Between Giants (63 page)

Friedrich Jeckeln was involved in organising many of the killings in Riga, and subsequently played a major role in the German administration in the Baltic States as head of police operations. By February 1945, he had risen to the rank of SS and Police General, and was assigned to the
SS-Freiwilligen Gebirgs-Korps
(‘SS Volunteer Mountain Corps’). He was captured by the Red Army and tried in Riga in 1946. Convicted of war crimes, he was hanged in February. Hinrich Lohse, the
Reichskommissar
for Ostland, fled to Schleswig-Holstein in 1944, where he remained active as Reich Defence Commissar. The British occupation authorities arrested him, and in 1948 he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Three years later, he was released on the grounds of ill health. He lived until 1964.

Jacob Gens, the Jewish head of the Vilnius ghetto police, who helped organise many of the ‘actions’ that were carried out to exterminate the population of the ghetto, was a controversial figure. It seems that he genuinely believed that by cooperating and being productive workers, the Jews of Vilnius might be able to prove themselves useful to the Germans and would thus survive. He often claimed that his deeds reduced the number of Jews who were executed. For example, an ‘action’ in July 1942 resulted in about 84 elderly Jews being shot, and Gens claimed that the original intention had been to kill several hundred, but he successfully negotiated a lower figure. After the
Judenrat
was dissolved by the Germans in July 1942, he became the sole Jewish authority in the ghetto. Although he was tasked with suppressing the anti-German resistance in the ghetto, he appears to have made and maintained regular contact with the resistance movement. In 1943, when it became clear that the ghetto was about to be liquidated, Gens resisted suggestions that he should attempt to flee – his Lithuanian wife lived outside the ghetto, and there was at least a possibility that he might be able to escape. He was summoned by the Gestapo on 14 September and accused of collaborating with the resistance movement, and executed the same day.

Viktors Arājs, whose paramilitary unit was involved in many killings in Latvia and elsewhere, was held in a British internment camp until 1949, after which he adopted the name Victor Zeibots, with the help of the Latvian government in exile in London. In 1979, he was prosecuted for war crimes in Hamburg and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1988. Another member of the
Arājs Kommando,
Herberts Cukurs, who had been a pioneering aviator before the war, was accused of involvement in several killings, but insisted that he had only worked as head of vehicle maintenance in Arājs’ unit. He started a new life in South America after the war, where he was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1965, who lured him to Montevideo under the guise of wishing to collaborate with him in the creation of a new airline. After killing him, the agents sent an announcement to press offices in Germany and South America:

Taking into consideration the gravity of the charge levelled against the accused, namely that he personally supervised the killing of more than 30,000 men, women and children, and considering the extreme display of cruelty which the subject showed when carrying out his tasks, the accused Herberts Cukurs is hereby sentenced to death. [The] accused was executed by those who can never forget on the 23rd of February, 1965. His body can be found at Casa Cubertini Calle Colombia, Séptima Sección del Departamento de Canelones, Montevideo, Uruguay.
²⁶

Another Latvian implicated in the killings of Jews and others was Kārlis Lobe. He fled to Sweden at the end of the war, and remained there until his death in 1985.

One of the Latvians to be involved in the Baltic Holocaust was Konrāds Kalējs, whose case caused controversy in recent years. He too served in the
Arājs Kommando,
and after the war lived first in Denmark, then in Australia, and eventually in the United States. In 1984, he was identified as a person who might have been involved in war crimes. He was arrested a year later as part of the elaborate ‘Puño Airlines’ operation – the United States Marshals Office created a fictitious airline, and then sent letters to suspects telling them that they had won airline tickets. When the suspects attempted to claim their tickets, they were arrested. After a prolonged legal process, he was deported from the United States to Australia, and attempted to enter Canada, only to be deported back to Australia. In 1999, he moved to England, but when the British government announced that he faced deportation, he once more returned to Australia. In 2000, the Latvian government opened proceedings against him, which were delayed due to Kalējs’ ill health. He died in Melbourne in 2001, and in a last interview with Australian TV, he admitted his involvement in killings in Latvia.

