May 28, 2021 • 50 mins
The story of the spy and the murderer isn't over. There is something missing in the story: the answer to the question of *why*. Why did Herbert Cukurs go from being a national hero to a mass murderer? Stephan Talty speaks to some striking characters to try and finally answer that question. It turns out to have more sides than we originally thought.
The opinion of most people was that Cukurs had always been a secret anti-Semite. Before the war, he’d hidden this hatred inside himself. But really he hated Jews. And when the war came, the Nazis gave him a chance to use that hatred. And he did terrible things. End of story.
But that just didn’t fit the facts. So Talty kept looking. And in that search, he found Zelma Shepshelovich. Zelma was a bright, beautiful Jewish girl. During the war, on the day her family had been murdered, Zelma had been hidden by a Latvian guy who was hopelessly in love with her. And she stayed in hiding and learned things that take us to the heart of Cukurs’ life. Her story also involves psychiatric asylums, an escape to Sweden, suicide attempts and much more.
But Zelma's story is mostly about suffering and love and never forgetting. Zelma is the key to knowing the question of *why*. Or at least one side of it.
Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher came out of author Stephan Talty's work on a book called The Good Assassin: Buy the book
This episode contains interviews with:
• Zelma Shepshelovich, courtesy of The Institute for Visual History and Education at the USC Shoah Foundation
• Naomi Ahimeir, daughter of Zelma Shepshelovich
• Ilya Lensky, Director of the Jews in Latvia Museum in Riga, Latvia
• Dr. Sarah Valente, visiting assisstant professor at The Ackerman Center at The University of Texas at Dallas
• Written and Hosted by STEPHAN TALTY
• Produced and Directed by SCOTT WAXMAN and JACOB BRONSTEIN
• Executive Producers: SCOTT WAXMAN and MARK FRANCIS
• Story Editor: JACOB BRONSTEIN
• Editorial direction: SCOTT WAXMAN and MANGESH HATTIKUDUR
• Editing, mixing, and sound design: MARK FRANCIS
• With the voices of: NICK AFKA THOMAS, OMRI ANGHEL, ANDREW POLK, MINDY ESCOBAR-LEANSE, STEVE ROUTMAN, STEFAN RUDNICKI
• Theme Music by TYLER CASH
• Archival Researcher: ADAM SHAPIRO
• Thanks to OREN ROSENBAUM
Learn more about “Good Assassins: Hunting the Butcher” at DiversionPodcasts.com
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion podcasts. A note this episode contains descriptions of graphic violence.
Listeners discretion is advised. Way back in episode one, I
(00:29):
talked about my reason for doing this podcast. I'd written
a book about Meo and Herbert Suckers, but I was
left feeling there was something missing in the story, the
answer to the question of why why did Herbert Suckers
go from being a national hero to a mass murderer.
As I researched Massad's mission to assassinate Sukers, I picked
(00:51):
up clues here and there from the people I've been
talking to. But really, I've saved answering that question that
this episode because it turned out to have more sides
to it than I originally thought. I'm Stephen Talty and
(01:15):
this is good Assassin's Hunting the Butcher, Episode ten Motives
for Murder. So the opinion of most people I spoke
to was that Suckers had always been a secret anti Semite.
(01:37):
He had to be. Before the war, he'd hidden his
hatred inside himself, but really, down deep, he hated Jews,
and when the war came, the Nazis gave him a
chance to use that hatred, and he did terrible things
end of story. But that just didn't fit the facts.
(01:57):
So I kept looking, and in that search I found Zelma.
Zelma was a bright, beautiful Jewish girl. During the war,
on the day her family had been murdered, Zelma had
been hidden by a Laughyan guy who was hopelessly in
love with her. His nickname was Nank, and she stayed
(02:18):
in hiding, undercover as it were, and learned things that
take us to the heart of Zuker's life. Her story
also involves psychiatric asylums and escaped Sweden, suicide attempts, and
much more. But her story is mostly about suffering and
love and never forgetting. Zelma is the key to knowing
(02:39):
the question of why, or at least one side of it.
So I want to tell you Zelma's story. Zelma was
a Latian Jew studying foreign languages at a college in Riga.
She was in her early twenties at the time the
Russians invaded in Her dream was to learn foreign languages
and escape Latvia. She was fiery and she was beautiful.
(03:05):
In my book, I compare her to a Jewish Rita Hayworth.
I think the description fits. Selma came from a very
close family she had a younger sister and an older brother.
She'd grown up in a small town in Latvia, but
her ambitions were to league to see the world and
to eventually settle in Palestine. When I went to Israel
(03:26):
in two thousand eighteen to research this story, I met
with Zelma's daughter, Naomi. Naomi was hesitant at first to
speak with me. She was very protective of her mother.
So I started out with something simple, tell me what
your mother was like. No, it's throughother complicated, you know,
to describe AND's own mother. You know, she was, first
(03:48):
of all, she was a loving personality. She loved people,
and she she was a very devoted person. But as
I knew her since I was a child, she was loving,
a devoted mother. But you know, like I don't know,
(04:09):
if you know what they say about the Jewish mothers,
they are crazy, always worried and devoted and loving, like
without any limit. But I think that it was also
because of her past. She was always worried that I
(04:30):
shouldn't be cold and that I would have enough food.
Why Zama was so worried that her daughter would have
enough food, Well that becomes clear a little later. So
Zelma was a college and Riga. During the Soviet occupation,
(04:54):
she suffered along with everyone else, but when the Germans
came in, everything changed. Her family was forced into a
ghetto in one of the poor neighborhoods of the city.
Barbed wire went up. Food was scarce, but Zelman and
her sister got jobs outside of the ghetto. She went
to work and returned every night. One day she was
(05:19):
detained by the police and brought to the building in
Riga with the Rage Commando, the unit that Herbert Supers
served in had its headquarters. Here's Zelma describing how she
remembers that night from an interview she did with the
USC show a Foundation. We are already inside, as I mentioned,
(05:40):
inside the courtyard, jewelry is being confiscated, shouting, heilding. So
the girls were driven, including me of course, into the cellar,
which was dark. There was a small lamp overhead. It
was dirty and there were signs that people had spent
(06:01):
there the night because it was rather dirty. In one
corner there was a so called toilet and we were
sitting on the floor. Guard was all the time watching us,
without saying anything, without asking questions, And this went on
(06:22):
until the late afternoon. Towards evening, these Perk and Crouse
people started coming to to the cellar one after the other,
and they picked out girls, including me. Upstairs. They were
all drunk, I could tell it easily. There were all
(06:45):
head pistols in their hands. So the so called officer
are facing me, said upstairs. And I did go upstairs
because there was no other way out. She was brought
to a room where Victor Rush, the leader of the commandos,
(07:07):
was waiting. She begged him to let her go, but
he refused. It was in his office he rated me,
He humiliated me, He tortured me sexually, and I thought
that at the end his name was Arrays, lictors Arrayes.
(07:33):
How did she know it was Robed himself who was
the perpetrator. I wouldn't have known it. But when I
was crying and weeping and asking for mercy, he said,
you bitch, don't you know who is standing before you?
He said, I am niktos Arra is the boss of
(07:57):
this place. Some months later, Zelma was told that the
Nazis were going to round up the Jews and take
them to a work camp outside of Latvia. Her father
was hopeful, maybe the Nazis would let them live. Of course,
there had been atrocities and murders, but who knew. It
(08:19):
was still early in the war, and stories about concentration
camps and the gas chambers hadn't started circulating yet. But
Zelma sent something terrible was happening. So one day she
said goodbye to her parents as usual and told her
sister what she was planning. Please don't tell our parents.
I shouldn't know anything. They will not survive if they
(08:42):
hear what I'm going to do. I'm going to commit suicide.
I'm not going to give them a chance to torture me,
to rape me again and to kill me. I will
die away. I found correct. She was going to commit
suicide by opinion the Daugava River that flowed through Riga.
(09:04):
She wouldn't allow the Nazis and their accomplices to hurt
her again. She decided for herself how her life would end,
so she walked toward the river. But before she arrived,
she visited an apartment where a Latvian man was living,
the guy Knock that I mentioned before. She just wanted
(09:27):
to leave a message for a family friend, but Nanc
was in love with Selma had been ever since he
spotted her at a country dance months before, and when
she told him what she was about to do not consistent.
She stayed there in the apartment and Zelma agreed not
saved her and risked his life in the process. Had
(09:48):
he been caught, he would have been shot alongside Selma.
