Herberts Cukurs

Herberts Albert Cukurs (17 May 1900 – 23 February 1965) was a Latvian aviator and Nazi collaborator.

He served as the deputy commander of the Arajs Kommando, a collaborationist unit that carried out the largest mass murders of Latvian Jews during the Holocaust.

Although Cukurs never stood trial, the accounts of multiple Holocaust survivors, including Zelma Shepshelovitz, credibly link him to personally supervising and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity for the duration of the German occupation of Latvia.

His crimes included shooting Jewish children and babies in captivity, burning Jews alive, and sexually assaulting Jewish women.

Two decades after World War II, Cukurs was identified in Brazil by a Holocaust survivor, who attempted to alert the authorities after seeing Cukurs' face on the cover of a magazine.

As a pioneering long-distance pilot, Cukurs won national acclaim for his international solo flights in the 1930s (Latvia-Gambia and Riga-Tokyo).

He was awarded the Harmon Trophy for Latvia in 1933, and was considered a national hero, in analogous fashion to Charles Lindbergh.

Cukurs built at least three aircraft of his own design.

In 1937, he made a 45000 km tour visiting Japan, China, Indochina and India, flying the C 6 wooden monoplane "Trīs zvaigznes" (registration YL-ABA) of his own creation.

The aircraft was powered by a De Havilland Gipsy engine.

Cukurs also designed the Cukurs C-6bis prototype dive bomber in 1940.

After the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, Cukurs was summoned to Moscow in an attempt to recruit him to build planes for the Soviet Union.

In mid-1941, during the German occupation of Latvia, Cukurs became deputy commander of the newly formed Latvian Auxiliary Police unit, the Arajs Kommando.

In his book The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1945, the Latvian historian Andrew Ezergailis writes that Cukurs played a leading role in the atrocities that were committed in the Riga ghetto in conjunction with the Rumbula massacre on 30 November 1941.

After the war, surviving witnesses reported that Cukurs had been present during the ghetto clearance and fired into the mass of Jewish civilians.

According to other eyewitness sources, Cukurs was also the most recognizable Latvian SD man at the scene of the Rumbula massacre.

Ezergailis states that "although Arājs' men were not the only ones on the ghetto end of the operation, to the degree they participated in the atrocities there, the chief responsibility rests on Herberts Cukurs' shoulders."

Cukurs was described as follows:

The Latvian murderer Cukurs got out of a car wearing a pistol (Nagant) in a leather holster at his side.

He went to the Latvian guards to give them various instructions.

He had certainly been informed in detail about the great catastrophe that awaited us.

Later, Ezergailis retracted these interpretations, saying that in light of new documents, it would be wrong to claim that Cukurs had participated in the Rumbula shooting or the burning of the Riga synagogues.

During interviews with the press, Ezergailis stated that there is no evidence that Cukurs had been at the pits at Rumbula, and that it has not been proven that Cukurs was "the most eager shooter of Jews in Latvia".

However, according to eyewitness accounts, Cukurs had participated in the burning of the Riga synagogues and the killing of Jews that he had dragged out of their houses, locked inside the synagogue on Stabu Street, set it on fire and shot with his revolver anyone who broke the windows from inside and tried to get out of the burning building.

The Brazilian Consulate in Marseille issued the visa for permanent residency on 18 December 1945.

The visa did not list the name of the Latvian Jewish woman Cukurs kidnapped, raped, and pretended was his wife, but it identified three minor children: Gunārs, Antinea and Herberts.

In Brazil, Cukurs established a business in São Paulo, flying Republic RC-3 Seabees on scenic flights.

While living in South America, he neither hid nor tried to conceal his identity.

After it was learned that he would not stand trial for his participation in the Holocaust, Cukurs was assassinated by Nazi-hunting Mossad agents, who persuaded him to travel to Uruguay under the pretense of starting an aviation business.

An acquaintance named "Anton Künzle", in reality the disguised Mossad agent Yaakov Meidad who had taken part in the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, cabled Cukurs from Montevideo.

He was invited to a house in a remote suburb of the city that had just been rented by a man from Vienna.

Inside, he was ambushed by a group of men.

Cukurs fought back against his attackers, and bit the finger of one of the hitmen so hard it was nearly severed.

Ultimately, Cukurs was overwhelmed.

Following the discovery, Cukurs was investigated and, in 1965, assassinated by Nazi hunters who were working for Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel.

In the aftermath of the assassination, Israeli journalist Gad Shimron and one of the Mossad agents ("Künzle") who killed Cukurs authored a book on the experience, titled The Execution of the Hangman of Riga.

In it, they referred to Cukurs as the Butcher of Latvia, a name later used by several other sources.

Time reported at the time of Cukurs' death in 1965, his crimes included setting the Riga synagogue fire, executing over 1,200 Jewish civilians (including infants) forced to stand over a lake (so victims fell into the water) in just one of many massacres he carried out, kidnapping and raping Jewish girls and young women at the Arajs Kommando Headquarters, and his participation in the Rumbula massacre in a forest near Riga.

Multiple eyewitnesses said they saw Cukurs snatching infants from the arms of their mothers and shooting them.

Cukurs retreated to Germany with German forces and after the war fled to Brazil via the ratlines.