides his advisor, John J. Bukowczyk, the other members of Schiessl's dissertation committee were Melvin Small, Brad Roth, and Andrew Port. None list the Holocaust as a field of study.

Cues

Bukowczyk, Schiessl's advisor, focused on American immigration and ethnic history, primarily Polish. The issue of war criminals coming to the U.S., particularly in light of their alleged concentration among a narrow group of nationalities: Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, would generally fall within his area of study. What would be dissertation's focus of analysis?

While historical facts are objective, historical accounts are written from a point of view. Several passages in the summary stand out as potential red flags.

With warning signs apparent in the summary, we next examined what Schiessl wrote regarding the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.

Our review focuses on Schiessl's scholarship regarding:

1. Vilis Hāzners, the first Latvian-American to be charged as a Nazi collaborator; his deportation case galvanized the U.S. "hunt for Nazis among us," and
2. more widely, his treatment of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia and local collaborators.

Since this is a doctoral thesis in book form, we examined Shiessel's cited sources to validate his contentions.

Alleged Nazi–Soviet interregnum and “Germanless” Holocaustat page 17

We find Vilis Hāzners first mentioned in this passage:

Latvia and Estonia, similar to Lithuania, did not come under Soviet control until the summer of 1940, before the Germans invaded starting in June 1941. As in Lithuania, in Latvia the Selbstschutz formed as soon as the Soviet Army had disappeared. These local forces immediately began to locate, assemble, and murder Jews in their neighborhoods, before the German army had appeared in the area. Even after the arrival of the Germans, Latvian militia units were actively “cleansing” the countryside of Jews and Communists, in which the German authorities would not or could not effectively intervene until August 3, 1941. By August 10 of the same year the German authorities had picked reliable men from the Selbstschutz and organized them as Schutzmannschaften. By the end of the same month, the number of auxiliary policemen in Latvia was close to 3,000.a One of them was allegedly Vilis Hazners. Born in 1905 in Latvia, according to several Israeli witnesses at his 1977 denaturalization trial, he served as an officer in the Latvian Schutzmannschaft in 1941 in Riga and ordered the beating and killing of Jewish ghetto inmates. According to one witness, when Hazners gave orders, “he didn’t talk, he screamed. . . . People were beaten according to his orders and many of them disappeared.”b Purportedly, he also helped to push Jews into the burning Choral Synagogue in Riga, where as many as 1000 of them died.c At the end of the war, he found his way to a DP camp and finally entered the United States in 1956 under the Refugee Relief Act.

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a	Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, “'Inventing' the Holocaust for Latvia: New Research,” in Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 104, 113; Breitman, Himmler’s Police Auxiliaries.
b	The Daily Messenger, Canandaigua, New York, November 1, 1977.
c	Bennington Banner, Bannington [sic.], Vermont, October 28, 1977.
d	Simpson, Blowback, 205–6; New York Times, June 15, 1965, 6.

Having named Hāzners as collaborator "Exhibit A," Schiessl introduces us to the full complement of "Germanless" Holocaust dogma:

1. Latvians (and Lithuanians) formed Nazi units to persecute Jews as soon as the Red Army retreated, even using German names for their "self-protection" units! and operated for weeks before the Germans arrived (see #2) — FALSE There was little chance for Latvian partisans to organize; any who did were fully occupied pursuing the retreating Soviets who just a week earlier had ripped family, friends, and relatives out of their homes and shipped them away in standing-room-only cattle cars to Siberia, tearing apart families as they separated men from the women and children. No one was interested in harming Jews, whose standing and relations in Latvian society was positive enough for (actual) anti-Semites to denounce Latvia as a "Jewish nation."
2. A significant period of time — two weeks — elapsed between the time the Red Army retreated and the Wehrmacht arrived — FALSE The Germans established complete control upon their arrival on the heels of the retreating Red Army. Germans were already in the center of Rīga and publishing their first daily newspaper edition (July 1, 1941, immediately shutting down the Latvian broadsheet Free Land that published for one day, the same day, only) while Russians were still fleeing the city northwest with many forces still on the wrong side of the Daugava.
3. Even after the Nazis established their occupational presence, they allowed armed Latvians to operate independently in persecuting Jews — FALSE The Germans immediately disarmed the populace under pain of death.
4. Continuing the above, it was at least August 3rd, more than a month since capturing the capital Rīga, before Germans managed to establish control — FALSE What did happen in August was that German civilian authorities took over from German military authorities, not that German authority was established.
5. Germans began formally creating "reliable" (in killing Jews) Schutzmannschaft collaborative units from the self-organized "reliable" Selbstschutz Latvians as of August 10th — FALSE The Germans established the Selbstschutz upon occupation. The Germans declared the Schutzmannschaftat the end of July, a month into the occupation, but only populated at the very end of 1941, mostly during 1942–1943, after the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia had run its course. Meanwhile, Viktors Arājs met with Walter Stahlecker immediately after the inception of the occupation, the seed of what became one of a number of Latvian Einsatzkommando managed collaborationist Sicherheitsdienst (SD) units, all short-lived except for Arājs unit, which lasted most of the war. These were neither Selbstschutz nor Schutzmannschaft, nor formed from them.

   Most disturbingly, Schiessl accepts Selbst- ("self-") at face value. No. Everything that happened in Nazi-occupied Latvia took place under German initiation, management, and total control. Nothing the Nazis called "voluntary" was voluntary; nothing called "self" was initiated or controlled by locals. Stahlecker even ordered collaborators to pillage Jewish property while dressed in civilian clothes to mask German control and appear to be the populace run amok.