So the thing about non apartment was he had two roommates,
and these guys worked for the Rage Commando who were
helping the Nazis round up and killed Jews. This was
(10:10):
Herbert Supers unit. Later it would come out that the
Rage Commando or Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, was responsible for
the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews, roma, Latvian communists,
mental health patients, and others. They were notorious, violent, bloodthirsty.
(10:33):
So Zelma was hiding from the Nazis inside this apartment
where Nazi collaborators came all the time. They had parties there,
brought their girlfriends, not introduced Elma to these guys as
his fiancee. Then it worked, but the Nazis were still
conducting sweeps looking for people hiding Jews who was really dangerous.
(10:54):
In the first place, they used to come to get
to eat, drink, and sing all their songs. Even there,
the national songs, not the Anzeme, but folk songs had
a parody against Jews. Let's throw the Jews into into
the river and let's kill them, something like that. You
(11:17):
can't imagine what I felt like sitting among them, But
I had only one aim and didn't think of anything
that of anything they're saying. Remember, remember forever their name,
the surname, what school they went to, what they were
doing before the war, whatever you can. You have a mission.
(11:39):
Why did the rest perish? Why did you stay alive?
And your mission is the oaths you have. You have
given at the mass graves in the community that if
you stay alive, you will destroy them as many of
them as you can. And this is what I did.
(12:00):
Someone tried to find out what happened to her family,
but it was hard to ask questions like that, Why
should it supposedly gentile Latvian girl care about what happened
to some Jewish family. Finally she spotted the next boyfriend
of hers, a Jewish guy who had somehow escaped to sweeps.
She asked him if he knew about her family. He
passed her a note telling her that both their families
(12:23):
were dead, along with thousands of other Jews. Zelma was devastated.
Of course, her brother had escaped to Russia, but her mother,
her father, and her younger sister were gone. She began
to have nightmares. Her daughter told me that they lasted
for the rest of her life. Yes, she had nightmares
(12:47):
as far as I remember myself. You know, when I
was a child, there was not a single night that
fast quietly for her. And as my dad was you're
a pathologist, he knew how to treat her. Of course,
so she took a lot of medicines in order to
(13:10):
just to sleep at least a few hours during the night.
And she was shouting at night and she was crying.
So with her family gone someon was alone in Riga.
All she had a nunk and every day she was
in danger of being discovered. Once the Gestapo came to
(13:32):
the apartment where they lived, and so they knocked on
the door and my mom she well nunk the left
when who saved her just he told her to in
the little room near at the kitchen it was usually
the maid's room, and closed the door and my mom
(13:53):
put on a kerchief. And by the way, she was
a great actor and they came into the room. They
opened the door, and then she behaved like some simpleton, like,
you know, like a person who was in a psychiatric state.
Not so, let's say normative as they say nowadays. Yes, so,
(14:17):
as they asked, and who are you? And so she
mumbled something that they said, Okay, leave her, that's not
the case, and they closed the door. Zelma had a
lucky escape, but she stayed with nanc and despite the
(14:39):
danger and the surveillance, she became obsessed with doing something
about the murders of her family. She wanted the killers
to be punished, so when the commando members came to visit,
she would listen very closely to their conversations. I heard
the names of their frinds, of their collaborators they used
(15:00):
to come to the house, particularly to meet already, not
so much to Stubbylon and they those people had no
idea who I was, as they kept sitting and boasting
how many people they've shot water day, and I knew
exactly whether they came from, what their names were, etcetera.
(15:21):
So she kept a list. Sometimes they would brag about
what they'd done that day, about how many Jews they'd killed.
She would listen carefully to catch the men's names, with
schools they went to, what towns they were from. There
were other Jews hiding in Latvia, but as far as
I can tell, no one had kept a list like Zelma.
(15:42):
It was as if while the war was still going on,
that she'd become a Nazi hunter e. Simon Biesenthal and
to be a freedman. Even those two never really began
their search until after the war. Zelma did it under
the nose of the Castapo. I asked Naomi about this.
Why did her mother take on this job? Was the
(16:04):
survivor's guilt? She never well. We talked a lot, of course,
but she never told me that she had any feeling
of guilt. It may be deep in her soul. She
felt it like many Like many people. There were many
(16:26):
people who couldn't just continue and committed suicide. Yes, because
they couldn't live with it. I asked Naomi. Why was
her mother so determined? Why was she so determined? I
think it was very important for her. I don't think
there are just a few people who just were so tolerant,
(16:46):
you know, and didn't want to find the murderers. She
was determined to do it. Yes, because perhaps it's also yes,
you are right, you know, perhaps it's also due to
her character. This is amazing. I don't know any other examples,
and I've researched this of solo Jews actively surveilling and
(17:08):
hunting Nazis during the war while they were still in power.
She was the turn like, I'm not going to stop
util we find this and this and this and that one,
you know, and I want to do it, and that's it,
you know, well, it was It was her character because
she looked upon herself as a very strong person, and
(17:28):
she was very strong in different aspects of her life. Yes,
not only in this aspect. One night, there was a
party at the apartment, lots of men crowding in, drinking,
and in the middle of it, Zama heard that someone
special had arrived. It was Herbert Suckers. When he came in,
(17:48):
she heard him say something. He was showing the others
his gun, and he announced the crowd that with that
gun he killed dirty Jews that day. It was the
only confess shin that Zukers would ever make. Zelma memorized
his words. She added Suckers to her list of killers,
and she waited in just Before the war ended, Zelma
(18:16):
and Knock escaped to Sweden together. One of the first
things Selma did was to write an account what had
happened in Riga. She included all the names of the
killers that she had written down, so this was still
Zelma's report was one of the first eyewitness accounts of
the Holocaust. There were lots of stories during the war
(18:39):
of the camps and the atrocities, but in n there
weren't yet available first person eyewitness accounts like Zelma's. Had
she been able to get it out into the world,
it would have been a big deal. She brought the
report to the big newspapers at Stockholm, but was rebuffed.
Most important newspaper in Sweden is Dugan's Unitary. I had
(19:03):
a report for them. I went there to the editor,
to the chief editor, and that was a time when
they still hope that the Germans would win the war.
And when I told him the contents of my report,
he said, I am sorry for such things. We have
no space in our newspaper. She brought a report to
(19:23):
the attention of American and British embassies in Sweden, and
their reaction was even worse. There the report, they were
terribly frightened. There was a list of a number of
war criminals. They destroyed it. There was a list of survivors,
(19:47):
which they destroyed partly, and and that's it. So after
the war, I thought I would never see it again.
Most of Latvia's Jews were already dead, but others were
still hiding and being pursued. It was still time to
(20:08):
save them and to arrest the man who had killed
Zelma's family. They were still in Latvia. They could be captured,
but nobody did anything. The Germans were still powerful. People
were afraid getting on their wrong side. At that point,
it was thought perhaps they'd win the war. Who knew.
Zelma was shocked, depressed. Nobody seemed to care or to
(20:32):
believe her. She never mentioned what exactly, but she was
very much disappointed. Yes, that the people didn't want to
hear about it there in Sweden, that's right, Yes, I
think for something political, you know that they didn't want
to spoil the relationships. Yes, she was very much disappointed
(20:54):
her whole life about it. That's right. After the war,
Zelma and Nac returned to Latvia. There the Soviets were
taking over again, and Nac was arrested for anti Soviet activities.
He'd deposed the occupation back in. Zelma, who now thought
(21:15):
of him as a friend and not a husband or
a lover, tried to help. She went to the authorities
and offered to take his place, but they told her
if she stuck by Knock, she would go to prison too.
As she lobbied for Knock's release, Zelma met and fell
in love with the Jewish doctor, the man who become
Naomi's father. They married and eventually had two girls, Naomi
(21:39):
and her sister. Knock, by the way, I knew all
about this, he'd even given his approval. He and Zelma
were just friends by this time, and Nac wanted her
to be happy. So Zelma had all this information about
Herbert Suckers and the other perpetrators, but she was stuck
in Latvia. The Soviets wouldn't let her leave. Things got
(22:02):
bad because she wouldn't denounce Knock and becoming an informer
for the Soviet spy agency. She was thrown in a
psychiatric asylum. The conditions were horrible and she lost hope.
She even tried to commit suicide, but a Latvian nurse
saved her. Eventually, Zelma was released, but she was still
(22:24):
an outcast. Finally, twenty years later, she and her family
emigrated to Israel, and then things got interesting. In the
late seventies, Victor Raj, the leader of the violent commando
unit that was responsible for the deaths so many during
(22:44):
the war. The man who had raped Selma, was arrested
in Frankfurt, Germany, where he was living under an assumed name.
