Come to This Court and Cry, page 9
Towards the end of 1944, with the Soviet army approaching, Cukurs moved his family to Liepāja, and Miriam and Ludmila soon joined them there. He procured a fake passport for Miriam that bore his last name, stamped twice with the seal of the Reich. As ‘Marija Cukurs’, Miriam travelled on to Berlin with the family, posing as their eldest daughter. Cukurs wore his SS uniform on the journey, she recalled. Sheltering Miriam in this way was no small feat. ‘Even for a collaborationist it was a risk,’ writes the Brazilian historian Bruno Léal, author of the first definitive account of Cukurs’s time in South America. ‘If he was caught, not only Miriam, but Cukurs and his family could face very severe punishment.’ In Berlin, Cukurs went to work at an aircraft factory, where he also secured a job for Miriam. When the Soviet army began to approach the city, they fled further west and hid in a forest near Kassel. From there, they piled into the Cadillac and headed towards France, stopping only once they had reached Marseilles. In a photograph from the journey, Miriam stands next to the Cadillac cradling Herberts Jr in her arms, flanked by members of the family.
From the port of Marseilles it would be possible for them to buy passage to South America on one of the many ships carrying Europeans away from their destroyed cities and towards the boulevards of Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Cukurs started selling paddle-boat trips from Marseilles in order to save up funds. He sold off his family’s belongings one by one. Miriam checked in with the local office of HICEM, a Jewish immigration agency, which specialised in preparing refugees for relocation abroad. She gave the agency her real name, and they helped her secure a first-class ticket to board the Cabo de Buena Esperanza, bound for Rio de Janeiro. The Cukurs family travelled below deck. The seas were full of ships carrying refugees from Europe − victims, perpetrators, bystanders, opportunists − from east to west, north to south. Upon arrival, they would sign their names into the port register − name, birthdate, port of embarkation. Some would take the opportunity to reinvent themselves – some for fear of prosecution, some for the simple want of a new life. Cukurs did not bother with these deceptions. When he and his family − and Miriam − arrived in Rio, they spent their first night all together, camping on the beach.
All this time, Miriam claims not to have known of Cukurs’s position in the Kommando, not to have heard about the burning of the Great Choral Synagogue in Riga, or of any of his misdeeds. But in Brazil, things were different. Miriam went to live with a Jewish family and continued to visit the Cukurs family regularly. Slowly, she began to get wind of accusations against her famous benefactor. Cukurs was too well known to hide, and besides, he didn’t think he had to. He told a journalist that he chose Brazil as a place to settle because it had more than 300 aerodromes. Perhaps he hoped to pick up his career as a pilot where he had left off, to reclaim his fame and good fortune. He started by creating another small tourism business, once again selling paddle-boat trips and seaplane rides at the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. He couldn’t stop himself from courting the press, from selling his new venture. In March 1949, the paper A Manhã ran a flattering profile of him under the headline ‘From the bellicose skies of Europe to the calm waters of the lagoon’. ‘Herberts Cukurs, an aviator and shipbuilder, has adventure in his blood’, it reads. ‘He fought against the Russians, travelled half the world, and ended up in Brazil.’ By then, Cukurs and his wife Milda had successfully applied for Brazilian naturalisation, and business was going well enough for them to make do. Maybe, by then, they had an inkling of the storm brewing on their horizon. Perhaps they had noticed that a small army of Jewish refugees was surveilling the lagoon, collecting testimonies and photographs, building their case.
On 24 June 1950, O Cruzeiro, one of the largest Brazilian tabloids, ran what would be one of the last complimentary profiles of Cukurs, perhaps the last piece in which words like ‘butcher’, ‘criminal’ and ‘murderer’ were nowhere to be seen. Written by the journalist João Martins, the piece framed the Cukurs story as a triumphant tale: ‘This is the story of a man who had to rebuild his entire existence at the age of forty-six, with his whole family, in a strange land, with a strange language, habits and climate… When everything seems lost, humankind can find enough energy and capacity to look ahead, forget the past, and rebuild your own destiny. Instead of discouragement and regrets, willpower and work. This is the hallmark of humanity.’