6. Between the 3rd of August and month-end, the Nazis organized 3,000 Holocaust collaborators. — FALSE Per the above point, collaborators were organized primarily under the Sicherheitsdienst ("SD"), the others being the Rīga police, reporting in to Roberts Štiglics, to Stahlecker. Nor did some sort of formal organization commence on August 3rd. Organization of both collaborators and unrelated border patrols and front-line reservists and combatants began immediately upon occupation. The primary issue here is that a German uniform was the only option for anyone intent on pursuing the Red Army or guarding against its return. It is grossly inaccurate to lump all "collaborators" together as if all were Holocaust collaborators.
7. Hāzners screamed at and beat Jews, and herded as many as 1,000 into a burning synagogue in Rīga to incinerate them alive — FALSE Schiessl prefixes "allegedly" and "purportedly" but does not indicate that allegations and witness identifications failed spectacularly under courtroom scrutiny. "1,000" reflects the inflation of victims typical of Soviet accusations made against individuals they have singled out for attack. Sources disagree on the actual number of victims, ranging from less than 100 to as many as 300, in the burning of the Great Choral Synagogue of Rīga. It is also likely the victims had already been shot. U.S. authorities entered multiple KGB propaganda publications into evidence against Hāzners.

Every one of Schiessl's contentions fits popular narratives of a local-led, "Germanless' Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia and is FALSE.

Sources

Hans-Heinrich Wilhelmpages 104–105

Professor Bernhard Press, a survivor of the Holocaust in Latvia, has published an impressive book on the killing of the Jews in that Baltic state. In this account, based largely on his own recollections, Press emphasizes the role of Latvians in the annihilation of the Jews. He 5suggests that local forces began to arrest, concentrate, and murder their Jewish neighbors even before the German troops had occupied Riga and Dünaburg (Dvinsk, Daugavpils). Furthermore, Press 6suspects that there might well have been communications and agreements reached between the German authorities, operating clandestinely in Latvia, and various (Latvian) underground organizations, such as the Aiszargy [sic.], Perkonkrusts, former members of the police, security service, army, aviation clubs, student associations, and fraternities. Through these arrangements, the 7underground groups may have promised not only to support German military efforts to "liberate" Latvia, but also to "cleanse" Latvian cities of their Jewish population before or shortly after the advancing German troops arrived.

Press's strength is in personal narratives. However, in seeking an explanation for the thoroughness with which the Holocaust eradicated Latvia's Jewry, Press does not look to Stalin's deportations beheading of the Jewish community only a week before the Nazi invasion (5% of population, 12% of deportees), still reeling when the Nazis arrived. Nor does he look to the Germans having pre-planned every minutia of their industrialized slaughter of humanity. Instead, both Press and Max Kaufman (author of the first Latvian survivor memoir) believe the Latvian people betrayed them, even postulating an independent center of Latvian authority eradicating Jews continuing to function under Nazi occupation, as Schiessl indicates here regarding alleged eradication of Jews independent of the Germans after the occupation was established.No such center existed. We would note Press also falsely accuses Hāzners by name in his book.

Wilhelm, at least, does not accord more historical accuracy to Press's narrative of events than deserved, that Press's emphasis only "suggests...", "suspects...", and contends underground groups "may have...". However, a historian's mere repetition of allegations strongly suggests veracity.

The source ultimately cited, Press, offers false conspiracy theories about the organization and execution of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

Hans-Heinrich Wilhelmpage 114

When local forces went "too far" in their eagerness to "cleanse" the countryside, the German authorities tried not to take notice. Superiors were criticized by their subordinates, but often hesitated to intervene. Many were glad they had been told that they had nothing to do with the "inner conflicts" of Lithuania and Latvia. Leeb's Befehlshaber des rückwahrtigen Heeresgebietes (commander of the rear area) waited until August 3 to intervene, prohibiting unsystematic and arbitrary executions by local forces without German supervision and authorization, fully aware of the problem that the means were missing to compel his Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian auxiliaries to follow his advice.a

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a	Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Lagebeurteilungen aus zwei Weltkriegen (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 62 ff., especially p. 146 (diary of Fhr. v. Gneissenbach, entry August 11, 1941).

This is classic Nazi propaganda, including accounts of German officers "saving Jews" from brutal locals. The Germans established complete control as soon as they invaded. In many cases, the Germans could not even locate any acting "local" authorities, those having been in such positions prior to the Soviet invasion having been deported or killed. The notion that the Nazis could not control Latvian authorities or forces for more than a month following the invasion is preposterously false. Even as the Germans were invading Rīga on July 1st, they had already shut down the Latvian newspaper after printing a single broadsheet and published the first issue of Tēvija ("Fatherland") in its place.

Von Leeb commanded the Wehrmacht's Army Group North, including units collaborating with the SS in the murder of Jews. He was convicted at Nuremberg for disseminating Hitler's order for his "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union. (Hitler sacked von Leeb over disagreements in 1942.) Given von Leeb's invasion orders included eradication of Jews and killing enemy civilians, do we expect anything other than self-exculpatory blaming of "locals"?

In looking into von Leeb's personal role in the Holocaust, we found mention8 of his conversation with Army Group North Rear Area commander General Franz von Roques about Nazi shootings in Kovno, in which they concurred they had no influence on the Einsatzgruppe pogrom eradicating Jews and it was best to distance themselves. While perhaps true, their conclusion was self-serving and disingenuous, given Army Group North Rear Area worked hand-in-glove with Stahlecker's units in eradicating Jews behind the front line. Astoundingly, von Roques escaped being sent to prison after the war.

