Talk:Arajs Kommando

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Category: Law enforcement in Latvia

Genocide never was law enforcemnet, at least not according to the Nuremberg Trials. I think this category is misplaced. Philaweb T-C 19:58, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you're correct. Someone long before me removed the category from this article. (I think there was a reason that law enforcement was associated with some Nazi German and Nazi collaborationist murdering during WW2, but it varied by region and locale. It may have been less common at concentration camps and more common among collaborators... and maybe more common in the Baltic nations but it certainly was not in Serbia; both civilian and law officer Croatians slaughtered many more Serbians for the Nazi Germans than actual Nazi Germans did.)--FeralOink (talk) 12:31, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

They were volunteers

According to Ruth Bettina Birn, Chief Historian, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section, Department of Justice, Canada, they were volunteers. She writes:

"A classic example of non-Germans, who fit the picture Goldhagen wishes to paint of Germans, is the 'Arajs Kommando'. Named after their leader, Viktor Arajs, this was a group composed of Latvian men, mainly students or former army officers with right wing political backgrounds. Within days of the arrival of the German forces in Riga, Arajs made contact with the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Stahlecker, and offered his services. In the following months, his group, officially known as the 'Latvian Auxiliary Security Police', did nothing but kill Jews. They were active in Riga and moved around all of Latvia; parts of the group were sent to Byelorussia. The guards in camps located in Latvia were Arajs Commando members. The killing actions were extremely gruesome, with the perpetrators literally wading in blood, getting drunk during the killing, and afterwards participating in large celebrations. Survivor accounts describe the terrible conditions under which the Jews were kept in the basement of the commando headquarters. There they were tortured, degraded, and raped. All of the Arajs Commando members were volunteers. They were free to leave at any time."
"Goldhagen offers evasive explanations for non-German perpetrators: 'The Germans had defeated, repressed and dehumanized Ukrainians and there were pressures operating on the Ukrainians that did not exist for the Germans' (pp. 408-9). He also states that 'German conduct towards their eastern European minions ... was generally draconian' (p. 409). Apart from smacking considerably of standard revisionism, these assumptions certainly do not apply to the Arajs Commando. All the 'typical German' patterns of behaviour like 'rage, lust for vengeance, that unleashed the unprecedented cruelty' (p. 414) were present here as well. How does this fit into Goldhagen's explanatory framework?"
Via Revising the Holocaust. Author(s): Ruth Bettina Birn and Volker Riess. Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 1997), pp. 195-215. Published by Cambridge University Press. --Paul Siebert (talk) 05:17, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
Yes, exactly. Birn and Riess are correct, and especially so about Goldhagen. Historically, 18th and 19th century Germany was MORE tolerant of Jews in contrast to the Balkans, and Eastern Europe in general. That's why so many Jews studied German in those more eastern locales and migrated when possible to Germany. Ukraine had one unit of volunteer collaborationist Waffen SS Grenadiers (44th) whereas much smaller Latvia had two:15th and 19th. Patterns of behaviour like 'rage, lust for vengeance' weren't typical of Germans, but rather, typical of Nazi Germans especially the SS. And those behaviors were equally, sometimes more, present in the all-volunteer Arajs Commando, Croatia's Black Utase (and Ukrainian collaborationists, who took pleasure in burning alive their Polish neighbors while at church in addition to the slaughter of Jews at Babyn Yar) etc. Goldhagen has been broadly criticized and, it is my understanding, discredited for trying to shift blame away from enthusiastic collaborators with Nazi Germans to the latter alone. Thank you for sharing this excerpt, Paul Siebert, as another WP:RS.--FeralOink (talk) 22:49, 5 December 2025 (UTC)
Additional thoughts for Paul Siebert as promised. Goldhagen rose to prominence in approx 1998-2000 while at Harvard. He sought to assign all blame to the bellicose Nazi German invaders and portray Latvia and Ukraine as meek, quasi-colonized peoples who were psychologically bludgeoned (under threat of death) to participate in 44th SS Grenadiers, Kommando, the collaborationist Latvian Legion, and so forth. This is untrue. The truth is demonstrable in a quantitative sense; see this source, about the Latvian Legion. It states that (unlike boycott/refusal in Lithuania), SS registration in Latvia was at the same percentage as in the German Reich itself! This is not typical behavior of an ideologically opposed, invaded and occupied country. Yet the Latvian Legion article (into which Arajs Kommando was folded in approx 1943), incorrectly attributes a low participation and high desertion rate to that source! Similarly, the Legion article heavily relies upon a book by Latvian Edvīns Brūvelis to support occupied Latvia's alleged distaste for collaboration. Brūvelis is recently deceased (age 102, born in Riga in 1922); he stated that his greatest inspiration to join Latvian aviation efforts during WW2 was Herberts Cukurs, Arajs Kommando officer, details at link for atrocities! Hardly a WP:NPOV source, yet Wikipedia articles rely on, or maybe misquote, his claims that 85% of Latvian Legions refused to cooperate with Germans, never slaughtered Latvian and other Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Latvian partisans, etc.--FeralOink (talk) 07:36, 6 December 2025 (UTC)

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Every time

Every time someone on Wikipedia praises these savages or denies their crimes or both, I will add another citation detaily describing their crimes--QazyQazyQazaqstan (talk) 20:00, 15 October 2023 (UTC)