In Rio as in Riga, with coverage came recognition. Latvian survivors recognised Cukurs’s face in the newspapers, in streets and shops in town, and knew what he had done. One day, soon after arriving in Brazil, Cukurs had sold his Leica camera to a man who just happened to be friendly with Wolf Vipmans, the president of the Aid Society for Lithuanian and Latvian Jews. Vipmans then wrote to his cousin, a film producer and Latvian survivor named Gustav Joffe, who confirmed that Cukurs was a ‘war criminal’.4 The Jewish community began to organise, petitioning that Cukurs be extradited and tried, made to account for his sins. In London, Michelson had received photos of Cukurs at work in the lagoon. In one, he leans over the prow of a small boat, his face obscured. ‘Das ist Herberts Cukurs!’ the sender writes above the frame. In another, he sits in the pilot’s seat wearing an aviator cap, the calm waters of the lagoon rippling above his head.
On 30 June 1950, just a week after the O Cruzeiro report, the Jewish Federation of Rio de Janeiro held a press conference and invited all the major news outlets to attend. The purpose of the conference was to declare ‘what then seemed unbelievable’, the historian Bruno Leal writes. That ‘the owner of the paddle boats in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon was, contrary to the reports of the Rio papers, a Nazi war criminal responsible for the death of about 30,000 Jews during the Nazi occupation of Latvia. His crimes, according to the organisation, also included the burning of the largest synagogue in Latvia, with Jews inside it, in addition to the drowning and execution of children, women and the elderly, among others.’
The press conference was a last resort. The Jewish community had spent years trying to push anyone who would listen to do something about Cukurs. ‘This movement was characterised by caution, discretion, and above all, secrecy,’ Leal explains. They feared that Cukurs was a flight risk, literally − they did not want him to hear of their plans and fly himself to safety. In the late 1940s, a Federation member named Moses Hoff had approached the Soviet ambassador to Brazil to raise the question of Cukurs’s extradition. The independent nation of Latvia had by that time ceased to exist, and Soviet authorities were busy identifying and punishing those who had collaborated with the Germans and contributed to fascist crimes. The ‘little Nuremberg’ in Riga had been followed by a series of similar tribunals and executions throughout the newly reclaimed Soviet territory. Those who had escaped prosecution − the ones with information, with needed skills − were absorbed into Soviet security organs, others into British ones.5 Still others successfully drifted away into obscurity, some just for a few decades, some for the rest of their lives.
The Soviet ambassador dismissed the Jewish community’s extradition request. Shortly afterwards, on 20 October 1947, Cold War tensions led Brazil to sever diplomatic relations with the USSR, eliminating the possibility of further discussions. The Brazilian government was the Jewish community’s next best hope. The Jewish Federation formed a ‘special investigation commission’ led by Israel Scolnicov, which would have two goals: to alert the Brazilian public about Cukurs’s past and to pressure the government to expel him from the country.
Following the revelations, the story shifted from one extreme to another. The Brazilian press surged with reports and accusations against Cukurs. One paper called him ‘one of the biggest criminals of the Second World War’; another ‘chief commander of the Nazi occupation forces’; and yet another ‘a fugitive from the Nuremberg tribunal’. Protestors outside his paddle-boat business demanded his expulsion. Editorials suggested that the fact that Cukurs had been granted safe passage to Brazil was part of a much larger problem, and accused the Brazilian authorities of colluding with former Nazis to bring a ‘wave of undesirable elements’ to their shores. Cukurs, for his part, gave interviews denying the allegations. In one photo from this period, he appears wearing a neat suit and tie and thick, black-framed glasses. He holds a book in his hands, a list of names. A newspaper caption explains that it is a list of criminals indicted at Nuremberg. Cukurs is attempting to prove his innocence by showing that his name is not among the accused.6
In late July came news of another trial. It was a ‘simulated trial’, nothing more than a play. It would be held by a new entity called the ‘United Committee’, an alliance of fourteen Brazilian Jewish organisations. It would be akin to a moot court, with a judge, jury and court clerk. Both the prosecution and defence would consist of three lawyers. The point of the ‘simulation’, the committee said, was to raise awareness of anti-Semitism in Brazil and to alert the public about the ‘concentration of war criminals’ in the country.
