Latvian prosecutors have, for a third time, dropped a criminal investigation into a deceased Nazi collaborator accused of murdering Jews during the Holocaust.
Herberts Cukurs was a senior figure in Arajs Kommado, a collaborationist paramilitary that acted as wing of the SD between 1941 and 1943.
The unit was led by an SS commander, Viktors Arajs, with Cukurs as his deputy. During his command, it was an active death squad and was responsible several mass murders, including Rumbula Massacre in which around 35,000 Latvian Jews were killed. The group later turned its hand to the suppression of rebellions in Belarus and Russia during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Cukurs, who was assassinated in Uruguay in 1965 by undercover Mossad agents, never stood trial for his alleged war crimes but has been linked by survivor testimony to several massacres, particularly in the Riga Ghetto.
Multiple witnesses have also claimed he participated in mass deportations of Latvian Jews to the death camps. His crimes allegedly included shooting Jewish children, burning Jews alive and sexually assaulting Jewish women.
Criminal proceedings were initiated in 2006, but dropped in 2018. The following year, the investigation was reopened following a submission from the Council of Jewish Communities of Latvia. 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, according to the LETA news agency.
However, the case was closed for a second time by prosecutor Juris Ločmelis in 2023 before being opened for a third time by another prosecutor, Māris Leja. Last week, though, Ločmelis announced that the investigation would be dropped once again.
"A spokesperson for the Prosecution Office of the Republic of Latvia told JNS that "Cukurs' actions do not constitute the criminal offence provided for in the Criminal Law article 'Genocide.’"
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."
The move has drawn condemnation from global Jewish groups, including Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. A spokesperson for the museum called the decision “baffling because Cukurs' horrific war crimes are indisputable”, adding that it “denounces the repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs’ image in Latvia by those distorting and ignoring historical truth”.
Likewise, Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter and former head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, called the decision "morally outrageous” and claimed it “doesn’t make sense on a legal level”.
In Cukurs's case, exonerating him would suggest that the Mossad agents who allegedly assassinated him had murdered an innocent man, Zuroff claimed, adding: "This is, of course, a ridiculous moral inversion.”
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 10 days.