We can only surmise Wilhelm chose von Leeb's diary for its implied reliability in falsely alleging a "Germanless" Holocaust raged in Latvia for more than a month after the Nazis established their occupation.

What were the facts? Franz Wilhelm Stahlecker commanded the Einsatzgruppen forces tasked with eradicating Jewry. All anti-Jewish activities took place under complete German control. Even Latvian "locals" pillaging Jewish property were collaborators ordered to dress in civilian clothes so their actions would appear spontaneous, and "partisans" were disarmed at night by their German masters. Stahlecker documented that his attempt to incite local-led pogroms failed. Another report to Berlin bemoaned Latvian "passivity" in response to German attempts to incite anti-Semitism.

The source ultimately cited, von Leeb, was personally motivated to distance himself from the Holocaust as far as possible. The contention that an out-of-control Latvian populace marauded killing Jews for more than a month while the iron-fisted Nazi Germans were unable to establish control after occupying Latvia is blatanly false.

Richard Breitmanarticle

In Latvia, German authorities selected reliable men from the more or less spontaneously formed self-defense units that had sprung up as Russian troops evacuated the area. By 10 August the Latvian Schutzmannschaft had a commanding body consisting of 10 officers and 27 men; and all the Latvian police districts and branches, including the prison employees, were technically gathered under the umbrella of the Schutzmannschaft as well. Thus, the total number of Latvian Schutzmannschaft men was 174 officers and 2,799 men. Under the leadership of the Order Police, the 8Riga Schutzmannschaft was said to have participated in large and successful raids against Bolsheviks and Jews; it had also disarmed Latvian partisans in a wooded area southwest of Riga, and shot Communists and others considered political criminals.a9

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a

Nuremberg Doc. L-180: Einsatzgruppe A, Gesamtbericht bis zurn 15. Oktober 1941 [Stahlecker's Report]. Publ. in International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, 42 vols. (Washington, 1949), 37: 679-80 [hereafter cited as TMWC]; NARA, RG 242, T-501, roll 2, frames 1103-5: Priitzmann, Bildung von Hilfspolizeiverbanden durch Landeseinwohner, 21 Aug. 1941.

Schiessl suggests all Latvians who served in the Schutzmannschaft were "reliable men" who could be counted on to murder Jews, and that in the first two months of military occupation, the Nazis had already organized nearly 3,000 Holocaust collaborators. In truth (and as Schiessl discusses elsewhere), Latvian collaborators: Arājs Kommando and the Rīga Prefecture were subordinated to the criminal SS Sicherheitsdienst ("SD"). The Order Police, Ordnungspolizei, were similarly subordinated. The 9th Ordnungspolizei battalion, for example, did most of the killings of Jews in Rīga before the members of Arājs Kommando were trained. Breitman conflates these with the unrelated Selbstschutz and subsequent Schutzmannschaft

Selbstschutz Rekrutierungsreserve battalions being sent to the Eastern Front were not yet Schutzmannschaft units. While the order to form the Schutzmannschaft was issued after a month of occupation, creation and manning of units only began toward the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942. Very few of the Latvian Schutzmannschaft units could have collaborated in the Holocaust in Latvia, as the vast majority of killing was over by then.

Breitman mixes fact and misconception when he refers to crimes “said” to have been done by the 8“Riga Schutzmannschaft” For example, during the Hāzners proceedings, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sent a desperate cable to German authorities seeking "ALL INFORMATION CONCERNING THE RIGAER SCHUTZMANNSCHAFT WHICH IS AVAILABLE ON SHORT NOTICE". The Germans responded there was no such unit. They did list ten Schutzmannschaft battalions associated with the area — all established March-April 1942, well after the Holocaust in occupied Latvia. By then the Selbstschutz had been transitioned to the Schutzmannschaft. These were units Hāzners trained in his role as adjutant to Voldemārs Veiss for the aforementioned recruiting reserve. We can conclude that none of these battalions participated in the Holocaust because German military records confirmed Hāzners, their trainer, was not involved in the Holocaust.

Regarding Holocaust collaborators, Arājs Kommando, while formed shortly after the arrival of German occupational forces, only ramped up gradually in membership. Scholarship puts their count at some 300 during theat the height of the Holocaust in Latvia, while Arājs's trial records indicate 100-200 core members. Collaborators also include several similar but short-lived SD-subordinated units and Latvians serving in the at the Rīga central police precinct. However, allegations such as those stemming from post-war show trials in the Soviet Union, including that of the 18th Latvian Police Battalion slaughtering all of Slomin's Jews, deny historical facts and delete German responsibility.

Breitman's precision in numbers masks that he fails to identify Holocaust collaborators: the police at the Rīga Central Prison, Sicherheitsdienst, and units of the Ordnungspolizei. Instead, he names the Schutzmannschaft which were still the Selbstschutz at the time and uninvolved in the Holocaust.

The Daily MessengerNovember 1, 1977

Excerpting the relevant passage from the newspaper article10:

Wagenheim picked out Hazners in a World War II photograph as a man who had "screamed" orders to have Jews beaten.

He said Israeli officials then had identified the man in the photo as Hazners.

Wagenheim said the man in the photograph was in charge or guards who had beaten Jews while searching them for food.

"He didn't talk, he screamed," Wagenheim said of the man. "People were beaten according to his orders and many or them disappeared," he added. "Those who were taken to the guardhouse had a bad fate; many of them never came out alive.

