Nazi collaborators were brutal. They raped and forced women to work as sex slaves, then killed them when they were worn-out; they tossed babies in the air for target practice; and they buried wounded victims alive.
Just before the Soviets retook Estonia in 1944, the Nazis loaded onto ships the remaining Western European Jews who had been deported to work in the mines. The vessels brought them to Germany for reassignment at work camps. Those unable to work were executed. A few survived the war and were liberated by the Allies.
In neighboring Latvia, anti-Semites didn’t bother to wait for the Germans to arrive. After the Soviets withdrew, they began hunting and executing Jews with enthusiasm. Once the Germans arrived in July 1941, these anti-Semitic Latvians helped them “incite other Latvians to a Jewish action without much prodding,” according to American historian Valdis O. Lumans. In less than two years, the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators—mostly volunteers from self-defense and police units—murdered 90 percent of Latvia’s 95,000 Jews.
According to Lumans, two of the most rabid Latvian Nazi collaborators were Voldemars Veiss, a lieutenant colonel in the Latvian national army, and Viktors Arajs, a Latvian policeman. Veiss, who was probably an ethnic German (
Arajs soon became known as the “Jew Killer,” a sobriquet he wore with great pride. His gang of Latvian terrorists, generally known as the Latvian Security Police, embarked on “drunken orgies of looting, murder, torture and rape,” according to Lumans.
“[Arajs] seized as headquarters for himself, the luxurious [Riga] residence of a Jewish banker on Valdemars Street,” Lumans wrote, “and turned it into a house of horrors for Jews, a veritable robbers’ den, where he and his ‘boys’ tortured and murdered Jews for sport and kept Jewish women for sexual entertainment.”
Over time, Arajs’ Boys grew to more than a thousand. Not satisfied with killing Jews in big cities like Riga, they went Jew-hunting from town to town in blue, Swedish-built buses. Their hatred of Jews took them on raids into neighboring Lithuania and Belorussia as well. Scholars estimate that the Arajs’ Boys murdered twenty-six thousand Latvians. They had no counterpart in any other land or region under German rule. Arajs’ Boys were eventually conscripted into a Baltic Legion before fleeing west just before the Soviets retook Estonia.
One of the largest wholesale slaughters of Jews in Latvia was the liquidation of the Riga ghetto in late 1942, eighteen months after the Germans occupied Latvia. Approximately thirty thousand Jews were executed. Of those, six thousand were children under the age of fourteen.
For the sake of efficiency, the Nazis divided the ghetto in half. The evacuation of the first fifteen thousand Jews began at six on the morning of November 30. Sensing that death was about to “liberate” them, the victims were in a state of panic and despair. As Latvian policemen and execution commandos stormed their half of the ghetto, some single mothers, whose husbands had already been murdered, killed their children and then themselves. Riga survivor and historian Bernhard Press described the round up that freezing November morning:
First the policemen, rolling drunk, forced their way into the old-age home and the neighboring houses. In the old-age home, they machine-gunned old people, sick people, and invalids in their beds. They drove out of apartments… people who were still in the midst of their preparations for the supposed evacuation, with truncheon blows and shots, curses and threats. Anyone who did not obey fast enough was shot on the spot. Small children were hurled out of windows onto the street.
In the dark of night, Latvian policemen on foot and on horseback… drove people down the street like a panicky herd of animals. According to an eyewitness report, Herberts Cukurs [the Butcher of Riga] tore an infant from its mother’s arms and smashed the baby’s head against the curbstone. As the mother threw herself with a wild scream on the lifeless, bleeding body, he riddled her head with bullets from his revolver. Anyone who couldn’t keep up was killed with a shot in the neck.
The column of Jews marched two hours to a forest in Rumbula, a dot on the map with a railway station. Older Jews arrived by bus. The killing began at 8:15 A.M. and ended at 7:45 P.M., when the last of the fifteen thousand Jews had been shot.
Latvian volunteers ringed the field in front of the killing site in the forest to prevent Jews from escaping and unauthorized persons—potential eyewitnesses—from entering. The exhausted victims were herded into the forest through a tube made up of two lines of Germans and Latvian police. There was little resistance. Those who had resisted were already dead.
Once through the tube, the Jews passed three stations. At the first, they deposited their suitcases and other belongings. At the second, they stripped. At the third station, they placed all the valuables they were wearing in a wooden box—watches, jewelry, rings. Then Nazi SS officers and Latvian collaborators led them down wooden ramps into pits dug by Soviet POWs.
Once in the pits, the Jews were ordered to lie down in rows “like sardines.” The SS and Latvian executioners assigned to the smaller pits shot their victims from the rims above. Those assigned to the larger pits walked down the rows and shot each victim in the neck.
After the first layer of Jews was shot, the Nazis ordered another group to enter the pit and lie on top of those who had just been murdered. When the executioners tired, they were relieved by others. A dozen Soviet POWs stood ready to fill in the pits with dirt when the massacre was over. The Nazis and their Latvian collaborators killed the remaining fifteen thousand Riga ghetto Jews in the same fashion a week later.
How many of the Latvians who had voluntarily participated in the extermination of more than eighty-five thousand Latvian Jews ended up serving in the Baltic Legions in 1944, survived the war, and were granted U.S. visas is unknown. How many were hired by the CIA after the war as saboteurs, spies, and informants is also unknown. And it is unlikely that the numbers will ever be calculated with any degree of accuracy even after information stored in Eastern European archives has been sifted and digested, and the responsibility for the genocide is debated, fixed, and accepted.
Given the voluntary collaboration of Estonians and Latvians in the wholesale butchery of Jews in their countries, one can readily understand why the Jewish community was cynical and angry at the Displaced Persons Commission decision to open America’s door for former members of the Baltic Legions.
In June 1950, Congress passed the Lodge Act, which authorized the U.S. armed forces to recruit up to 12,500 aliens into the U.S. Army to help fight the Cold War. The recruitment drive was part of the National Security Council’s Psychwar-2 program, which was to be implemented by the army in collaboration with the CIA and with the full approval of the Department of State. The White House and military had found an eager legislative ally in Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, a moderate Republican and decorated war hero.
A military man from collar to boot straps, Lodge was a perfect choice to introduce the bill. While still a U.S. senator, he served as a major in a 1st Armored Division tank unit and fought in North Africa. In late 1942, he returned to the United States to campaign for reelection, which he won, only to give up his seat in 1944 to resume active duty in Italy and France. In 1945, he retired from the military as a lieutenant colonel with French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre medals pinned to his chest. He was reelected to the Senate in 1946. As an army officer during World War II, Lodge became convinced of the need for an indigenous reconnaissance and intelligence corps made up of soldiers who spoke the local language, understood local customs, and knew local topography. Could the army ask for anyone better to introduce an innocentsounding alien recruitment bill?
The Lodge Act left it up to the military to set additional enlistment criteria besides age and marital status. It did not forbid the hiring of Nazi war criminals.
When the Displaced Persons Act of 1948—which was amended and extended for two more years in 1950— finally expired in 1952, Congress passed Public Law 414, the Immigration and Naturalization Act. Missing from Section 212 of the new law, which dealt with who should be excluded from the United States, was a critical sentence present in the old law: “any person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin” would be ineligible for a U.S. visa.
The omission slipped through Congress with hardly a ripple of protest and without public debate. The implications of the deliberate deletion, however, were far-reaching. In effect, a Nazi war criminal could