He was brought to trial in Hamburg in nineteen The
trial was made possible only because of Selma and other
survivors who volunteered to testify against the Nazi collaborator. Without them,
(23:05):
they would have been no case. Zelma was nervous, but
she agreed to fly from Israel to Hamburg to face
arrage thirty years after he detacked her. I knew I
have to be strong. I knew I have to do
my job. I knew that it has to be proven
(23:26):
that this man is the greatest murderer of East due
during the war, that he is responsible for the killing
of Latin jury, and he has to spend his life
in prison. Naomi went with her mother promotional support. They
were afraid, but it was a chance to get justice
(23:47):
and to find out why and as I told you,
I was with her in Hamburg, you know, during the
trial of our Eyes, and I saw her there. How
she behaved and how she you know, she was so strong.
She just didn't break down. I think it was very
(24:07):
hard for her, but she did it. Finally, a raj
was brought into the courtroom. Selma got up and told
her story, the roundups, the violent rape, the killings. At
the end, the juris asked her a few questions. Then
the presiding judge leaned over to address her. This is
(24:30):
hard to believe every word you are saying. Then a
black and white photograph was placed before her, showing about
thirty men in uniform. The judge told her, then he
was a young man. Now before you, an old ailing
man is sitting. Could you identify him? I cooked on
(24:52):
my glasses, go ahead, pointing at him. At him, the
court was silent. The defense attorney approached her and asked,
but how did you know? Is that what was done
to you was done by days? So I said, He
said to me, you bitch, do you know who's standing
(25:13):
before you? He said, habit kind of an argument. I
have no more questions. The attorney nodded to the judge
and the cross examination was over. Rags sentence was probably
sealed at this point, but prosecutors wanted to know about
his unit and about Herbert Suckers. On the witness stand,
(25:38):
they pressed Garage about his second in command, and Arraje
finally revealed what it had caused Suckers to join up.
Rage described his first meeting with Sukers, around the time
of the German invasion. He said the Aviator had left
his farm and come to the capitol to meet with him.
They talked, and Suckers began asking for refuge. Rumors were
(26:02):
circulating in the countryside. Suckers told him claiming that he
had worked as a Soviet collaborator during the occupation. The
gossip apparently contained details not only had he turned Bolshevik,
but the Soviets had given him a Cadillac as payment
for his services. Other sources I was able to find
confirmed this. In During the first Soviet occupation, Zuckers had
(26:26):
been called to Moscow by the Vice Minister of the
aviation industry. The man had heard about suckers brilliance and
designing air plants. He asked the Aviator to help the
Russians build long range Palmbers. It was a tough moment
for Suckers. Soviets were hated in Latvia for the horrors
they were inflicting on the people there. But this was
(26:49):
a huge opportunity. Suckers could become a major player in
world aviation. So he took the job. Later with the
Nazis and control Churs was afraid. He must have sensed
the murderous rage that Latvians felt towards anyone who had
worked with the Russians. He was faced with the same
accusation being made against the Jews and Nazi propaganda being
(27:13):
broadcast daily on the radio. Every Jew is a Bolshevik.
If he didn't find a way to separate himself from
the rumors, he could share the jews fate, and so
he sought out a raj who took him on as
his second in command. This was what I've been looking
for the answer to why Zukers thought he could be executed.
(27:39):
So he joined the commando unit and began killing Jews.
It wasn't anti Semitism, it was plain self preservation survival.
He was scared. He was a coward, But what an
awful transaction. Savior skin but helped take the lives of
(28:00):
thirty thousand innocent people. It was in a way worse
than I had thought. If Sukers had been a true believer,
someone that really believed that Jews were with the Nazis
said they were, that was one thing, But to kill
your neighbors and friends just to stay alive. It actually
bothered me more than my original theory. So I had
(28:25):
an answer, or at least a partial one, but I
wanted to run it by one more person. I wanted
to know if Zuker's still mattered. Good Assassin's Hunting the
(28:50):
Butcher isn't over. Next week I talked about some of
Massad's greatest operations, with snipers, stolen airplane, fall, Harris Masterminds,
and other surprises. I think you'll like it, and I
hope you tune in kill. I'd heard about attempts to
(29:47):
rehabilitate Zuka's reputation. In two thou fourteen, There's actually been
a musical about him, which played in Latvia to cheering crowds.
This is a number from the show that asked whether
Zuker's is a killer or a misunderstood national hero. The
(30:16):
musical ignited a debate. Some denounced it but others on
the far right said he was in fact innocent and
should be publicly exonerated. I wondered if the spirit of
Herbert Suckers still lived on in Riga. So I called
Ilya Lensky. He's a director of the Jews and Latvia
(30:38):
Museum in Riga and he studied history at the University
of Latvia. He's young Jewish. I called him up at
his office on Zoom. I started out by asking him
how many Jews are left in Riga today and if
they felt safe. So we estimate that it could be
(30:59):
at minimum of eight thousand Jews and all the Latvia,
well majority of them in Riga. Sometimes it's estimated to
be up to ten thousand. And then of course there
is much broader group of people who could potentially being
affiliated with the Jewish community, so having Jewish roots or whatever,
but that's different stories. So we could estimate about eight
(31:19):
thousand people to identify themselves as Jews, and most of
whom are connected to the Jewish community religiously culturally in
different ways. So nowhere there is legal discrimination, of course,
but also there is no unificial discrimination. And we would
presume that Latvia is one of the few countries in
(31:43):
Europe where basically the jewsh community does not see anti
Semitism as the major challenge to its existence. I mean,
we cannot say that there is no anti Semitism, and
of course also to of course story is part of
story of antism mimatism as well, but but anti Semitism
we do not consider to be the major challenge. Wow,
(32:08):
that's surprising. He's saying that there's almost no anti Semitism
in Latvia anymore, which is great and not what I
was expecting to hear. I had a few more questions
on that. So do you think that Latvians have sort
of faced up to their role in the Holocaust, you know,
in a sort of full and honest way. Uh, that's
(32:30):
a good question. I don't have an answer to this,
because actually we don't know what is a full honest way.
I worked for the museum for almost fifteen years, and
for all of this time I've been involved in one
way or another and researching how Latin society sees the
Holocaust today. And so I can say the definitely Latin
(32:54):
society has made a significant progress in last thirty years,
and we have to understand that also during the Soviet times.
There's was a complex It's a multi layered issue of
how halcost is perceived. I asked Elia what he thought
was causing this change. I think as the generations change,
(33:14):
and generally as we are more becoming more and more European,
particularly with the joining the EU and so on, the
paradigm changes in the sense that there's, for example, is
basically gone, at least in the public sphere, the concept
that the Holocaust was just a revenge for the atrocitus
(33:35):
of the Jewish communists. Yeah, so, I mean this was
something that they could still encounter in the nine takes.
People say, yeah, Latvians were participating, it's a bad thing.
But the Jews where the main perpetrators during the communist
terror in nineteen, which is basically reproducing Nazi propaganda because
(33:57):
the Nazis used this as an excuse for their integers repressions.
They used this to recruit Latins to collaborate. So today
we basically do not see that in public discourse. I mean, again,
we see it on the internet, but I don't think
that any sin politician today would dare to say something
(34:18):
like that. This was really incredible. It was earlier, really
saying that struggle against anti Semitism was over. I cannot
say that we are in the end of the way
of how we speak about the Holocaust. But the fact
that the Holocaust is being now also portrayed rather openly
(34:39):
in cultural products. We could say we have it in
the literature, we have it in the movies. I think
it's a sort of a good sign. So I would
say that I don't know if we're doing good, but
I can say that not being we have a great progress,
and that's what makes me very optimistic. So good news.
(35:02):
Zukers was far less popular in Latvia than I'd imagined,
but I still wanted to ask Ilia the big question
about motives. I'm just wondering what your personal opinion of
Zukers is. One of the reasons I wanted to do
the podcast is the whole question of why. I mean,
he was a man who had some Jewish friends, or
(35:23):
he was seen in cafes talking to Jews before the war.
His father employed Jews in his workshop. He didn't have
a terrible reputation. He visited the Palastine, He's visited health,
he gave it. He gave a talk Palistine in the
Jewish club. Absolutely, so he was kind of a hero
for Jews and non Jews alike in the thirties. Have
(35:44):
you thought about this idea of betrayal why he seemed
to turn on his Latvian neighbors, even people he knew well.