"He was one of he officers who remained very clear in my memory because I was very afraid of him," Wagenheim said.

Wagenheim testified to having seen "Hazners" at the Rīga ghetto gate multiple times. However, there are a number of issues. Hāzners never had any reason to be there, himself documented to have been working elsewhere. The Justice Department suppressed exculpatory German war records.11 Ghetto witnesses who remembered "Hazners" didn't recall each other. Hundreds of other potential witnesses shown multiple photographs of Hazners, and who should have seen him when and where alleged, failed to identify him. Conveniently, Israeli authorities did not track how many ghetto inmates failed to recognize "Hāzners." Lastly, none of the witnesses knew the name "Hāzners" unless they were told it or "heard it" afterwards. No witness heard the "Hāzners" they fingered in the courtroom addressed as "Hāzners." None had encountered Hāzners before the Nazi occupation. In Wagenheim's case, he testified he did not "remember" Hāzners's name until Israeli authorities told it to him, and had not seen "Hāzners" closer than 15 to 20 meters away.

Notably, "1,000" is another sign of Soviet propaganda. Scholarship puts the victims of the synagogue burning in question, the Great Choral Synagogue, at 300; they likely were already shot dead. Hāzners's trial established he could not have been present. Moreover, a recently available source indicates that, according to Walter Stahlecker's Baltic-German interpreter, the Wehrmacht conducted the burning after failing to gather Latvians in the streets for the action.

Schiessl's prefacing "according to" in his narrative to testimony of war crimes as reported in the source is insufficient when the allegations failed scrutiny in court.

Bennington BannerOctober 28, 1977

This brief article relates the testimony Meir Lowenstein regarding "Hazners" at the ghetto, and that of two unnamed witnesses indicating Hāzners (quoting article) "personally beat Latvian Jews and forced them into the Choral Synagogue where as many as 1,000 Jews may have died."

Much as Hāzners was never at the ghetto gate, he was conclusively demonstrated to not have been at the Rīga synagogue when it was burned. One of the witnesses fingering Hāzners for the burning possessed the full collection of anti-Latvian KGB propaganda publications prominently featuring Hāzners (with photo), and which the INS entered into evidence at his deportation trial. Given Israeli authorities introduced pictures of Hāzners as a confirmed "war criminal" to hundreds of potential witnesses in their search for Arājs Kommando members, one could see where a witness could be swayed to testify, particularly if shown pictures of the "criminal" on multiple occasions.

Notably, two years after the case against Hāzners failed and the U.S. government's appeal denied, the USSR resurrected its accusations against him at the United Nations, shifting the scene of the crime to Belarus:

One of them [major war criminals who had escaped secretly to the United States after the war], Vilis Khazners, had been in Byelorussia and had "distinguished himself" on one occasion by herding Jews into a synagogue and burning it down. He [is] one of 300 war criminals still at large.

"Khazners" is the result of transliterating Hāzners to Хазнерс and back — a hallmark of Soviet fabrication.

Schiessl's prefacing "purportedly" in his narrative to testimony of war crimes as reported in the source is insufficient when the allegations failed scrutiny in court.

CIA recruits émigrés, pays handsomelyat page 98

Hāzners appears next as a CIA operative.

The CIA sponsored [entry into the United States] and helped pay the salary of Vilis Hāzners, who had served in the Latvian Schutzmannschaft in 1941 in Riga and allegedly participated, among other atrocities, in helping to push Jews into a burning synagogue. After his arrival in the United States through the Refugee Relief Act, he took the chairmanship of the Committee for a Free Latvia and became a delegate to the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN) in New York. The CIA funneled money to such anti-communist émigré organizations, which helped to pay Hāzners's salary in the amount of about $12,000 per year in the 1950s. In addition, Hāzners was a member and chairman of the Latvian Officers Association, made up mostly of former Waffen-SS members, and other Latvian refugee groups. As such he supported an open appeal to the United Nations (UN) to finally deal with “Soviet colonialism” in the Baltic states on the 25th anniversary of the Soviets’ occupation of Latvia in 1965.d

Sources

Christopher Simpsonpages 205–6

We review Simpson's allegations against Latvians including his denunciations of Hāzners at length in our detailed review of Simpson's Blowback.

Summarizing:

1. CIA sponsored Hāzners to enter U.S.—FALSE, per declassified CIA files
2. CIA helped pay Hāzners's salary—true, up to $300 per quarter for assistance with interviews, translations, etc., but not guaranteed; potentially $4,800 annually as "overt" salary heading anti-Soviet efforts, per declassified CIA files;
3. CIA paid Hāzners $12,000 per year—FALSE, per declassified CIA files;
4. Hāzners served in the Schutzmannschaft—FALSE, at the time alleged Hāzners served in the Selbtschutz; neither Simpson nor the New York Times article mention the Schutzmannschaft; this is Schiessl's error;
5. Hāzners herded Jews into a burning synagogue—FALSE;
6. Hāzners served as chairman of the Committee for a Free Latvia and delegate to the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN)—true;
7. anti-Soviet activism—true, which "activism" Simpson attempts to fashion into a cynical CIA Cold War conspiracy in which the U.S. government knowingly recruited Nazi war criminals.

In his book, Simpson believes anyone who wore a German uniform is a Nazi, ridicules "the myth that the Baltic Waffen-SS legions were simply anti-Communist patriots," and features KGB propaganda in his "selected bibliography." Blowback embodies neither scholarship nor legitimate investigative journalism.