The Estonian commander of the Jägala concentration camp, Aleksander Laak, moved to Canada after the war, where he started a new life under the name Alex Laak. In 1960, he was mentioned during Holocaust trials in Estonia, and subsequently tracked down by Russian and Canadian journalists. The exact circumstances of his death are unclear. He was found hanging in his garage in September 1960, and explanations have ranged from suicide to his being killed by Mossad. Karl Linnas, an Estonian who was in command of a concentration camp near Tartu, moved to the United States after the war. He was tried and convicted
in absentia
by the same trials that mentioned Laak, and in 1979 US officials charged him with making false statements to secure entry to the United States. In 1981, he was stripped of his US citizenship, and after a protracted legal process was flown to the Soviet Union in 1987. He died three months later in a prison in Leningrad. Ain Mere, who was also convicted as part of the Estonian trials of 1960, was living in England at the time. The British authorities refused to extradite him, as there was no treaty covering such arrangements between Britain and the Soviet Union, and he died in 1969.

Alfred Rosenberg, who had played such a large part in the creation of
Generalplan Ost
, was one of those who stood trial in Nuremberg after the war. He was convicted of crimes against humanity and helping to initiate wars of aggression, and was hanged in 1946.

The last commander of Army Group Courland, Carl Hilpert, went into captivity with his men. He died in the Soviet Union in 1948. Ernst Merk, commander of 18th Army, remained a Soviet prisoner until 1955, but survived to write about his captivity.
²⁷
His opposite number in 16th Army, Friedrich-Jobst Volckamer von Kirchensittenbach, also survived imprisonment, and finally returned to Germany in 1955.

Many of the Latvian and Estonian soldiers who succeeded in surrendering to the Western Powers at the end of the war found themselves deployed in a surprising role, acting as guards during the Nuremberg Trials. Others served as guards of US facilities during the Berlin Blockade, and although the SS was condemned by the Allies as a criminal organisation, exceptions were made for men of non-German nationalities who were conscripted into its ranks. In September 1950, the United States Displaced Persons Commission declared that:

The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States.
²⁸

The long post-war struggle for independence in the Baltic States is beyond the scope of this book.
²⁹
The trauma of the population losses from the fighting, mass executions and deportations scarred the three countries for decades. Despite the influx of large numbers of non-Baltic Soviet citizens, the countries were able to keep their distinctive cultures and languages alive throughout the years of Soviet occupation, and as the Soviet regime began to relax its hold during the era of
Glasnost
and
Perestroika
, demands for independence grew. Public acts of defiance began in 1987, and the following year, Estonia published the
Suveräänsusdeklaratsioon
(‘Declaration of Sovereignty’), stating that Estonian laws superseded Soviet laws and that Estonia’s government, not Moscow, had sole rights to the assets and territory of Estonia. In 1990, Estonia’s government informed its citizens that conscription into the Soviet armed forces was no longer compulsory, and in March, Lithuania issued a Proclamation of Independence. A few weeks later, Latvia followed suit.

At first, the Soviet response was to impose an economic blockade. During 1991, there were attempts to assert Soviet control by force; in January, Soviet military and political units attempted unsuccessfully to establish a ‘Committee of National Salvation’ in Riga, and Soviet tanks advanced on the TV Tower in Vilnius, killing 14 civilians. Attempts by Soviet troops to move against key buildings in Tallinn were blocked by mass demonstrations, and as the short-lived coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in August fell apart, the three states declared their independence. Iceland was the first foreign power to recognise any of them, and a plaque in Tallinn commemorates this event.

The years that followed the restoration of independence saw the three countries move swiftly away from their Soviet past. All three became members of both the European Union and NATO, and their economies flourished. In the second decade of the 21st century, the economic turmoil across the entire Western World has had a marked effect upon the three countries, but whatever financial pressures may face the three nations, it seems that they have firmly become part of the west, something to which they have aspired for nearly a century of struggle, and for which they have suffered so much loss and bloodshed. It seems that the fundamental question about the Baltic States – whether they can have an independent status, or whether they must be part of a larger political entity – has finally been resolved by their incorporation into both NATO and the European Union. Indeed, the vital role of these organisations in safeguarding the independence of much of Europe suggests that most nations have had to compromise the totality of their independence to some extent.