First of all, as we knew so responsibly, could have
been suspected of cooperating with the Salviettes. Yeah, because he
tried to work as an engineer for the SOB. It's
okay they failed with a different story, So it could
(36:07):
be that he was afraid that. It's only small part
of the explanation. It could be an explanation why he
joined the r I S Unit. But the biggest question,
so why did he actively collaborate? The answer is pretty simply,
he just didn't see any issue. You see, that's the
most weird thing that when we discussed Sucker's case, we
(36:31):
do not discuss the case of a fervent And toes mind,
this had never occurred to me that Suckers killed Joos
because he didn't see any issue. It was the weirdest
answer honestly I'd gotten in three years of research. I
think Elias sensed my confusion because he went on, Yeah,
so we're discussing a regular person who just did not
(36:54):
see an issue. Okay, I go there, I work there. Okay, Yeah,
I kill people, but it's it's a situation. I mean,
in different situations, I would not be killing people. In
this situation. I'm doing my work, and part of my
work involves occasionally killing people. So so what I mean,
(37:15):
the war is going on. It's bad. It's bad for everyone. Okay,
So I don't know it would extent we could say,
and we could trust the witness accounts, so that he
was really enjoying doing what he was doing, that's the question.
We can't presume that at some point. Yes, but I'm
(37:35):
not a psychologist, so I don't want to discuss these things.
But probably he just didn't see it as an initiation,
that's you see, that's why he was not hiding. For example,
in the fifties, living in sixties, living in Brazil, he
was not hiding. He was giving interviews, yeah, where he
said that the accusations against him are fake and that
he didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. So if you really
(37:58):
consider yourself guilty, then probably you hide as many you know,
real Nazis did, Yeah, German Nazis. But also, for example,
as we know, our eyes was living and hiding. So
probably he just did not see any problem with it.
And I would say one of the key elements when
(38:18):
we discuss the issues of Holocaust and laugh in general,
that many people in the r Ice Unit, they didn't
have any record of membership and anti Semitic organizations before that.
We cannot say that they were like fervent and to someone, No,
they were regular people, ordinary man. So probably this could
(38:38):
be also an answer to why he did what he did.
In other circumstances, he would not do that. But circumstances
were that he did it and probably didn't see it
as anything wrong or any anything problematic. Probably he saw
it as something wrong, but not too wrong. So Eliot's theory,
(39:05):
if you can call it that, who said Suckers didn't
see what the big deal was about? So what he
helped kill some Jews, That's what was happening in Riga,
That's what was happening everywhere, at least in German controlled countries.
It was like in the air you breathe, you couldn't
escape it. So Zuckers wasn't taunting these railies when he
(39:28):
said he was innocent. He wasn't a sociopath. He was
something far more ordinary, a guy who went along with things,
who didn't have the courage to stand up and say no.
There was another layer to this, one that reminded me
of Zuker's behavior when he first got to Brazil in
(39:51):
the late forties. In his many newspaper and magazine interviews,
Zuker's promoted himself almost as a victim. He said, you know,
the Russians came to my country, and then the Germans,
and I was a refugee, and I fought them in
any way I could. Dr. Sarah Valente, the professor who
(40:12):
studies the legacy of the Holocaust in Brazil, came across
a particularly startling example of Sukers doing this as so,
he says, Kokers claims to have lived without political preoccupations,
devoting his life entirely to aviation, so he was not
a political person at all. He was only flying, he
(40:32):
was only a pilot. And that his country was invaded
by the Russians on June seventeenth, nineteen forty, and that
the Latvian Jews dominated and enslaved the rest of the population,
carrying out massacres and tortures. They wiped out more than
thirty thousand civilians. This to me is very telling because
(40:55):
in this moment he is bringing the blame to the
Jews as being the ones who are capable of having
done this. It's a fascinating article from a research perspective
in the sense that he has. Kuker further claims that
during the Russian occupation, he disguised himself as a peasant
and took part in the underground resistance movement. He didn't
(41:16):
joined a lot of an army and fought the Russians
alongside the Germans when they began their offensive in July
of nineteen one. He maintains that he did not take
part in any massacre against Jews. He never changed his name,
he's never went into hiding, and was not accused by
the Allied authorities. So it's almost like he took on
(41:37):
this mantle of victimhood and kept exaggerating it to the
point that he couldn't see anything he did is problematic.
I asked Ilia about this, as you mentioned, when he
came to Brasil, he did give interviews, and one of
the interesting things I found is that he promoted himself
almost as a victim and couldn't see anything that he
(41:59):
did as of the Maattic. As you said, do you
think this is a wider issue for Latvians that the
suffering of the Year of Terror was not acknowledged by
the wider world and their own suffering wasn't perhaps given
the way that they wanted it to. Yes, that's definitely true.
I mean, I think many ethnic Latvians in the country,
but also in the emigrant community, they felt that their
(42:21):
story is being neglected. And there is interesting memoir. It's
a semi fiction, semi memoir but generally trustworthy by Xantha Mauna,
a prominent Latvian literary critic, and there she describes the
discussion she had with some Latvian intellectuals costing the professor.
And there she she describes how a few days after
(42:45):
Rumbula killings she was talking to this professor and he
said that England and France didn't say a word when
a hundred thousand children from the Baltics were deported to
say read by the Soviets, So why should we care
about the Jews being killed? Lots of Latvians suffered horrific
(43:07):
things during the war, and that didn't get a lot
of attention even today. I think very important point is
that the Jews were not seen as part of the society.
It was not only anti Semitisms, it was generally kind
of um glass wolves existing within Latvian society. That makes sense.
(43:29):
Part of the Latvian mentality is that they're caught between
two ancient enemies, and in the forties they were terrorized
by both of them. Latvians wanted that story told. I
would too. I had one more question for Ilia. It's
great that Jews in Latvia feel little or no hatred
(43:50):
towards them today, but his answers made me think us
Zookers as an example before the war, a good guy,
not an anti semi. In the war comes and he
changes completely, but not because of anti Semitism, not really.
So even if the situation for Jews in Latvia today
is good, did that mean everything was fine or were
(44:13):
we missing something? I came to that age old question.
Could something like the Holocaust happened there? Again? That's a
good question. The problem, as I said that, actually we
don't understand how much this hidden sentiment was present back then.
Were to say how much the pre war anti Semitism
(44:38):
which which existed them which at some points was rather hardcore.
It was non violent, but it was very hardcore, and
it was present in the political rhetorics, very it was visible.
To what extent it's connected with the events of the Holocaust,
to what extent people who were hating the Jews is
(45:00):
non violently in the thirties, they went to killing the
Jews in the forties. Yeah, and so I would say
this is more threatening somehow than than open anti Semitism.
I think this has to do very much with general
human psychology. That's why I always say that the Holocaust,
(45:21):
after all, is not only is the part of the
Jewish history, but behind it as a whole story of
humankind and human being, functions and extreme conditions and so on.
It reminds me of this saying I heard once about
the military generals are always prepared to fight the last war,
(45:43):
meaning they learned the lessons of the past, but failed
to anticipate the future. The next war or the next
attempted genocide will probably be different than the Holocaust. We
see the past. Clearly, we can't study Seekers as a
kind of test case measure his anti semitism. The tradeoffs
(46:04):
he made and wanting to survive, but looking ahead that's
much harder. I asked Ilia about this. Yeah, so, so
when when when you suddenly strike when you think about
the Holocaust and it happens, I guess too many historians. Yeah,
I mean, all of us who sported the Holocaust we
have rather strong kind of you know, emotional screen because
(46:27):
but but even us, at some point we just come
to kind of stupor which do not undstand we do.
We don't have this key to unlocked the door, because
that's the door much ruder than our research than where
we comprehend It's it's somewhere in the field of psychology
and how person functions in general. You know, I could
(46:49):
tell that Ilia had thought about the same question, probably
more than I had, and he come up with what
I thought was a fascinating conclusion. Yeah, so, so so so,
And that's why I don't like, For example, the question
quite often asked in an age discussions, is Holocaust possible today?
