Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, condemned Latvia’s Prosecution Office’s decision to close the investigation into the “infamous Latvian war criminal and Nazi collaborator Herberts Cukurs for his role in the Holocaust and involvement in the killing of tens of thousands of Jews,” Yad Vashem announced in a statement on Tuesday.
According to the organization, this “decision is baffling because Cukurs’s horrific war crimes are indisputable.” Yad Vashem added that it is ready to “provide documents from its archive” to support prosecuting Cukurs.
Yad Vashem 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 dealing with his case is effectively closed.”
However, Lipkin stated that he intends to appeal the decision, saying, “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,” KAN cited.
Who was Cukurs?
Cukurs, is known as the “Butcher of Riga” and is heavily linked with being responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust.
According to Yad Vashem, Cukurs held a “senior, operative position in the Arajs Kommando, the unit that from June 1941 until March 1942 carried out mass killings against Jews and other civilians.”
“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 by many in Latvia. This is 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 Wold War II, 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’ image in Latvia by a minority bent on whitewashing the historical truth.”