After Schiessl published his thesis, but well before publishing his book, Simpson even appeared on the Kremlin's propaganda cable television channel to denounce Latvians as Nazis and Nazi-glorifiers.

New York TimesJune 15, 1965

Excerpted from "Some Suspected of Nazi War Crimes Are Known as Model Citizens" by Ralph Blumenthal:

Those [accused of being Nazis] who came under official investigation might never have been known publicly except for the fact that the Immigration Service, in response to some charges of foot-dragging on the Nazi cases, released the names of 37 suspects in June 1974.

...

Vilis Hāzners, a 71-year-old Latvian who came here in 1956 as an avowed displaced person from Germany. He has been under investigation regarding allegations of atrocities by Latvian Police. He is the former president of the Committee for a Free Latvia in Washington and delegate to the Assembly of Captive European Nations. He is now living on a well kept 104-acre farm near Whitehall, N.Y., close to the Vermont border.

In a recent telephone interview he said he had been a major fighting with German forces on the Eastern Front but declined to discuss the allegations directly, referring further inquiries to his attorney, Ivars Berzins, who also refused to comment on the charges.

The INS's "list of names" can be traced back to Soviet propaganda. While Simon Wiesenthal had, for example, "identified" Hāzners as a "criminal" to authorities in 1949 based on a search for Waffen-SS officers, the INS was working on a Wiesenthal list from 1973 and from Soviet propaganda naming Hāzners.

The cited New York Times article corroborates some facts on which Simpson was correct. Otherwise it, and its mention of the list of names, does not feature in Schiessl's narrative.

“Problems with the pictures” allegedly set Hāzners freeat pages 139-140

We arrive at the INS's defeat and the false meme that "problems with the photographs" were to blame for the loss, not that allegations failed scrutiny regardless of issues with presentation of photographic evidence.

The task force did try several older cases with devastating results. Of the five cases the SLU actively tried—Zutty’s project control office had originated all cases—two were lost outright. The first lost case concerned Vilis Hazners, a Latvian who had immigrated through the Refugee Relief Act in 1956 but never had become a citizen. At his deportation hearing, the INS accused him of having been a member of a Latvian self-defense unit and later also a Schutzmannschaft unit and that he had lied about these activities on his immigration paperwork. Witnesses identified him as an individual who ordered the murder of Jews in the Riga ghetto. However, the trial was eventually lost due to problems with the pictures identifying Hazners. Martin Mendelsohn replaced the first INS lawyer participating in the trial, William Strasser, after having been reprimanded by the court for rearranging a photo spread he had introduced as evidence. Moreover, the INS could not reproduce the original photos which INS investigators had shown to Israeli Holocaust survivors. Instead Martin Mendelsohn used what he claimed to be accurate reproductions. The judge, therefore, did not allow the witness, Maria Radiwker, an Israeli investigator, to make the link between Hazners and the available photographic material.a In addition, INS translators made a mistake when identifying Hazners as a member of the local police on a World War II document. Instead a court translator pointed out that the document actually described Hazners as a member of a Selbstschutz unit.b Finally, Hazners’ defense attorney could show that the accused was not present at most of the locations the crimes were committed.c The judge in the end decided that not enough evidence linked Hazners to the crimes and dismissed the case in 1979. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) upheld the court’s decision in 1981, “holding that the record did not contain clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence of Hazners deportability.”d

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a	Syracuse Post Standard, March 8, 1978, 5.
b	Syracuse Herald-Journal, March 9, 1978, 16.
c	Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation, 182.
d	Saidel, Outraged Conscience, 17.

Sources

Syracuse Post StandardMarch 8, 1978

"War Crimes Trial Ouster Try Hits Snag", by Joseph Mianowany.

ALBANY (UPI) — The government, with a new attorney at the helm, Tuesday resumed deportation proceedings against an accused Nazi collaborator, but again ran into problems with photographic evidence it had hoped to use.

The U S Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)'s case against Vilis Hazners of Whitehall, Washington County, hit a number of stumbling blocks similar to ones encountered when the proceedings began in earnest last October.

The 73-year-old Hazners is accused of beating Jews and selecting them for execution in Riga, Latvia, during World War II and of concealing that activity when he immigrated to the United States in 1956.

Martin Mendelsohn represented the INS Tuesday, replacing William Strasser, who had handled most earlier sessions.

Strasser was reprimanded last year for rearranging a series of pictures he had introduced in evidence against Hazners.

The government's first witness Tuesday was Maria Radiwker, 72, an Israeli investigator responsible for much of the early investigation into the whereabouts of accused Nazi collaborators.

As Strasser had tried with several Israeli witnesses last year, Mendelsohn attempted to have Mrs Radiwker identify WW II-era photographs and link them to pictures of Hazners.

Mendelsohn said the series of photos were "accurate reproductions" of ones Mrs Radiwker had shown the Israeli witnesses.

9However, INS Judge Anthony De Gaeto would not let the witness compare the pictures, saying she was not a photographic expert and the government did not prove the original pictures were destroyed or unavailable.

Later, when Mendelsohn tried to submit a photo identified as one of Hazners and taken from a book on war criminals, defense attorney Ivars Berzins reacted strongly.

10"I'm speechless," he said "I'd better sit down so I can contain myself."

Those who still insist Hāzners escaped justice cite the photo spread issue and allege the INS "botched" the case. Had Schiessl researched beyond contemporaneous news reports and the Nazis-among-us genre, he would have discovered that not allowing the photo spread into evidence had no impact on Hāzners's vindication. Instead, Schiessl negligently propagates the lie that "problems with pictures" allowed Hāzners to escape justice.