Let's say, no, Holocaust is not possible today, because Holocaust
(47:10):
is what already happened. We already know how Holocaust happened,
and you know it happened. That's it is genocide possible. Well,
of course, we see it in Rwanda, in Bosnia, wherever
is all the other things? Possibly, yes, possible, Yeah, it
would just not be called holocaust and probably will not
be aginst juice. But it doesn't matter. So there probably
(47:44):
won't be another holocaust because in a way we know
what to look for. We're pretty well inoculated against that
particular virus, aren't we. But while we're trying so hard
to spout one disaster, is that where a different one
might creep up on us. That's what worries Ilia and
(48:08):
I can see his point. A New Year's day in
janu the great American novelist John Steinbeck sat down to
write a letter to a friend, as World War Two
was raging around the world and plunging humanity to what
(48:31):
looked like the darkest period in modern history. Steinbeck wrote,
not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness
and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut
down again, and rise up. It isn't that the evil
thing wins, it never will, but that it doesn't die.
(48:54):
I don't know why we should expect it to. It
seems fairly obvious. The two sides of the mirror are
required before one has a mirror that two forces are
necessary in Man before he is man good Assassins. Hunting
(49:27):
the Butcher is a production of Diversion Podcasts in association
with I Heart Radio. This season is written and hosted
by Stephen Tulty, produced and directed by Scott Waxman and
Jacob Bronstein. Executive producers Scott Waxman and Mark Francis. Story
editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editorial direction from Scott Waxman
(49:48):
and Mongesh At Ticketdoor Editing, mixing and sound designed by
Mark Francis. Archival research by Adam Shapiro. Thanks to Oran
Rosenbaum at U t A. Diversion Podcasts
Diversion podcasts. A note this episode contains descriptions of graphic violence.
Listeners discretion is advised. Way back in episode one, I
(00:29):
talked about my reason for doing this podcast. I'd written
a book about Meo and Herbert Suckers, but I was
left feeling there was something missing in the story, the
answer to the question of why why did Herbert Suckers
go from being a national hero to a mass murderer.
As I researched Massad's mission to assassinate Sukers, I picked
(00:51):
up clues here and there from the people I've been
talking to. But really, I've saved answering that question that
this episode because it turned out to have more sides
to it than I originally thought. I'm Stephen Talty and
(01:15):
this is good Assassin's Hunting the Butcher, Episode ten Motives
for Murder. So the opinion of most people I spoke
to was that Suckers had always been a secret anti Semite.
(01:37):
He had to be. Before the war, he'd hidden his
hatred inside himself, but really, down deep, he hated Jews,
and when the war came, the Nazis gave him a
chance to use that hatred, and he did terrible things
end of story. But that just didn't fit the facts.
(01:57):
So I kept looking, and in that search I found Zelma.
Zelma was a bright, beautiful Jewish girl. During the war,
on the day her family had been murdered, Zelma had
been hidden by a Laughyan guy who was hopelessly in
love with her. His nickname was Nank, and she stayed
(02:18):
in hiding, undercover as it were, and learned things that
take us to the heart of Zuker's life. Her story
also involves psychiatric asylums and escaped Sweden, suicide attempts, and
much more. But her story is mostly about suffering and
love and never forgetting. Zelma is the key to knowing
(02:39):
the question of why, or at least one side of it.
So I want to tell you Zelma's story. Zelma was
a Latian Jew studying foreign languages at a college in Riga.
She was in her early twenties at the time the
Russians invaded in Her dream was to learn foreign languages
and escape Latvia. She was fiery and she was beautiful.
(03:05):
In my book, I compare her to a Jewish Rita Hayworth.
I think the description fits. Selma came from a very
close family she had a younger sister and an older brother.
She'd grown up in a small town in Latvia, but
her ambitions were to league to see the world and
to eventually settle in Palestine. When I went to Israel
(03:26):
in two thousand eighteen to research this story, I met
with Zelma's daughter, Naomi. Naomi was hesitant at first to
speak with me. She was very protective of her mother.
So I started out with something simple, tell me what
your mother was like. No, it's throughother complicated, you know,
to describe AND's own mother. You know, she was, first
(03:48):
of all, she was a loving personality. She loved people,
and she she was a very devoted person. But as
I knew her since I was a child, she was loving,
a devoted mother. But you know, like I don't know,
(04:09):
if you know what they say about the Jewish mothers,
they are crazy, always worried and devoted and loving, like
without any limit. But I think that it was also
because of her past. She was always worried that I
(04:30):
shouldn't be cold and that I would have enough food.
Why Zama was so worried that her daughter would have
enough food, Well that becomes clear a little later. So
Zelma was a college and Riga. During the Soviet occupation,
(04:54):
she suffered along with everyone else, but when the Germans
came in, everything changed. Her family was forced into a
ghetto in one of the poor neighborhoods of the city.
Barbed wire went up. Food was scarce, but Zelman and
her sister got jobs outside of the ghetto. She went
to work and returned every night. One day she was
(05:19):
detained by the police and brought to the building in
Riga with the Rage Commando, the unit that Herbert Supers
served in had its headquarters. Here's Zelma describing how she
remembers that night from an interview she did with the
USC show a Foundation. We are already inside, as I mentioned,
(05:40):
inside the courtyard, jewelry is being confiscated, shouting, heilding. So
the girls were driven, including me of course, into the cellar,
which was dark. There was a small lamp overhead. It
was dirty and there were signs that people had spent
(06:01):
there the night because it was rather dirty. In one
corner there was a so called toilet and we were
sitting on the floor. Guard was all the time watching us,
without saying anything, without asking questions, And this went on
(06:22):
until the late afternoon. Towards evening, these Perk and Crouse
people started coming to to the cellar one after the other,
and they picked out girls, including me. Upstairs. They were
all drunk, I could tell it easily. There were all
(06:45):
head pistols in their hands. So the so called officer
are facing me, said upstairs. And I did go upstairs
because there was no other way out. She was brought
to a room where Victor Rush, the leader of the commandos,
(07:07):
was waiting. She begged him to let her go, but
he refused. It was in his office he rated me,
He humiliated me, He tortured me sexually, and I thought
that at the end his name was Arrays, lictors Arrayes.
(07:33):
How did she know it was Robed himself who was
the perpetrator. I wouldn't have known it. But when I
was crying and weeping and asking for mercy, he said,
you bitch, don't you know who is standing before you?
He said, I am niktos Arra is the boss of
(07:57):
this place. Some months later, Zelma was told that the
Nazis were going to round up the Jews and take
them to a work camp outside of Latvia. Her father
was hopeful, maybe the Nazis would let them live. Of course,
there had been atrocities and murders, but who knew. It
(08:19):
was still early in the war, and stories about concentration
camps and the gas chambers hadn't started circulating yet. But
Zelma sent something terrible was happening. So one day she
said goodbye to her parents as usual and told her
sister what she was planning. Please don't tell our parents.
I shouldn't know anything. They will not survive if they
(08:42):
hear what I'm going to do. I'm going to commit suicide.
I'm not going to give them a chance to torture me,
to rape me again and to kill me. I will
die away. I found correct. She was going to commit
suicide by opinion the Daugava River that flowed through Riga.
(09:04):
She wouldn't allow the Nazis and their accomplices to hurt
her again. She decided for herself how her life would end,
so she walked toward the river. But before she arrived,
she visited an apartment where a Latvian man was living,
the guy Knock that I mentioned before. She just wanted
(09:27):
to leave a message for a family friend, but Nanc
was in love with Selma had been ever since he
spotted her at a country dance months before, and when
she told him what she was about to do not consistent.
She stayed there in the apartment and Zelma agreed not
saved her and risked his life in the process. Had
(09:48):
he been caught, he would have been shot alongside Selma.
So the thing about non apartment was he had two roommates,
and these guys worked for the Rage Commando who were
helping the Nazis round up and killed Jews. This was
(10:10):
Herbert Supers unit. Later it would come out that the
Rage Commando or Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, was responsible for
the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews, roma, Latvian communists,
mental health patients, and others. They were notorious, violent, bloodthirsty.
(10:33):
So Zelma was hiding from the Nazis inside this apartment
where Nazi collaborators came all the time. They had parties there,
brought their girlfriends, not introduced Elma to these guys as
his fiancee. Then it worked, but the Nazis were still
conducting sweeps looking for people hiding Jews who was really dangerous.
(10:54):
In the first place, they used to come to get
to eat, drink, and sing all their songs. Even there,
the national songs, not the Anzeme, but folk songs had
a parody against Jews. Let's throw the Jews into into
the river and let's kill them, something like that. You
(11:17):
can't imagine what I felt like sitting among them, But
I had only one aim and didn't think of anything
that of anything they're saying. Remember, remember forever their name,
the surname, what school they went to, what they were
doing before the war, whatever you can. You have a mission.
(11:39):
Why did the rest perish? Why did you stay alive?
And your mission is the oaths you have. You have
given at the mass graves in the community that if
you stay alive, you will destroy them as many of
them as you can. And this is what I did.
