The Many Lives, and the Just Death, of the “Butcher of Riga”

Aug. 10 2020

Known as “the Latvian Lindbergh,” Herberts Cukurs was, in the 1930s, a hero in the young country of Latvia for his daring aeronautical exploits, at least one of which suggested that he did not share the original Lindbergh’s attitude towards Jews. Robert Philpot writes:

[I]n December 1939, [Cukurs] returned from . . . a 2,900-mile flight to Palestine, to enthrall Riga’s Jewish Club with a talk, complete with photographs, describing the sights, sounds, and smells of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Petaḥ Tikva, and Rishon Letzion. . . . This was not the only indication that, his fierce nationalism and occasional anti-Semitic remarks aside, Cukurs was, as one Latvian Jew later put it, “not really considered a Jew-hater.” He was, for instance, often seen with Jewish intellectuals in Riga’s cafes.

Yet his activities following the Nazi conquest of Latvia in 1941 belied this picture:

Cukurs . . . became second-in-command of the notorious Arājs Kommando, a 300-strong Latvian paramilitary group which enthusiastically participated in the murder of the country’s Jews. . . . Max Tukacier, a young Jew who had known Cukurs for over a decade, . . . saw the aviator “beat to death ten to fifteen people.” And Cukurs was recorded giving orders to his commandos at the scenes of the Judenaktionen. . . on November 30 and December 8, 1941, when roughly 25,000 Jews were murdered in or near the Rumbula forest.

After participating in the bloodletting of Riga’s killing fields, Cukurs and his men traveled around Latvia’s villages, towns, and small cities, helping round up and murder Jews. Within five months, 60,000 Latvian Jews had perished.

But the most extraordinary—perhaps unique—aspect of Cukurs’s story was what happened next. Like many other war criminals, the Latvian . . . escaped to South America after the war. But, unlike his fellow killers, Cukurs arrived in Brazil under his own name—and then almost immediately began seeking out members of the country’s Jewish community. Cukurs portrayed himself as both a political exile who had been targeted by the Communists and a man who had rescued Jews during the Shoah.

Several survivors in Israel knew the truth however, leading the Mossad—in an episode Philpot describes as worthy of the best of spy thrillers—to track down and kill Cukurs in 1965.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Brazil, Holocaust, Latvia, Mossad

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023