Between Giants (62 page)

Soviet control of the three countries was achieved through local communist parties, but although the First Secretaries of the three parties were local citizens, their deputies and other major figures were often Russians. As had been the case in previous occupations, a shortage of suitable local personnel at middle and lower tiers hamstrung the administrations of the three countries, a factor that was worsened by Soviet insistence that only those who had spent a minimum of 20 years in the Soviet Union undergoing ‘Sovietisation’ were entirely reliable. Although there were significant numbers of ethnic Estonians and Latvians who had lived in the Soviet Union prior to the war, they were regarded with contempt by their compatriots when they returned to take power under Soviet control. In the case of Lithuania, the pool of Lithuanians who were living in the Soviet Union was very limited, and in order to administer the country, large numbers of Russians moved into Lithuania; in 1947, 32 per cent of all government ministers were Russians. Similarly, the membership of the communist parties of the three countries was dominated by non-Balts. Until the end of the 1940s, only in Latvia did membership by Latvians approach 50 per cent, and this was largely due to the return to Latvia of large numbers of ethnic Latvians from the Soviet Union. Despite the use of Russians to try to ensure compliance in the three states, Moscow continued to be dissatisfied with arrangements, and in 1951, the Estonian Communist Party was heavily purged. The exact reasons are not clear, but widespread reluctance in the administration to embrace communist policies, particularly the collectivisation of agriculture, probably played a part.

The German and Latvian soldiers who surrendered in Courland in 1945 had been assured of good treatment and a swift return home at the end of the war. Like other Wehrmacht soldiers who surrendered to the Red Army in 1945, they were systematically robbed of their personal possessions, and in a few cases roughly treated. However, it appears that the determined resistance of the Wehrmacht in Courland had impressed the soldiers and officers of the Red Army, and there are many examples of the soldiers being treated with respect. The swift return to their homeland, however, did not materialise. The Soviet Union had suffered major losses, and was desperately short of manpower. The prisoners were transported east, and set to work in a variety of roles, ranging from clearing rubble to building factories and working in mines and fields. By 1949, many had been allowed to return home, but large numbers remained in captivity. Some, but by no means all, of these detainees had been charged with and convicted of a variety of crimes, and were no longer termed prisoners of war. The crimes they had allegedly committed varied hugely; in some cases, they included attacks on civilians and maltreatment of prisoners, but in other cases, the charges were absurd. One Luftwaffe pilot was sentenced to several years’ hard labour for the crime of destroying Soviet state property – the property in question being the Soviet aircraft that he had shot down during the war. The death rate amongst those who were detained the longest was considerable, with fewer than 50 per cent surviving until 1956, when the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, succeeded in negotiating their release during a momentous visit to Moscow.
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The German and Baltic soldiers who had succeeded in escaping to Sweden in the closing days of the war had an unpleasant shock awaiting them. At first, they were treated well, receiving payment for any work they undertook, but the Swedish government came under increasing pressure from Moscow. In June 1945, a formal demand was issued, requiring Sweden to hand over all former German combatants – including citizens of the Baltic States – who had fled to Sweden from the Eastern Front. The Swedish government was in a difficult position. Whilst many in Sweden, particularly the church and the military, were opposed to any such transfer, there were precedents for the handover of Germans. At the end of any war, former combatants were to be handed over to the controlling authority in their homeland, and as Germany had been divided into zones of occupation by the victorious Allies, this could be interpreted as requiring the Swedes to transfer Germans to whichever power they had fought against during the war. Consequently, some 3,000 Germans were handed over to the Soviet Union. Many attempted self-mutilation or even suicide as a means of avoiding extradition; once they had recovered from their injuries, they were extradited anyway.

The situation for the citizens of the Baltic States was somewhat more complicated, as they had not been fighting in the armies of their own nations during the war. There was also the difficult status of the Baltic States themselves. The Soviet Union viewed the soldiers as Soviet citizens, as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had become part of the Soviet Union prior to the German invasion, but this annexation had not been formally recognised by most other nations. Despite widespread protests against the extradition of any persons to the Soviet Union, about 150 Baltic soldiers – mainly Latvians who had escaped from the Courland Bridgehead or from West Prussia – were placed aboard the steamer
Beloostrov
in Trelleborg on 25 January 1946. Two Latvian officers took their own lives rather than be handed over to the Soviet authorities.