(12:00):
Someone tried to find out what happened to her family,
but it was hard to ask questions like that, Why
should it supposedly gentile Latvian girl care about what happened
to some Jewish family. Finally she spotted the next boyfriend
of hers, a Jewish guy who had somehow escaped to sweeps.
She asked him if he knew about her family. He
passed her a note telling her that both their families
(12:23):
were dead, along with thousands of other Jews. Zelma was devastated.
Of course, her brother had escaped to Russia, but her mother,
her father, and her younger sister were gone. She began
to have nightmares. Her daughter told me that they lasted
for the rest of her life. Yes, she had nightmares
(12:47):
as far as I remember myself. You know, when I
was a child, there was not a single night that
fast quietly for her. And as my dad was you're
a pathologist, he knew how to treat her. Of course,
so she took a lot of medicines in order to
(13:10):
just to sleep at least a few hours during the night.
And she was shouting at night and she was crying.
So with her family gone someon was alone in Riga.
All she had a nunk and every day she was
in danger of being discovered. Once the Gestapo came to
(13:32):
the apartment where they lived, and so they knocked on
the door and my mom she well nunk the left
when who saved her just he told her to in
the little room near at the kitchen it was usually
the maid's room, and closed the door and my mom
(13:53):
put on a kerchief. And by the way, she was
a great actor and they came into the room. They
opened the door, and then she behaved like some simpleton, like,
you know, like a person who was in a psychiatric state.
Not so, let's say normative as they say nowadays. Yes, so,
(14:17):
as they asked, and who are you? And so she
mumbled something that they said, Okay, leave her, that's not
the case, and they closed the door. Zelma had a
lucky escape, but she stayed with nanc and despite the
(14:39):
danger and the surveillance, she became obsessed with doing something
about the murders of her family. She wanted the killers
to be punished, so when the commando members came to visit,
she would listen very closely to their conversations. I heard
the names of their frinds, of their collaborators they used
(15:00):
to come to the house, particularly to meet already, not
so much to Stubbylon and they those people had no
idea who I was, as they kept sitting and boasting
how many people they've shot water day, and I knew
exactly whether they came from, what their names were, etcetera.
(15:21):
So she kept a list. Sometimes they would brag about
what they'd done that day, about how many Jews they'd killed.
She would listen carefully to catch the men's names, with
schools they went to, what towns they were from. There
were other Jews hiding in Latvia, but as far as
I can tell, no one had kept a list like Zelma.
(15:42):
It was as if while the war was still going on,
that she'd become a Nazi hunter e. Simon Biesenthal and
to be a freedman. Even those two never really began
their search until after the war. Zelma did it under
the nose of the Castapo. I asked Naomi about this.
Why did her mother take on this job? Was the
(16:04):
survivor's guilt? She never well. We talked a lot, of course,
but she never told me that she had any feeling
of guilt. It may be deep in her soul. She
felt it like many Like many people. There were many
(16:26):
people who couldn't just continue and committed suicide. Yes, because
they couldn't live with it. I asked Naomi. Why was
her mother so determined? Why was she so determined? I
think it was very important for her. I don't think
there are just a few people who just were so tolerant,
(16:46):
you know, and didn't want to find the murderers. She
was determined to do it. Yes, because perhaps it's also yes,
you are right, you know, perhaps it's also due to
her character. This is amazing. I don't know any other examples,
and I've researched this of solo Jews actively surveilling and
(17:08):
hunting Nazis during the war while they were still in power.
She was the turn like, I'm not going to stop
util we find this and this and this and that one,
you know, and I want to do it, and that's it,
you know, well, it was It was her character because
she looked upon herself as a very strong person, and
(17:28):
she was very strong in different aspects of her life. Yes,
not only in this aspect. One night, there was a
party at the apartment, lots of men crowding in, drinking,
and in the middle of it, Zama heard that someone
special had arrived. It was Herbert Suckers. When he came in,
(17:48):
she heard him say something. He was showing the others
his gun, and he announced the crowd that with that
gun he killed dirty Jews that day. It was the
only confess shin that Zukers would ever make. Zelma memorized
his words. She added Suckers to her list of killers,
and she waited in just Before the war ended, Zelma
(18:16):
and Knock escaped to Sweden together. One of the first
things Selma did was to write an account what had
happened in Riga. She included all the names of the
killers that she had written down, so this was still
Zelma's report was one of the first eyewitness accounts of
the Holocaust. There were lots of stories during the war
(18:39):
of the camps and the atrocities, but in n there
weren't yet available first person eyewitness accounts like Zelma's. Had
she been able to get it out into the world,
it would have been a big deal. She brought the
report to the big newspapers at Stockholm, but was rebuffed.
Most important newspaper in Sweden is Dugan's Unitary. I had
(19:03):
a report for them. I went there to the editor,
to the chief editor, and that was a time when
they still hope that the Germans would win the war.
And when I told him the contents of my report,
he said, I am sorry for such things. We have
no space in our newspaper. She brought a report to
(19:23):
the attention of American and British embassies in Sweden, and
their reaction was even worse. There the report, they were
terribly frightened. There was a list of a number of
war criminals. They destroyed it. There was a list of survivors,
(19:47):
which they destroyed partly, and and that's it. So after
the war, I thought I would never see it again.
Most of Latvia's Jews were already dead, but others were
still hiding and being pursued. It was still time to
(20:08):
save them and to arrest the man who had killed
Zelma's family. They were still in Latvia. They could be captured,
but nobody did anything. The Germans were still powerful. People
were afraid getting on their wrong side. At that point,
it was thought perhaps they'd win the war. Who knew.
Zelma was shocked, depressed. Nobody seemed to care or to
(20:32):
believe her. She never mentioned what exactly, but she was
very much disappointed. Yes, that the people didn't want to
hear about it there in Sweden, that's right, Yes, I
think for something political, you know that they didn't want
to spoil the relationships. Yes, she was very much disappointed
(20:54):
her whole life about it. That's right. After the war,
Zelma and Nac returned to Latvia. There the Soviets were
taking over again, and Nac was arrested for anti Soviet activities.
He'd deposed the occupation back in. Zelma, who now thought
(21:15):
of him as a friend and not a husband or
a lover, tried to help. She went to the authorities
and offered to take his place, but they told her
if she stuck by Knock, she would go to prison too.
As she lobbied for Knock's release, Zelma met and fell
in love with the Jewish doctor, the man who become
Naomi's father. They married and eventually had two girls, Naomi
(21:39):
and her sister. Knock, by the way, I knew all
about this, he'd even given his approval. He and Zelma
were just friends by this time, and Nac wanted her
to be happy. So Zelma had all this information about
Herbert Suckers and the other perpetrators, but she was stuck
in Latvia. The Soviets wouldn't let her leave. Things got
(22:02):
bad because she wouldn't denounce Knock and becoming an informer
for the Soviet spy agency. She was thrown in a
psychiatric asylum. The conditions were horrible and she lost hope.
She even tried to commit suicide, but a Latvian nurse
saved her. Eventually, Zelma was released, but she was still
(22:24):
an outcast. Finally, twenty years later, she and her family
emigrated to Israel, and then things got interesting. In the
late seventies, Victor Raj, the leader of the violent commando
unit that was responsible for the deaths so many during
(22:44):
the war. The man who had raped Selma, was arrested
in Frankfurt, Germany, where he was living under an assumed name.
He was brought to trial in Hamburg in nineteen The
trial was made possible only because of Selma and other
survivors who volunteered to testify against the Nazi collaborator. Without them,
(23:05):
they would have been no case. Zelma was nervous, but
she agreed to fly from Israel to Hamburg to face
arrage thirty years after he detacked her. I knew I
have to be strong. I knew I have to do
my job. I knew that it has to be proven
(23:26):
that this man is the greatest murderer of East due
during the war, that he is responsible for the killing
of Latin jury, and he has to spend his life
in prison. Naomi went with her mother promotional support. They
were afraid, but it was a chance to get justice
(23:47):
and to find out why and as I told you,
I was with her in Hamburg, you know, during the
trial of our Eyes, and I saw her there. How
she behaved and how she you know, she was so strong.