Syracuse Herald-JournalMarch 9, 1978

We could not locate a clipping of this article. However, the error in translation is confirmed in trial records.

There were far greater faults with the INS's case against Hāzners than mistranslation of what unit he belonged to. This did, however, highlight the INS's "guilt by association" strategy.

Ezergailispage 182

Since [Daugavas Vanagi — Who are They?] gave no specifics, the American prosecutors had to invent the details based on the peak moments of the atrocities in Latvia: they threw everything but the "kitchen sink" at him, as if Hazners single-handedly had murdered the Jews of Latvia. By resorting to an indiscriminate smorgasbord of accusations, the prosecutors demonstrated their ignorance about the Nazi occupation of Latvia and thus lost the case. They latched onto Ducmanis's [the author] contention that there was no difference between occupied Latvia and Nazi Germany. They invented a Latvian government led by Oskars Dankers, as if such a thing existed on 1 July 1941. In reality, at that time Dankers was still in Germany, and the genesis of the so-called Latvian Self-Administration of the Land was a slow process that took from August 1941 to May 1942. The American prosecutors, as Ducmanis himself did not do, accused Hazners of molesting and killing Jews at the Riga Police Headquarters (Prefektura), the burning of the Synagogue at Gogola iela, the clearing of both the Riga and Daugavpils (Dvinsk in the language of the prosecutors) ghettos. Hazners' defense attorney Ivars Berzins was able to show that Hazners was not present at any of these locations and that at the times indicated Hazners was elsewhere. To confound the prosecutors' case, Berzins showed that the witnesses against Hazners had been prepared and coached by Maria Radiwker, an attorney in Israel. Hazners was acquitted and exonerated.

Ezergailis correctly asserts U.S. authorities lost the case against Hāzners because the coached eyewitnesses had clearly misidentified Hāzners.

Saidelpage 17

The Office of Special Investigations (051), which superseded SLU, appealed this decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) on March 5, 1980, and an oral argument before the BIA was held on September 4, 1980. On July 15, 1981, the BIA dismissed OSI’s appeal and motion to reopen, holding that the record did not contain clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence of Hazners’ deportability. Since that date, official OSI digests of cases in litigation have stated, “Various possible courses of action are now under consideration by OSI.” But there has been no action.

Sitting in the Albany courtroom in October and November, 1977, Rabbi Silton learned in detail from the witnesses about the inhuman harshness of life in the Riga Ghetto. He also learned that, with few exceptions, members of the Jewish community were not in the courtroom to offer their moral support to the witnesses.

The rabbi learned another lesson sitting in that courtroom, a lesson that a handful of others had known for some time: the issue of Nazi war criminals living in America was neither new nor easily rectified.

Saidel, who attended the trial, relates dismissal of the case. But, it is also obvious from its reading that she is dissatisfied that the OSI has not taken more steps since to address a failure of the justice system to find Hāzners guilty of Holocaust collaboration.

Lastly, regarding Hāzners

In two remaining passages mentioning Hāzners, Schiessl briefly notes that U.S. authorities lost 20 cases ("13.3%"), including his, and that he passed away in the U.S. in 1989.

Schiessl cites the German-language translation of the KGB's Daugavas Vanagi — Who are They? (Daugavas Vanagi: Wer Sind Sie?) regarding Hāzners and lists it in "Secondary Sources".

Arājs Kommando and other perpetrators at pages 13-14, 22 and following

The Germans launch the Holocaust in eastern Europe and the Balticspages 13-14

Schiessl presents the Holocaust in eastern Europe as a progression of phases. Focusing on the first two, its inception in Nazi-occupied territory:

• Phase 1: June 1941, Germany invades, there is an interregnum of "two weeks" during which locals organize Selbstschutz units and immediately begin attacking Jews and suspected Communists. After Germans occupy territory, locals continue to rampage. Several weeks later Germans organize the Selbstschutz into Schutzmannschaften.
• Phase 2: Starting with the arrival of the Einsatzgruppen in July, Germans "take over" planning and extermination of Jews. Locals already performing that function on their own "willingly cooperate."
  • Germans "wanted to stop spontaneous pogroms" because they might spread to non-Jewish groups and potentially place too much power in the hands of nationalists.
  • It was then that they organized Schutzmannschaften and other collaborator units, such as Arājs Kommando

In the context of the Baltics, this narrative is folklore.

Operation Barbarossa was launched Sunday, June 22. By June 25th or 26th, Germans were already machine-gunning Jews to death in the Slobodke (Vilijampolė) Jewish suburb of Kaunas. Franz Walter Stahlecker sent his men into Kaunas ahead of the arrival of Einsatzkommando 3 (unit of Einsatzgruppe A)) to organize and execute spontaneous-appearing pogroms and enlist Lithuanian partisans to kill Jews, in which they succeeded after initial resistance. It is not clear what persuaded the partisans to collaborate; nevertheless, the Germans closely managed their actions, including disarming them at the end of each day. In fact, anyone possessing a weapon had to turn it in. There was no possibility of armed locals executing anyone independently of the Germans.

Lithuania was subsequently "cleansed" by an EK "Rollkommando" (mobile killing unit) led by Joachim Hamann, killing 1,000 Jews a day for three months straight.

In Latvia, Germans already occupied Daugavpils (Dvinsk) by June 26th. The Wehrmacht and EK entered the city together, and the Nazis had already executed Jews before the day was done.