The nations involved in the war for the Baltic States have developed their own distinctive historiographies about the period. Soviet-era accounts are inevitably full of tales of heroic communists fighting the hated fascists, and reflect the doctrine of the period, that the three states had become part of the Soviet Union prior to the German invasion. Before Stalin’s death, there was a deliberate policy of portraying the war – and the final victory – as a predominantly Russian affair, and the suffering and contributions of all other nationalities, including Soviet Jews, were reduced in significance. Much of the general understanding in the Western World of the Holocaust is based upon accounts written by Holocaust survivors in the west, who experienced and survived the horrors of the death camps, and inevitably these accounts make little mention of the mass killings that occurred before the Wannsee Conference in late 1941.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, a small number of Soviet veterans have written their own accounts of the war, and like many memoirs written so long after the events they describe, their accuracy and completeness is open to question. For example, despite widespread evidence of the almost routine rape of women in East Germany, Poland and the Baltic States as the Red Army advanced, almost no Russian-language accounts address this issue. Where authors acknowledge that such events occurred, they stress that their own regiments and divisions did not take part. Despite the acceptance of the independence of the Baltic States by the Russian Federation, there remains a strong point of view within Russia that the three states legitimately were, and perhaps still should be, part of the body of Russia, whether this body is the Czarist Empire, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation. Indeed, whilst the official attitude to the Latvian and Estonian Legions during the Soviet era was in keeping with the western viewpoint, that men coerced into joining the SS were not to be regarded in the same way as Germans serving in the SS, the attitude of Moscow today is quite the reverse. Soldiers who fought against the Red Army are frequently portrayed as also being the men responsible for the Baltic Holocaust and the killing of ethnic Russian civilians. Whilst it is true that many men within the legions were indeed guilty of such acts, it would be wrong to suggest that all were involved.

The legality – or otherwise – of the long Soviet presence in the Baltic States is itself a source of continuing controversy. Russian writers have made much of the expediency of Winston Churchill with regard to the borders of the Soviet Union. In March 1942, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: ‘In view of the increasing burdens of war, I have come to the conclusion that the principles of the Atlantic Charter should not be interpreted in such a way as to deprive Russia of the border that it had when it was attacked by Germany.’
³⁰

At the time, unable to offer the Soviet Union any aid by opening a second front in the west, Churchill may have felt the need to offer whatever political support he could to the country that was seen as bearing the brunt of the German war effort. Whilst Roosevelt may have been less willing to allow Stalin a free hand to annex the Baltic States, he ultimately had little choice; the Red Army was indisputably the master of the region, and nothing short of a war seemed likely to change matters. The inability of the Western Powers to dispute Soviet control of the Baltic States after the war, it is maintained, effectively legitimised the Soviet presence in the region, and as this presence was based upon the original Soviet occupation following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, this in turn was in some way legitimised.

German accounts of the war began to appear during the 1950s, as veterans of the Wehrmacht began to compile histories of their regiments and divisions. Like Soviet accounts, these make almost no mention of war crimes; in a few cases, where the subject arises, attempts are made to blame the SS and its associated paramilitary formations. The unit histories instead concentrate on the years of dazzling victories, then the bitter resistance of the closing months of the war. The German soldiers are usually portrayed as patriots who fought to prevent their homelands from being overrun by the Red Army, with little or no discussion of the fact that it was the German invasion of the Soviet Union that ultimately brought the Red Army to Germany. When civilians are mentioned, it is usually in the context of jubilant Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians who welcomed the arrival of the Wehrmacht, or fearful refugees who attempted to flee the return of the Red Army. The casualties suffered in the face of the Red Army’s advance are frequently described in German accounts; similar losses inflicted by the Wehrmacht in 1941 are almost completely absent.