She just didn't break down. I think it was very
(24:07):
hard for her, but she did it. Finally, a raj
was brought into the courtroom. Selma got up and told
her story, the roundups, the violent rape, the killings. At
the end, the juris asked her a few questions. Then
the presiding judge leaned over to address her. This is
(24:30):
hard to believe every word you are saying. Then a
black and white photograph was placed before her, showing about
thirty men in uniform. The judge told her, then he
was a young man. Now before you, an old ailing
man is sitting. Could you identify him? I cooked on
(24:52):
my glasses, go ahead, pointing at him. At him, the
court was silent. The defense attorney approached her and asked,
but how did you know? Is that what was done
to you was done by days? So I said, He
said to me, you bitch, do you know who's standing
(25:13):
before you? He said, habit kind of an argument. I
have no more questions. The attorney nodded to the judge
and the cross examination was over. Rags sentence was probably
sealed at this point, but prosecutors wanted to know about
his unit and about Herbert Suckers. On the witness stand,
(25:38):
they pressed Garage about his second in command, and Arraje
finally revealed what it had caused Suckers to join up.
Rage described his first meeting with Sukers, around the time
of the German invasion. He said the Aviator had left
his farm and come to the capitol to meet with him.
They talked, and Suckers began asking for refuge. Rumors were
(26:02):
circulating in the countryside. Suckers told him claiming that he
had worked as a Soviet collaborator during the occupation. The
gossip apparently contained details not only had he turned Bolshevik,
but the Soviets had given him a Cadillac as payment
for his services. Other sources I was able to find
confirmed this. In During the first Soviet occupation, Zuckers had
(26:26):
been called to Moscow by the Vice Minister of the
aviation industry. The man had heard about suckers brilliance and
designing air plants. He asked the Aviator to help the
Russians build long range Palmbers. It was a tough moment
for Suckers. Soviets were hated in Latvia for the horrors
they were inflicting on the people there. But this was
(26:49):
a huge opportunity. Suckers could become a major player in
world aviation. So he took the job. Later with the
Nazis and control Churs was afraid. He must have sensed
the murderous rage that Latvians felt towards anyone who had
worked with the Russians. He was faced with the same
accusation being made against the Jews and Nazi propaganda being
(27:13):
broadcast daily on the radio. Every Jew is a Bolshevik.
If he didn't find a way to separate himself from
the rumors, he could share the jews fate, and so
he sought out a raj who took him on as
his second in command. This was what I've been looking
for the answer to why Zukers thought he could be executed.
(27:39):
So he joined the commando unit and began killing Jews.
It wasn't anti Semitism, it was plain self preservation survival.
He was scared. He was a coward, But what an
awful transaction. Savior skin but helped take the lives of
(28:00):
thirty thousand innocent people. It was in a way worse
than I had thought. If Sukers had been a true believer,
someone that really believed that Jews were with the Nazis
said they were, that was one thing, But to kill
your neighbors and friends just to stay alive. It actually
bothered me more than my original theory. So I had
(28:25):
an answer, or at least a partial one, but I
wanted to run it by one more person. I wanted
to know if Zuker's still mattered. Good Assassin's Hunting the
(28:50):
Butcher isn't over. Next week I talked about some of
Massad's greatest operations, with snipers, stolen airplane, fall, Harris Masterminds,
and other surprises. I think you'll like it, and I
hope you tune in kill. I'd heard about attempts to
(29:47):
rehabilitate Zuka's reputation. In two thou fourteen, There's actually been
a musical about him, which played in Latvia to cheering crowds.
This is a number from the show that asked whether
Zuker's is a killer or a misunderstood national hero. The
(30:16):
musical ignited a debate. Some denounced it but others on
the far right said he was in fact innocent and
should be publicly exonerated. I wondered if the spirit of
Herbert Suckers still lived on in Riga. So I called
Ilya Lensky. He's a director of the Jews and Latvia
(30:38):
Museum in Riga and he studied history at the University
of Latvia. He's young Jewish. I called him up at
his office on Zoom. I started out by asking him
how many Jews are left in Riga today and if
they felt safe. So we estimate that it could be
(30:59):
at minimum of eight thousand Jews and all the Latvia,
well majority of them in Riga. Sometimes it's estimated to
be up to ten thousand. And then of course there
is much broader group of people who could potentially being
affiliated with the Jewish community, so having Jewish roots or whatever,
but that's different stories. So we could estimate about eight
(31:19):
thousand people to identify themselves as Jews, and most of
whom are connected to the Jewish community religiously culturally in
different ways. So nowhere there is legal discrimination, of course,
but also there is no unificial discrimination. And we would
presume that Latvia is one of the few countries in
(31:43):
Europe where basically the jewsh community does not see anti
Semitism as the major challenge to its existence. I mean,
we cannot say that there is no anti Semitism, and
of course also to of course story is part of
story of antism mimatism as well, but but anti Semitism
we do not consider to be the major challenge. Wow,
(32:08):
that's surprising. He's saying that there's almost no anti Semitism
in Latvia anymore, which is great and not what I
was expecting to hear. I had a few more questions
on that. So do you think that Latvians have sort
of faced up to their role in the Holocaust, you know,
in a sort of full and honest way. Uh, that's
(32:30):
a good question. I don't have an answer to this,
because actually we don't know what is a full honest way.
I worked for the museum for almost fifteen years, and
for all of this time I've been involved in one
way or another and researching how Latin society sees the
Holocaust today. And so I can say the definitely Latin
(32:54):
society has made a significant progress in last thirty years,
and we have to understand that also during the Soviet times.
There's was a complex It's a multi layered issue of
how halcost is perceived. I asked Elia what he thought
was causing this change. I think as the generations change,
(33:14):
and generally as we are more becoming more and more European,
particularly with the joining the EU and so on, the
paradigm changes in the sense that there's, for example, is
basically gone, at least in the public sphere, the concept
that the Holocaust was just a revenge for the atrocitus
(33:35):
of the Jewish communists. Yeah, so, I mean this was
something that they could still encounter in the nine takes.
People say, yeah, Latvians were participating, it's a bad thing.
But the Jews where the main perpetrators during the communist
terror in nineteen, which is basically reproducing Nazi propaganda because
(33:57):
the Nazis used this as an excuse for their integers repressions.
They used this to recruit Latins to collaborate. So today
we basically do not see that in public discourse. I mean, again,
we see it on the internet, but I don't think
that any sin politician today would dare to say something
(34:18):
like that. This was really incredible. It was earlier, really
saying that struggle against anti Semitism was over. I cannot
say that we are in the end of the way
of how we speak about the Holocaust. But the fact
that the Holocaust is being now also portrayed rather openly
(34:39):
in cultural products. We could say we have it in
the literature, we have it in the movies. I think
it's a sort of a good sign. So I would
say that I don't know if we're doing good, but
I can say that not being we have a great progress,
and that's what makes me very optimistic. So good news.
(35:02):
Zukers was far less popular in Latvia than I'd imagined,
but I still wanted to ask Ilia the big question
about motives. I'm just wondering what your personal opinion of
Zukers is. One of the reasons I wanted to do
the podcast is the whole question of why. I mean,
he was a man who had some Jewish friends, or
(35:23):
he was seen in cafes talking to Jews before the war.
His father employed Jews in his workshop. He didn't have
a terrible reputation. He visited the Palastine, He's visited health,
he gave it. He gave a talk Palistine in the
Jewish club. Absolutely, so he was kind of a hero
for Jews and non Jews alike in the thirties. Have
(35:44):
you thought about this idea of betrayal why he seemed
to turn on his Latvian neighbors, even people he knew well.
First of all, as we knew so responsibly, could have
been suspected of cooperating with the Salviettes. Yeah, because he
tried to work as an engineer for the SOB. It's
okay they failed with a different story, So it could
(36:07):
be that he was afraid that. It's only small part
of the explanation. It could be an explanation why he
joined the r I S Unit. But the biggest question,
so why did he actively collaborate? The answer is pretty simply,
he just didn't see any issue. You see, that's the
most weird thing that when we discussed Sucker's case, we
(36:31):
do not discuss the case of a fervent And toes mind,
this had never occurred to me that Suckers killed Joos
because he didn't see any issue. It was the weirdest
answer honestly I'd gotten in three years of research. I
think Elias sensed my confusion because he went on, Yeah,
so we're discussing a regular person who just did not
(36:54):
see an issue. Okay, I go there, I work there. Okay, Yeah,
I kill people, but it's it's a situation. I mean,
in different situations, I would not be killing people. In
this situation. I'm doing my work, and part of my
work involves occasionally killing people. So so what I mean,
(37:15):
the war is going on. It's bad. It's bad for everyone. Okay,
So I don't know it would extent we could say,
and we could trust the witness accounts, so that he
was really enjoying doing what he was doing, that's the question.