Many of the Baltic soldiers who were returned to the Soviet Union, particularly the officers, were executed. The rest were sentenced to hard labour, and spent many years in captivity. In 1994, 44 of the group were still alive, and on 20 June, 40 of them – 35 Latvians, four Estonians, and a single Lithuanian – travelled to Stockholm, where they were received by King Carl XVI Gustaf. Margaretha af Ugglas, the Swedish Foreign Minister, acknowledged that the extraditions had been without legal justification, and stated the regrets of the Swedish government.
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The deaths in the Baltic States during the war, as a result of the fighting and the policies of the various occupying powers, resulted in a major change in the population. Accurate figures are hard to verify, but the total population reduction, as a result of Soviet deportations before and after the war, German extermination of Jews and others, and casualties from the fighting, was probably of the order of 20 per cent. This suggests that the Baltic States lost a greater proportion of their population than any other country in the Second World War, with the exception of Poland. It is striking that the countries that suffered the worst loss of population during and immediately after the Second World War were those that suffered occupation by both the Germans and the Soviets.

The few Baltic Jews who survived the Holocaust faced a difficult future. Samuel Esterowicz, one of those who owed his life to the efforts of Major Plagge, managed to find work in the new administration, but his past as a successful businessman meant that he was part of a class treated with suspicion by the communist authorities. A friend of his, Michal Girda, was arrested by the Soviets because he had served briefly with a White Russian unit in the Russian Civil War, and Esterowicz was forced to confirm this detail. When he was singled out for criticism when his department failed to achieve its performance targets, he concluded that there was no future for him in ‘liberated’ Lithuania. Along with over 90 per cent of other Baltic Holocaust survivors, he opted to emigrate to the west. He and his family left in a train of cattle-trucks in April 1945, travelling first to Poland, where they lived in Łódź. As anti-Jewish sentiment became more pronounced in the Polish population, the family travelled on to Italy before eventually emigrating to the United States.

Mascha Rolnikaite, who was taken from Vilnius after the liquidation of the ghetto to a work camp in Estonia, was later moved to Stutthof, near Gdansk. As the Red Army tore the German lines apart in the last winter of the war, she – like thousands of other concentration camp prisoners – was forced to leave the camp and set off on forced marches. Already malnourished, thousands of prisoners perished as they struggled through the snow, often clad only in their striped concentration camp uniforms:

Eventually, Rolnikaite and her fellow prisoners were left in a barn. During the night, there were several large explosions, and the prisoners feared they were about to be killed. The following morning, there was silence. A Polish voice from outside the barn told them that the Germans had fled.

Eventually, Rolnikaite returned to Vilnius. To her joy, she encountered her father, who she had not seen since immediately before the German occupation; he had escaped to the east with the Red Army. One of her sisters was also alive, but her mother and two youngest siblings had disappeared into Auschwitz, where they presumably died. Unlike the Esterowicz family, the Rolnikaite family chose to stay within the Soviet Union.

The Germans involved in the Baltic Holocaust also had diverse fates. Franz Stahlecker, whose
Einsatzgruppe A
oversaw so many of the killings in Lithuania and Latvia in 1941, did not outlive his crimes by more than a few months. He was killed in March 1942 while leading an operation against Soviet partisans. Martin Weiss, who had played a major role in the killings in Vilnius, attempted to merge back into civilian life in Germany after the war. He was recognised and denounced, and in 1950 was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Würzburg. Karl Jäger, the author of the detailed report of the deeds of
Einsatzkommando 3
in Lithuania, assumed a false identity at the end of the war. He was working as an agricultural labourer when his report was first examined in public in 1959. He was soon recognised and arrested, and while awaiting trial, he committed suicide in prison in Hohenasperg.