To the point:

1. There was no interregnum, let alone two weeks, during which locals slaughtered Jews. Nor did the Soviets flee, leaving a vacuum. They held on until the last minute, imprisoning and executing locals even in retreat. In Rīga, the capital, the Soviets jailed Vilis Hāzners on the 25th. He was freed after the Russians abandoned the jail on the 30th — the Germans completed their occupation of the city the next day. Hāzners found the hallways littered with bodies, including that of a friend, and in the summer heat the stench of rotting flesh of unburied corpses already filled the jail's courtyard. That weeks passed during which locals killed Jews is utterly false.

   That Stahlecker and his Einsatzgruppen units arrived some time after occupation was established or "took over" control of the Holocaust from locals is utterly false.

2. There was no anti-Jewish action which the Germans did not manage. Even post-occupation Latvians "looting" Jewish homes in Rīga were collaborators whom Stahlecker ordered to dress in civilian clothes and authorized to loot.

   Arājs Kommandopage 22 and following

   While Schiessl's account of Arājs Kommando is largely factual regarding victims and actions, it is also fictional in that it omits German management and control, and does not indicate the Germans killed a single Jew. Rumbula is mentioned only as a "killing site". Absent is describing it as the location where Germans shot 25,000 Jews over two separate days and packed them like sardines into mass graves.

   Schiessl also falsely credits Arājs Kommando alone for cleansing the entire Latvian countryside of Jews by the end of October, and doing it so thoroughly that none were left to kill.

   Intentionally or not, Schiessl leaves the uninformed reader to erroneously infer a Holocaust in which the Germans were incidental, or latecomers at most.

   Discussing the Holocaust in detail is well beyond the scope here. However, urgent corrections are required to Schiessl's faulty narrative beyond just the sequence of events regarding both the Selbstschutz and Schutzmannschaften. We suggest historian Andrew Ezergailis's Holocaust in Latvia, published (1996) in conjunction with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. LINK.

   The Selbstschutz

   Schiessl defines the Selbstschutz:

   literally “self defense” units; formed after Soviet forces left and before German army arrived; members could be either ethnic Germans or natives.

   There is an article about Selbstschutz in Wikipedia, but which discusses it in its pre-WWII context.

   Schiessl's definition is simply not factual. As already mentioned, there was no interregnum, there was no Selbstschutz predating Nazis invasion, occupation, establishment, and control. Following the Nazi invasion, the only option for Latvians who wanted to pursue the Soviets — who had just mass deported their friends and families only a week earlier — was a German rifle. These formed the Selbstschutz organized under Latvian Voldermārs Veiss, subordinated to the Wehrmacht and operating out of a headquarters on Annas Street. While ostensibly formed to protect national assets, guard against sabotage, and so on, they became the recruiting reserve for service under the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. These Selbstschutz were later reorganized into the Schutzmannschaften, but their function as a front-line combat reserve did not change. In practice, the "reservists" were all deployed in active combat.

   Notably, the Germans were not interested in "collaboration". All requests to form Latvian units to pursue the Red Army were rebuffed. The Nazis even assassinated a former senior Latvian army officer petitioning to form such units. "Collaboration" from the Nazi viewpoint was total subjugation under German control. Only German-created and run "organizations" were allowed. Just as the word "voluntary" was a Nazi propagandist sham so were all instances of any organization or action prefixed by "self-": self-protection, self-defense, self-cleansing, self-administration, self-help. There was no "self" anything. This appears lost on Schiessl.

   The Schutzmannschaften

   The Schutzmannschaften were not organized immediately. It was declared as an umbrella organization a month into the organization, including guards, street police, and police battalions. The Selbstschutz recruiting/combat Eastern Front reserve was subsequently included/renamed to the Schutzmannschaften but their role did not change. New Schutzmannschaften units were only formed at the end of 1941 and into 1942/43. While the later combat Latvian Legion (Waffen-SS) is was mostly conscripted, Nazi conscription of Latvians had already begun in 1941.

   Those who initially volunteered out of a desire to secure Latvia from Soviet return obligated themselves to a year of service. While there were numerous instances of Latvian "collaborators" providing guard duty or digging graves, they were not necessarily willing participants. The Nazis shot anyone who did not follow orders or who deserted. (For example, police escorting Jews to Rumbula, where Germans killed 25,000 over the course of two days, were told they were taking them to the railway to be "resettled." Some of the German officers in charge had orders to shoot Latvian guards who failed to keep Jews in line.)

   The vast majority of Schutzmannschaften units did not participate in the Holocaust. As Ezergailis relates in Holocaust in Latvia:

   The Schutzmannschaften occupy an ambiguous place among the military and police forces in Latvia. They were a sprawling organization that included street policemen, countryside constabularies, bridge guards, and the military units known as police battalions. It is impossible to paint them all with the same brush. The majority of the Schutzmannschaften had nothing to do with the atrocities, although some did.

