Latvian prosecutors have for a third time dropped a criminal probe of a deceased Nazi collaborator accused of murdering Jews during the Holocaust—a move that drew condemnation on Tuesday from Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum.
“The decision is baffling because [Herberts] Cukurs’s horrific war crimes are indisputable,” the museum wrote in a statement. Yad Vashem offered to provide the prosecutors with evidence on Cukurs and said it “denounces the repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’s image in Latvia by those distorting and ignoring historical truth.”
Prosecutor Juris Ločmelis announced the decision to drop the investigation last week, the LETA news agency reported on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the Prosecution Office of the Republic of Latvia told JNS that “Cukurs’ actions do not constitute the criminal offense provided for in the Criminal Law article ‘Genocide.’” She did not respond to JNS’s request to explain why the charges of assisting a genocide do not constitute a violation of the law against it. “This decision was made because the offense committed does not constitute a criminal offense,” she replied.
The Latvian criminal code states: “A person who has committed a crime against humanity, a crime against peace, a war crime or has participated in genocide, shall be punishable irrespective of the time when such offence was committed.”
Efraim Zuroff, a hunter of Nazis who for many years headed the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, also protested the move, which he told JNS was “morally outrageous but also doesn’t make sense on a legal level.”
Unlike many other collaborators, Cukrus, a celebrity aviator possessing a large physique, was instantly recognizable, Zuroff added, and several survivors put him at the scene of the deportations.
In Cukurs’s case, exonerating him would suggest that the Mossad agents who allegedly assassinated him had murdered an innocent man. “This is, of course, a ridiculous moral inversion,” said Zuroff, an expert on the Holocaust in the Baltics.
Cukrus (1900-65) was the deputy commander of the Arajs Commando force that participated in the near annihilation of Latvian Jewry after the Germans invaded Latvia. The Mossad reportedly killed Cukurs in Uruguay in 1965.
According to witnesses, his crimes included shooting Jewish children, burning Jews alive and sexually assaulting Jewish women.
In 2018, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Latvia terminated the criminal proceedings initiated in 2006 regarding Cukurs’s participation in the murder of Jews. In 2019, the Council of Jewish Communities of Latvia and several victims submitted a petition to the then-Prosecutor General Ēriks Kalnmeiers requesting that the criminal proceedings against Cukurs be reopened.
The council submitted the testimony of a private individual living in Israel, who allegedly personally saw Cukurs in the Riga Ghetto during the convoy of prisoners to Rumbula, as well as the testimony of Ābrams Shapiro, according to LETA. A probe was reopened but Ločmelis closed it in 2023. In January, another prosecutor, Māris Leja, reopened the probe, but it has now been dropped a third time.
A lawyer for one of Cukrus’s alleged victims, Davids Lipkins, told LETA that he will be appealing the decision to drop the investigation within the 10-day appeals window afforded by the law.
In many post-Soviet countries, including Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine, Nazi collaborators are being celebrated as patriotic heroes because they fought the USSR’s domination alongside the Germans in World War II.