Standartenführer Franz Murer, the man with overall responsibility for the Vilnius ghetto, during his time in command earned himself the nickname the ‘Butcher from Vilnius’. He returned to his native Austria at the end of the war and attempted to pass himself off as just another returning soldier. Unfortunately for him, there was a displaced persons’ camp near his hometown, and one of those living in the camp recognised him. He was arrested by the British occupation forces, and handed over to the Soviet Union, where he was convicted of murdering Soviet citizens – Vilnius was regarded as having been part of the Soviet Union at the outset of the German invasion – and sentenced to 25 years’ hard labour. In 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty effectively re-established Austria as a sovereign state, he was released from prison. Although he was prosecuted again in Austria in 1963, he was acquitted. He died in 1995.

Bruno Kittel replaced Murer as the man with overall responsibility for the Vilnius ghetto, and supervised its liquidation. He personally killed several Jews in the ghetto, usually selecting his victims at random. At the end of the war, Kittel – who had been an actor before the war – simply disappeared. His fate is not known.

Erich Ehrlinger, who commanded
Sonderkommando 1b
, part of Stahlecker’s
Einsatzgruppe A
, was involved in many killings in the Baltic States, playing a leading role in the massacre of Jews in Daugavpils. Later, he and his men were active in Belarus and Russia, killing Jews, non-Jewish civilians and suspected partisans. After the war, he adopted a fake identity, but in 1954 resumed using his real name. Four years later, he was arrested and charged with war crimes, and after his conviction was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1965 pending appeal, and his sentence was officially remitted on the grounds of ill health in 1969. Despite his apparent ill health, he lived until 2004.

Helmut Rauca, who was involved in the killings in the Kaunas ghetto, travelled to Canada after the war. Here, he was protected by the policy of the Canadian government to avoid investigating suspected war criminals, on the grounds that such investigations might be interpreted as promoting the opinions of particular special interests groups; the official policy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1962 stated:

In view of the possibility that individuals or organizations may attempt to employ the Force as an investigational agency for groups engaged in locating and punishing individuals suspected of war crimes, unless otherwise instructed by Headquarters, Ottawa, investigations into allegations of this nature are not to be conducted by the Force.
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One of many to question this policy was Robert Kaplan, the Canadian Solicitor General from 1980 to 1984. He successfully encouraged the investigation and extradition of Rauca to Germany to face charges in connection with the deaths of up to 11,500 Jews in Kaunas. Rauca was sent to Germany in May 1983; he died in prison while awaiting trial the following October.
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Eduard Roschmann, who replaced Kurt Krause as head of the Riga ghetto in early 1943, was not as inclined as his predecessor to kill Jews on the spot; instead, he generally had them taken to the central prison in Riga for execution. It is thought that far more Jews died as a result of this than were killed by Krause within the ghetto. Although he subjected Jews returning to the ghetto from work details to searches in an attempt to prevent them from bringing in food, he often ordered that any food seized was to be sent to the ghetto hospital. He was also involved in German efforts to hide the evidence of the massacres around Riga, and helped organise work parties that dug up the corpses of earlier killings for disposal. The work parties were themselves executed every two weeks and replaced by new workers. After the war, Roschmann went to Austria, where he was arrested in 1945, though he managed to pass himself off as an ordinary prisoner of war and was then released. Two years later, he was recognised by a former concentration camp inmate and once more arrested. He was incarcerated in Dachau, which was now being used as a detention camp, but in 1948 he escaped and fled Germany, taking a ship from Genoa to Argentina, with the help of Alois Hudal, a Catholic Austrian bishop with strong pro-Nazi leanings. Hudal’s involvement with escape routes for former Nazis resulted in increasing criticism of him, but he did not resign from his post in the church until 1952, and remained an active campaigner for former Nazis until his death. Roschmann set up a timber company in Argentina under the name Federigo Wagner, and from 1958 he faced repeated attempts to extradite him to Europe, where he faced charges ranging from bigamy to mass murder. In mid-1977, the Argentinian government stated that it would consider extraditing him, even though there was no formal extradition treaty with West Germany; it appears that there were numerous tensions between Argentina and West Germany at the time, and that this announcement might have been designed to placate the Germans. In any event, Roschmann fled Argentina for Paraguay. In 1977, a body was found in the capital with identity documents that suggested that the corpse was Federigo Wagner. The body had several wounds that were consistent with Roschmann’s medical history, but some, including Simon Wiesenthal, were sceptical that it was Roschmann, and speculated that he had in some way fabricated the death in order to escape justice.