by Prit Buttar
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.21
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:
We went on and on, and there was no end in sight. Every day, a few women fell by the wayside. They collapsed and even with the help of others could no longer stand. The guards then shot them in the head, dragged them a pace or two, and another corpse rolled into the ditch. When we passed a village, the guards reported that a body lay a few kilometres back and would have to be buried.
… I had a terrible hunger. They no longer gave us anything to eat. Sometimes the farmers, in whose barns we were locked at night, let us have a bucket of potatoes. Everyone got one or two potatoes.22
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.
Was it possible that the explosions had really frightened the Germans? That they had fled and left us here?
Again the droning [of aircraft engines], coming nearer and nearer!
… There were loud men’s voices behind the barn. Russians? The Red Army? Was it really them?
… The barn filled with soldiers. They came up to us, seeking out those still alive, helping them up. When they found those for whom help had come too late, they took off their caps.
‘Do you need help, little sister?’
I was pulled up onto my feet, but couldn’t move, my legs were shaking. Two Red Army men took my hands, lifted me up and carried me into the open.23
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.24
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.25
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.
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 subseq
uently 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:
