"I don't think we've been slow," said Dzintra Subrovska, spokeswoman for the prosecutor general's office, responding to an accusation by Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.
"Such cases take longer to investigate than crimes committed more recently," Subrovska said. "It's not so easy to find witnesses. Sometimes they have died or are in bad health, or are living abroad."
Kalejs, who lived in a retirement home in Melbourne, was challenging in Australian courts an extradition application by Latvian prosecutors who charged him with killing Jews as a guard commander at the Salaspils labor camp near Riga in 1942-43 and of complicity in the torture and starvation of hundreds of others.
That Kalejs was not extradited was a "grave travesty of justice," said Zuroff.
"Kalejs deserved to die in prison after a long prison term and not in a ritzy old people's home in Melbourne. To date neither Australia nor Latvia have ever successfully taken action against Holocaust suspects," he said in a telephone interview.
Zuroff highlighted Kalejs' suspected membership of the Arajs Commando, a killing squad responsible for the deaths of 30,000 Jews, Roma and opponents of the Nazi regime. Members of the squad, including its barbarous leader Viktors Arajs, have identified Kalejs as a senior officer at Selaspils.
Latvian prosecutors cited a lack of evidence as the reason for not trying him in connection with those killings.
The chairman of Latvia's Jewish Community, Gregory Krupnikov, defended what he called the "quite decent" performance of the prosecutor general's office in the last three to four years.
"Previous prosecutors obviously misperformed, but more recently they called in international experts and things improved," he said.
Kalejs admitted at the end of the war that he had been a lieutenant in the Nazi-led forces, but his case went uninvestigated. He arrived in Australia in 1950 and found work at Bonegilla, a migration center. Other ex-Nazis used his help to win a smooth passage into the country, according to Mark Aarons, a writer on Nazi-era war criminals.Kalejs was granted Australian citizenship in 1957, before moving to the United States. He was expelled from the United States in 1994 and Canada in 1997 for lying on entry forms about his war past.
He fled to Australia last year from Great Britain after he was exposed living under a false name.
With no other investigations of Nazi-era crimes underway, Latvian society is unlikely to have an opportunity to face in a public court the uncomfortable facts about the collaboration and crimes of some of its countrymen.
In a radio interview Nov. 9, Gerard Lethbridge, Kalejs' lawyer in Melbourne, accused the Australian government of being "inhumane and callous in its bid to extradite a sick old man." The government caved in to pressure to prosecute from the United States, he told Radio Australia.
"We felt that the whole thing was a witch hunt. He maintained he had done nothing wrong. It was a terribly unfair process he was being put through."
That Kalejs went untried did not anger Margers Vestermanis, head of Riga's Jewish Museum, who saw thousands die in the Riga ghetto before he was thrown into a concentration camp outside the city.
"In heaven, before God, there will be a judicial process," he said, but added, "Unfortunately the reaction of the Latvian public is one of indifference."
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