We can't presume that at some point. Yes, but I'm
(37:35):
not a psychologist, so I don't want to discuss these things.
But probably he just didn't see it as an initiation,
that's you see, that's why he was not hiding. For example,
in the fifties, living in sixties, living in Brazil, he
was not hiding. He was giving interviews, yeah, where he
said that the accusations against him are fake and that
he didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. So if you really
(37:58):
consider yourself guilty, then probably you hide as many you know,
real Nazis did, Yeah, German Nazis. But also, for example,
as we know, our eyes was living and hiding. So
probably he just did not see any problem with it.
And I would say one of the key elements when
(38:18):
we discuss the issues of Holocaust and laugh in general,
that many people in the r Ice Unit, they didn't
have any record of membership and anti Semitic organizations before that.
We cannot say that they were like fervent and to someone, No,
they were regular people, ordinary man. So probably this could
(38:38):
be also an answer to why he did what he did.
In other circumstances, he would not do that. But circumstances
were that he did it and probably didn't see it
as anything wrong or any anything problematic. Probably he saw
it as something wrong, but not too wrong. So Eliot's theory,
(39:05):
if you can call it that, who said Suckers didn't
see what the big deal was about? So what he
helped kill some Jews, That's what was happening in Riga,
That's what was happening everywhere, at least in German controlled countries.
It was like in the air you breathe, you couldn't
escape it. So Zuckers wasn't taunting these railies when he
(39:28):
said he was innocent. He wasn't a sociopath. He was
something far more ordinary, a guy who went along with things,
who didn't have the courage to stand up and say no.
There was another layer to this, one that reminded me
of Zuker's behavior when he first got to Brazil in
(39:51):
the late forties. In his many newspaper and magazine interviews,
Zuker's promoted himself almost as a victim. He said, you know,
the Russians came to my country, and then the Germans,
and I was a refugee, and I fought them in
any way I could. Dr. Sarah Valente, the professor who
(40:12):
studies the legacy of the Holocaust in Brazil, came across
a particularly startling example of Sukers doing this as so,
he says, Kokers claims to have lived without political preoccupations,
devoting his life entirely to aviation, so he was not
a political person at all. He was only flying, he
(40:32):
was only a pilot. And that his country was invaded
by the Russians on June seventeenth, nineteen forty, and that
the Latvian Jews dominated and enslaved the rest of the population,
carrying out massacres and tortures. They wiped out more than
thirty thousand civilians. This to me is very telling because
(40:55):
in this moment he is bringing the blame to the
Jews as being the ones who are capable of having
done this. It's a fascinating article from a research perspective
in the sense that he has. Kuker further claims that
during the Russian occupation, he disguised himself as a peasant
and took part in the underground resistance movement. He didn't
(41:16):
joined a lot of an army and fought the Russians
alongside the Germans when they began their offensive in July
of nineteen one. He maintains that he did not take
part in any massacre against Jews. He never changed his name,
he's never went into hiding, and was not accused by
the Allied authorities. So it's almost like he took on
(41:37):
this mantle of victimhood and kept exaggerating it to the
point that he couldn't see anything he did is problematic.
I asked Ilia about this, as you mentioned, when he
came to Brasil, he did give interviews, and one of
the interesting things I found is that he promoted himself
almost as a victim and couldn't see anything that he
(41:59):
did as of the Maattic. As you said, do you
think this is a wider issue for Latvians that the
suffering of the Year of Terror was not acknowledged by
the wider world and their own suffering wasn't perhaps given
the way that they wanted it to. Yes, that's definitely true.
I mean, I think many ethnic Latvians in the country,
but also in the emigrant community, they felt that their
(42:21):
story is being neglected. And there is interesting memoir. It's
a semi fiction, semi memoir but generally trustworthy by Xantha Mauna,
a prominent Latvian literary critic, and there she describes the
discussion she had with some Latvian intellectuals costing the professor.
And there she she describes how a few days after
(42:45):
Rumbula killings she was talking to this professor and he
said that England and France didn't say a word when
a hundred thousand children from the Baltics were deported to
say read by the Soviets, So why should we care
about the Jews being killed? Lots of Latvians suffered horrific
(43:07):
things during the war, and that didn't get a lot
of attention even today. I think very important point is
that the Jews were not seen as part of the society.
It was not only anti Semitisms, it was generally kind
of um glass wolves existing within Latvian society. That makes sense.
(43:29):
Part of the Latvian mentality is that they're caught between
two ancient enemies, and in the forties they were terrorized
by both of them. Latvians wanted that story told. I
would too. I had one more question for Ilia. It's
great that Jews in Latvia feel little or no hatred
(43:50):
towards them today, but his answers made me think us
Zookers as an example before the war, a good guy,
not an anti semi. In the war comes and he
changes completely, but not because of anti Semitism, not really.
So even if the situation for Jews in Latvia today
is good, did that mean everything was fine or were
(44:13):
we missing something? I came to that age old question.
Could something like the Holocaust happened there? Again? That's a
good question. The problem, as I said that, actually we
don't understand how much this hidden sentiment was present back then.
Were to say how much the pre war anti Semitism
(44:38):
which which existed them which at some points was rather hardcore.
It was non violent, but it was very hardcore, and
it was present in the political rhetorics, very it was visible.
To what extent it's connected with the events of the Holocaust,
to what extent people who were hating the Jews is
(45:00):
non violently in the thirties, they went to killing the
Jews in the forties. Yeah, and so I would say
this is more threatening somehow than than open anti Semitism.
I think this has to do very much with general
human psychology. That's why I always say that the Holocaust,
(45:21):
after all, is not only is the part of the
Jewish history, but behind it as a whole story of
humankind and human being, functions and extreme conditions and so on.
It reminds me of this saying I heard once about
the military generals are always prepared to fight the last war,
(45:43):
meaning they learned the lessons of the past, but failed
to anticipate the future. The next war or the next
attempted genocide will probably be different than the Holocaust. We
see the past. Clearly, we can't study Seekers as a
kind of test case measure his anti semitism. The tradeoffs
(46:04):
he made and wanting to survive, but looking ahead that's
much harder. I asked Ilia about this. Yeah, so, so
when when when you suddenly strike when you think about
the Holocaust and it happens, I guess too many historians. Yeah,
I mean, all of us who sported the Holocaust we
have rather strong kind of you know, emotional screen because
(46:27):
but but even us, at some point we just come
to kind of stupor which do not undstand we do.
We don't have this key to unlocked the door, because
that's the door much ruder than our research than where
we comprehend It's it's somewhere in the field of psychology
and how person functions in general. You know, I could
(46:49):
tell that Ilia had thought about the same question, probably
more than I had, and he come up with what
I thought was a fascinating conclusion. Yeah, so, so so so,
And that's why I don't like, For example, the question
quite often asked in an age discussions, is Holocaust possible today?
Let's say, no, Holocaust is not possible today, because Holocaust
(47:10):
is what already happened. We already know how Holocaust happened,
and you know it happened. That's it is genocide possible. Well,
of course, we see it in Rwanda, in Bosnia, wherever
is all the other things? Possibly, yes, possible, Yeah, it
would just not be called holocaust and probably will not
be aginst juice. But it doesn't matter. So there probably
(47:44):
won't be another holocaust because in a way we know
what to look for. We're pretty well inoculated against that
particular virus, aren't we. But while we're trying so hard
to spout one disaster, is that where a different one
might creep up on us. That's what worries Ilia and
(48:08):
I can see his point. A New Year's day in
janu the great American novelist John Steinbeck sat down to
write a letter to a friend, as World War Two
was raging around the world and plunging humanity to what
(48:31):
looked like the darkest period in modern history. Steinbeck wrote,
not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness
and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut
down again, and rise up. It isn't that the evil
thing wins, it never will, but that it doesn't die.
(48:54):
I don't know why we should expect it to. It
seems fairly obvious. The two sides of the mirror are
required before one has a mirror that two forces are
necessary in Man before he is man good Assassins. Hunting
(49:27):
the Butcher is a production of Diversion Podcasts in association
with I Heart Radio. This season is written and hosted
by Stephen Tulty, produced and directed by Scott Waxman and
Jacob Bronstein. Executive producers Scott Waxman and Mark Francis. Story
editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editorial direction from Scott Waxman
(49:48):
and Mongesh At Ticketdoor Editing, mixing and sound designed by
Mark Francis. Archival research by Adam Shapiro. Thanks to Oran
Rosenbaum at U t A. Diversion Podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.