   On the upper levels of the German command the lines of authority of all the Latvian police, military, and paramilitary units ultimately led to the SD [Sicherheitsdienst]. The Latvian SD reported directly to the German SD. The Schutzmannschaften were under the control of the German Ordnungspolizei, but at the same time, through the Ordnungspolizei, General Friedrich Jeckeln had a great deal to do with the activities of the Schutzmannschaften. Hardly anything in Latvia transpired without SD involvement, but when we consider the operative level there is a sharp distinction between the work of the SD and that of the Schutzmannschaften. In the worst case, Schutzmannschaften involvement in the atrocities was not identical with that of the SD. The overwhelming number of the Schutzmannschaften, those serving in the battalions, and most of those guarding the streets, had no involvement at all with the killing of the Jews. The participation of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften in the killings was episodic and outside their routine. They received it as a special assignment at a specified time and location. Although some of the Schutzmannschaften, especially in the small towns, were ordered to carry out killings, their function usually was limited to gathering and guarding the Jews prior to and during the killing [by Germans]. In many locations, especially Vidzeme [northeastern Latvia, more than a third of its territory], where there were few or no Jews, the resident Schutzmannschaften had no opportunity to be involved with the atrocities, even if they had wanted to. If the Schutzmannschaften participated in the killings, they participated only in their own locality; they did not, as did the Arājs Commando, travel from place to place. Due to the episodic and fleeting nature of their role in the atrocities it has been extremely difficult to find out the truth about their participation. The war crimes prosecutors in the United States and West Germany, with some exceptions, have not attempted to prosecute the Latvian members of the Schutzmannschaften, either the residential ones or those from the battalions.13

   It is worth noting that U.S. prosecutions of Latvian émigrés focused on former Latvian Legion (Waffen-SS) officers. Proceedings were rife with Soviet propaganda and perjured evidence. As elsewhere, we recommend our research on the Vilis Hāzners deportation trial.

   AssessmentMisleading, misinformed, mistaken

   Our analysis and review focuses solely on Schiessl's treatment of the Holocaust specific to Latvia and on Vilis Hāzners's first such U.S. Latvian "Nazis among us" court case.

   ---

   Reading Alleged Nazi Collaborators, we get the impression of a pre-Internet age scholar, busy researching, jotting down notes, photocopying book pages and newspaper articles, printing out microfiche and roll-film document copies, then without foreknowledge of the topic attempting to arrange hundreds of pieces of paper into a coherent narrative.

   Upon reading Schiessl's Acknowledgments, we expected a major work on the topic. He thanks

   • Holocaust scholars Richard Breitman, Martin C. Dean, and Jürgen Matthäus while he was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.,
   • Elizabeth White, chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI),
   • archivists at
     • the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
     • the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit,
     • the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and
     • the Immigration History Research Center in Minneapolis.

   It is all the more disappointing, then, that Schiessl's account of the organization and progression of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia is based on folklore and propaganda. Schiessl selects unreliable sources — for example, contending that Latvians ran amok for more than a month at the start of the Nazi occupation killing Jews before the Germans were able to step in to control and stop it. Moreover, in Schiessl's Nazi-occupied Latvia, every Latvian wearing a German uniform was a Holocaust collaborator.

   Moving to Schiessl's central topic of individuals alleged to be Nazis or their collaborators who escaped to the U.S. after the war and examining the case of Vilis Hāzners, the first U.S. "Latvian Nazi" deportation action, Schiessl reports allegations against Hāzners at face value. He cites Christopher Simpson's politically motivated and historically corrupted Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, strewn with inaccuracies, to detail Hāzners's offenses and role at the center of an imaginary sinister anti-Soviet CIA–Latvian Holocaust perpetrator conspiracy. Only at the very end does Schiessl indicate that the Immigration and Naturalization Service's case against Hāzners failed. Even then, he falsely claims Hāzners escaped justice because of botched evidence, not that witness identifications failed to withstand scrutiny in court, a fact he could have readily ascertained from court documents. See Hāzners Case, Judicial Review and Denial of Motion to Appeal.

   Schiessl's overview of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia falsely portrays the Germans as Johnny-come-lately's (if at all) to a slaughter of Jews already well underway at the hands of an unfettered local population eager to continue in the blood-letting even after the Nazis eventually got themselves organized more than a month after occupying Latvia. Examining the Vilis Hāzners case as a litmus test, Schiessl scrap-books together sources with no understanding their significance, agendas, interrelationships, or accuracy. Only at the very end does he indicate the case against Hāzners was dismissed, yet still propagates the blatant lie that disallowed photographic evidence at his deportation trial let him escape justice.

   No stars.

   Schiessl naïvely trusted sources at face value to cobble together a grossly inaccurate and misleading account of events where they relate to the Holocaust in Latvia. But we do not fault Schiessl. Specific to Vilis Hāzners, Latvian Holocaust collaborators, and the Holocaust in Latvia, we fault Schiessl's dissertation committee for its demonstrable failure to competently advise and evaluate.

   ---

   1	"The Search for Nazi Collaborators in the United States", dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (2009).
   2	Schiessl, book, p. 63.
   3	Feigin, Judith. The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust. 2008, at www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal/legacy/2011/03/14/12-2008osu-accountability.pdf.
   4	Feigin (2008).
   5	Schiessl, book, p. 118.
   6	Ieva Zake. "Soviet Campaigns against 'Capitalist Ideological Subversives' during the Cold War: The Latvian Experience." Journal of Cold War Studies 2010; 12 (3): 91–114. p. 94-95.
   7	Hearsay evidence, at U.S. Department of Justice, retrieved January 12, 2023.
   8	Mineau, A. Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity, Rodopi, 2004, ISBN: 9789042016330. LINK, page 104.
   9	Brietman's article appeared originally at wiesenthal.com available at archive.org, 17 April 2007.
   10	Israeli Witnesses Testify Against Alleged Ex-Nazi, by Joseph Mianowany, UPI.
   11	The Department of Justice refused defense requests for German records in DOJ possession.
   12	Ryan, A.A. Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, ISBN: 9780151758234. LINK, p.60.
   13	Ezergailis, Andrew. The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center, Historical Institute of Latvia in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996, ISBN: 9789984905433. LINK, p. 45.

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