A life spent researching WWII horrors

As author of the seminal work on the Holocaust in Latvia, Andrievs Ezergailis stands out among Baltic academics. Having fled to the West during the war, he grew up in the United States and worked for 37 years as a history professor at Ithaca College in New York, where he still lives in his retirement. Recently he was in Latvia to participate in a conference on totalitarianism in the Baltics. He met with Aaron Eglitis to share his views on the tragic subject he specializes in.

Why did you choose to specialize in the Holocaust?
Well, basically the Holocaust began to move as a very big issue in the West in the 1970s. When I first started studying history the Holocaust studies were there, but it was not as big an academic subject as it is now. In the 1970s it began to turn into a big topic, and also it began to concern Latvia's past. In Germany there was the trial of Konrads Arajs, and that began to give us some information about the Holocaust in Latvia. That was solid information from legal depositions. The issue of the Latvian war criminals began to arise, as did the search by OSI - the Office of Special Investigation. And I participated in their work to some degree.
The topic had been there with me for the whole of my life, I didn't exactly know what happened in Latvia, but I had some kind of a notion - but only in general terms. And that prompted my interest to get deeper into the topic.

Was it difficult to do this type of research, since you were separated from the original material?
Well, it was impossible to get a hold of the documents here, except some very superficial ones. The KGB ran a really tight ship with Holocaust documents. Something happened here with the Arajs trial - not only his trial but also a German trail that pertained to the killing of the Liepaja Jews. There was all this Ostpolitik - Germany and the Soviet Union - and even some information from some participants. They began to be cross-examined, and in that sense little by little the Soviets opened the topic up. If it had not been for the German trials and the working together between the Germans and the Soviets, it probably would have been impossible to write the book about the Holocaust. But the Germans did the first work on this.

Of all the things that you've learned in your research what did you find the most shocking?
I don't know if it's emerged right now. I can't tell. The general killing procedures - the Rumbula action - was the most shocking thing to discover. The manner of killing - the undressing, the packing-up of the victims into sardine can-like positions and killing them at point blank range - that was about the most gruesome thing I had heard of.

What was the reaction to your book in the United States among both scholars and Latvians?
The scholars received it very well; they found it a well-documented book. The academically inclined Latvians accepted it, but the older ones basically ignored it. I received some hostile letters, but they didn't bother me all that much. Some even contained the threat of life, but I let those just slide.

You were thrown out of your Latvian fraternity?
[laughs] Where did you hear about that? It was somewhat Holocaust-related. I had written an article saying a member of my fraternity - Talavija - had organized the killing of Jews in Jelgava. They thought that I should have raised the issue internally rather than go outside of it. I guess I was misinformed about this particular protocol.
There was also an editing issue, where I used a colon, and the editor changed it to a period, and [this] made the sentence more declarative than what I had intended. I didn't take the statement on my own but cited a survivor of the Holocaust.

How was your book received by the Jewish community?
I think it was received pretty well. I had some problems with the survivors. The German survivors of Latvia, I think, were the most negative about the book. Like Gertrude Stein.
And the Simon Wiesenthal center?
They all use my book even if they don't like it. The issue basically turns on this point of whether or not there were killings of Jews before the Germans arrived. If I had agreed with that premise I think everything would have been honky-dory. And I don't agree with the premise. I also don't agree with the premise that Jews were the supporters of the Russians or the communists. This Nazi slogan of Jewish Bolsheviks is something I rejected in my book.

There are stories in the international press claiming that large portions of the Latvian community participated in the killing of Jews. Is there any way to evaluate that?
The problem is that the first version of the Holocaust was written by the Nazis, and the Nazi story of the Holocaust is this: the Jews are Bolsheviks, and they killed Latvians during the Soviet occupation, and the Latvians were so angry and revengeful that they started the pogroms. Both premises are Nazi-created propaganda. We have this problem of fighting these Nazi versions of the Holocaust.
The Nazis wanted to leave the impression to the world that the Holocaust was a spontaneous revengeful act and that the Germans had nothing to do with it. They wanted to shift the blame onto East Europeans.

Why was it important for the Nazis to do this?
Because they knew it was murder, they knew it was against international law and the laws of war, against the Hague protocols, a way of masking the murder of European Jews.

Are theire many people still alive in Latvia who participated in the Holocaust?
Well I don't know. There must be some alive, but very few. The prosecution of Latvians for these crimes has very high numbers during the Soviet occupation; there were hundreds of Latvians prosecuted for murdering Jews. There were probably more Latvians prosecuted for murdering Jews in Latvia than Germans.

What has been your latest research?
It's a collection of documents that were found in the U.S. archives. Most of the information was from Latvia - diplomats based in Sweden. After the war Latvian diplomats in Sweden were employed by the Americans, and they provided information - about the front, about the situation in Latvia during the war. As a consequence the relationship between American and Latvian diplomats was a very good one. The Americans recognized that the legion was a special unit that was not contrary to American purposes. The Americans knew very well how the legion was organized and created.