On 12 August 1950, this mock court convened in a downtown Rio auditorium. It was an imitation of justice, a theatre piece. The organisers hoped that life would imitate art, that their performance would be a mere prelude to the real thing. The prosecution listed all the heinous crimes attributed to Cukurs, and to Nazism writ large. The defence, for its part, pleaded insanity on behalf of their absent client. The jury delivered a unanimous verdict: Cukurs, they ruled, was a ‘convict’ who should be expelled from the country; his presence in Brazil was an ‘outrage’, an affront to the Jewish community and to all their dead relatives.
Two days later, Miriam Kaicners would be summoned to provide her statement to the Jewish Federation. She would never speak to Cukurs or his family again. She lived out the rest of her life in Brazil, married and had children. To her dying day, she would tell them almost nothing about how she had survived.
10
The Crime Complex
Despite the best efforts of the Committee Men, the Brazilians do not pursue the Cukurs case, and the Germans do not pursue Arājs. The whole Riga ghetto case had been handed over to West German prosecutors, with much hard-won information, including some of the defendants themselves, lost along the way. From a seat at the Wiener Library in London, I read reports of how this long heartbreak unfolded.
In January 1950, Michelson sends one of his trusted allies, Joseph Berman, a survivor of the Riga ghetto, to present himself to the Hamburg regional court. A prosecutor meets him there, and Berman asks him about the status of the Riga ghetto case: ‘I tried to find out from him something about the people released by the British authorities, whether any material was handed over, whether he had any documents, how much of the evidence had been lost which was sent from London and other parts of the world during the past few years, and in general, I tried to put the jigsaw puzzle together by asking him what had happened to this case,’ Berman wrote in his report. ‘(I was terribly depressed, and that night I went straight to bed.)’ But the prosecutor does ask him to do one thing while he is in town: the SS Unterstrumführer Rudolf Reese, who served in the Riga ghetto, is in his custody. Would Berman go to the prison to identify him?
In fact, Berman is asked to identify not just Reese but nine men from the Riga Gestapo. He goes up to each one and says their names. ‘I could not believe that this was at last really happening; that it had been possible to outlive the Nazi tortures and to help to bring them to justice,’ he writes in his report to the committee. Berman told Michelson that after the war he had come to envy the dead, to regret that he was alive. But just for that fleeting moment, he was certain that the dead would have wanted to be standing there with him. The next day, he returned to the prison to participate in an interrogation of Reese. He conducted his conversations with the accused ‘without any feeling of revenge,’ he writes. ‘I was willing to forgive even murder if they told the whole true story to the world of what they had done and what had taken place during the German occupation of the Baltic States.’
To the utter amazement of all present in the room Reese asked to speak to me privately. Dr. Voigt [the prosecutor] was a bit shocked, as this had never happened before, but he immediately consented. Not being able to find a room for us, and Reese not being allowed to leave without the Police Officer, they all left the room and left us two alone.
I went over to Reese and he started to embrace me and to cry bitterly. Then he told me how he used to watch on certain days where the other Gestapo officers were, so that the Jews could leave for Sweden.
I repeated what I had said to him before during the morning that I am willing to defend him in front of the whole world no matter what the consequences may be to me, if he confesses to everything he was involved in.
Reese begged to be released. He said he wanted Berman to be his lifelong friend. He promised to ‘confess from A to Z’ if only it meant that he would get out alive. But when the prosecutor returned to the room, he decided that Reese was too broken down to be deposed, and the police officer accompanying them wanted to go to lunch. So they adjourned.
