Yad Vashem condemned Latvia’s Prosecution Office’s decision to close the investigation into Herberts Cukurs for his role in the Holocaust.
The “Latvian war criminal and Nazi collaborator” was “infamous for his role in the Holocaust and involvement in the killing of tens of thousands of Jews,” Yad Vashem said Tuesday.
This “decision was baffling because Cukurs’s horrific war crimes are indisputable,” Yad Vashem said, adding that it was ready to “provide documents from its archive” to support prosecuting Cukurs.
It also denounced the “repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’s image in Latvia by distorting and ignoring historical truth.”
Latvian lawyer David Lipkin told KAN News that “the prosecution has come to the conclusion that Cukurs’s actions do not contain elements of genocide or any other crime, and therefore the case is effectively closed.”Lipkin said he intended to appeal the decision.
“We will insist and demand that the Prosecutor’s Office resume the proceedings, because we have a lot of evidence that proves Cukurs’s guilt,” according to KAN.
Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis, also reacted to Latvia's decision to close the investigation into Cukurs.
“We are shocked that the Latvian Prosecution Office has closed the case against Herberts Cukurs, a member of the Arajas Kommando death squad, involved in the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews. The decisions allows this brutal “butcher of Riga” to be exonerated," he said.
This perversion of the historical record, of a country clearing the name of a Holocaust perpetrator, is deeply troubling. Justice and historical integrity must not be plastic concepts, manipulated for populist purposes, an instrument to declare a mass murderer into a hero. Perceptions of the past will negatively shape the present, and shows an alarming trend of hard-lined nationalism in parts of Europe,” he added.
Who was Cukurs?
Cukurs is known as the “butcher of Riga” and is strongly linked to the murder of tens of thousands of Jews.
Cukurs held a “senior, operative position in the Arajs Kommando, the unit that from June 1941 until March 1942 carried out mass killings of Jews and other civilians,” according to Yad Vashem.
“Among other crimes, at the end of 1941, he personally participated in murder operations in Riga’s ghetto and the nearby Rumbula killing site, where Jewish men, women, children, and infants were murdered indiscriminately,” Yad Vashem added.
According to KAN, Cukurs is still viewed as a national hero in Latvia. This was partly due to his role as a gifted pilot before World War II.
After Latvia gained independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991, nationalist movements tried to clear Cukurs’s name “and called for his work as a pilot to be commemorated on a national level,” KAN reported.
After WWII, Cukurs fled to Brazil via the “ratlines” utilized by many Nazi and Nazi-affiliated war criminals. He was assassinated by Mossad agents after being lured to Uruguay in 1965.
In 2004, Yad Vashem condemned the distribution of pamphlets commemorating Cukurs across Latvia by a nationalist politician. At the time, Latvia’s government denounced what Yad Vashem referred to as “the attempt to rehabilitate Cukurs’s image in Latvia by a minority bent on whitewashing the historical truth.”