When they reconvened, the accused asked, once again, to speak privately with his accuser. ‘Immediately they had all left and I had closed the large double padded doors Reese knelt in front of me for about 2 minutes and started embracing me and crying bitterly and asking me to help him,’ Berman writes. ‘I told him again that he should confess to everything, implicating himself and everybody else, and I would help him.’ The Nazi got down on his knees and begged for mercy.
When the prosecutor again re-entered the room, Reese and Berman were seated next to each other, ‘practically on top’ of each other, Berman writes. ‘Our hands were clasped together for most of the time, as I had to stop him from crying. We sometimes even smoked the same cigarette.’ Reese begins to confess. Upon their final meeting, Berman handed him a few bars of chocolate and some cigarettes. But he did not grant him forgiveness. How could he? He did not yet know the full scope of what had to be forgiven. ‘I had said that I would do everything in my power to help him and defend him in court, if he spoke the whole truth from A to Z,’ Berman wrote to Michelson. The trouble, he worried, was that he would never know if or when Reese had confessed to all of his sins: ‘How would I know when it is “Z”?’1 How do you know when you’ve reached the end of a story?
It would be nearly a decade before the West Germans would finally decide to take these cases seriously, which required figuring out a system for cataloguing the ‘whole truth from A to Z’. It would take the form of an index. Today, the index lives in the south-western German town of Ludwigsburg, locked behind a vault door in the basement of an eighteenth-century tower. It is guarded like the rarest of treasures, yet it looks just like an ordinary archive, consisting of rows and rows of metal filing cabinets painted a single shade of beige. Only one copy of its contents exists, stored on microfilm at an undisclosed location. The drawers are labelled alphabetically: Behr-Bern, Horz-z, Zat-Zil. Some are organised by category: ‘Luftwaffe’, ‘Marine’, ‘Ordnungspolizei’, ‘Einsatzgruppen im übr. Europa’. It is an index of names – more than 1.7 million of them, each one logged on a green or yellow index card, many of them handwritten: 4,252 military units, 27,858 place names.2 There are perpetrators − members of every branch and every rank of every Nazi organisation; there are victims − those who survived to testify in some form; and there are those who might be called bystanders − people who watched a calamity unfold and later spoke of what they saw. Their names mingle together, in alphabetical order, in what is the most comprehensive directory of Nazi personnel and their crimes and of post-war attempts to bring them to justice.
The building where they are held, an austere former prison set back from the road, is easy to miss. Give someone on the street in Ludwigsburg its name and address − Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, the Central Office of the State Justice Ministries for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes − and you are likely to receive a strange look and a shrug. ‘It’s a bit of a riddle for Germans, this tiny, modest little office, with only a few people coming and going,’ the historian Annette Weinke told me. Most people have no idea that it exists, and yet it is the epicentre of post-war justice, the place where almost all Nazi prosecutions begin and end.
The first index cards were logged in 1958, the year the Central Office opened. A prosecutor named Erwin Schüle was its first director − the index was his invention. Earlier that year, Schüle had led the prosecution in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial, a landmark case that forever altered the German approach to war crimes prosecutions, a case that exploded ‘like a bomb’ on the public psyche, as another German historian put it. Schüle had been a late addition to the case, taking over as lead prosecutor a year into the investigation, when it looked like it wasn’t going anywhere fast.3 At the time, there was only one defendant: Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, the former police chief of Memel, a seaside city on the Lithuanian coast (now Klaipeda). Fischer-Schweder had joined an SS unit, Einsatzkommando Tilsit, and led the executions of hundreds of Lithuanian Jews. After the war, he attempted to erase his past: he changed his name and birthdate and successfully secured an ‘exoneration certificate’, colloquially referred to as a ‘Clorox card’, from a denazification court.4 In 1953, he applied to join the German civil service, and through a series of small frauds his application was accepted; a former SS officer thus became the head of a displaced persons’ camp in the city of Ulm.
