Abstract
Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944, trans. Ray Brandon, Berghahn: Oxford, 2009; xi + 517 pp.; 9781845456085, £50.00 (hbk)
Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein have produced the fourteenth volume in the series Studies on War and Genocide. Translated flawlessly from German into English by Ray Brandon, their readable and engaging study eminently meets the series’ high standards of scholarship. Its 17-page bibliography lists old classics as well as the most recent publications, and the copious, annotated endnotes following each chapter constitute a parallel book in themselves. Although the authors rely heavily on the much-researched Federal Republic archives, they also introduce materials that became accessible only with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union itself. In addition they consulted German Länder holdings, such as those of Hamburg, containing evidence from post-war, local trials of accused war criminals.
Though modestly describing their work as a regional study of one venue of the Holocaust, namely in and around Riga, Angrick and Klein depict this episode as a pivotal point in the radicalization of the Final Solution. In respect to the Riga Jews, the authors follow their grim fate from the pogroms of July 1941, through the creation of the Riga Ghetto, its subsequent ‘cleansing’ resulting in wholesale slaughter – preserving only the few fit for labour – and the 1942 conflation of their experience into a shared destiny with Reich Jews and others deported from the West. Resolving the quandary of what to do with the new arrivals ultimately resulted in their mass murder, sparing only potential workers. Though the authors stop short of declaring the Final Solution in Latvia as the catalyst for the final denouement of the Holocaust as a whole, it appears that the plans, policies, decisions, conversations and actions for solving the ‘Jewish problem’ in and around Riga went a long way in steering and implementing the overall process to its deadly end.
Angrick and Klein address numerous issues as the Final Solution played out in Riga, but length constraints limit this critique to only a few. For one, the authors emphatically indict Heinrich Himmler along with his SS subordinates, from Heydrich on down, as the primary wielders of authority in the East and the supreme operatives regarding Jews. They concur with most studies that in the internecine Nazi struggle for power in the occupied East the SS bested all other authorities, especially in Jewish matters. This finding reveals nothing new, but the authors delve deeper, examining quarrels within the SS itself. Though only one of many, the SS rift most critical for Jews set the SS ideologues, who – led by Himmler and Heydrich – were impatient for the radical ‘solution’ of getting rid of the Jews as soon as possible, apart from SS pragmatists who valued Jews as labour. Facing a diminishing labour force in Latvia and heightened wartime economic demands, the pragmatists eked out a brief victory that prolonged many Jewish lives. The ideologues nevertheless made certain that only a few thousands survived their wartime ordeals.
As for the ongoing debate between the intentionalist and functionalist interpretations of the origins of the Final Solution as an action of mass murder, Angrick and Klein offer a complex hybrid. They concede causal importance to the ‘intentions’ of the Nazi bigwigs, including Hitler himself, who expressed their views and then expected subordinates to implement what they ‘intended’ – eventually the mass extermination of Jews. But they also spotlight ‘functionalist’ causes, engendered by local initiatives responding to particular circumstances. The prime example is Friedrich Jeckeln, the master executioner at Babi Yar, who in November 1941 faced the prospect of housing trainloads of deported Reich Jews in Riga but lacked adequate space. Believing he met the expectations of his SS superiors, he resorted to his ‘Kiev’ methods in clearing out the Riga Ghetto by shooting its inmates at Rumbuli, a forest southeast of Riga. When a trainload of Reich Jews arrived unexpectedly, rather than place them in the vacated Ghetto, Jeckeln sent them directly to Rumbuli to be shot. Although Jeckeln had overstepped his authority, and Himmler bawled him out, the precedent was set, and shootings continued. Though this episode exemplifies the ‘functionalist’ interpretation, the authors also cite instances when Himmler, Heydrich and even Hitler himself descended from their Olympian heights of planning and set parameters for ‘intended’ action, specifying ‘functioning’ to ensure their ‘intentions’ were fulfilled.
Another issue is the nature and extent of Latvian involvement. The authors declare that Latvian ‘nationalists’ played an integral role in the killing process, at every phase, in every way. Without pursuing an agenda against all Latvians as collaborators, they let the documents talk. They indict as the most culpable murderers the infamous Latvian butchers, Vinktors Arajs and his three hundred-some ‘boys’, but they point to thousands more Latvians as accomplices, beginning with the initial pogroms, transporting Jews to the shooting pits, as executioners pulling triggers, and performing sundry duties contributing to the Final Solution. Angrick and Klein do, however, emphasize that some Latvians helped Jews, evoking rebuke from fellow Latvians as ‘Jew lovers’ and ‘traitors’ and eliciting even worse from German authorities.
Finally one should compare this publication with the standard monograph on the subject, Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia,1941–1944: The Missing Center (1996). Angrick and Klein acknowledge and commend Ezergailis for his pioneering work. In geographical scope The Final Solution in Riga mostly sticks to Riga and its environs, whereas Ezergailis covers all of Latvia. Though both works ostensibly maintain historical objectivity, Ezergailis tends to minimize the Latvian role and spontaneity in the Holocaust. While not whitewashing Latvians altogether, he argues that instigation and encouragement came from the Germans and not from Latvian self-motivated initiative. Ezergailis ascribes most atrocities to the small band of anti-Semitic extremists, the Arajs Commandos. He acknowledges other Latvians as participants, but in his view they do not represent in numbers or in their anti-Semitic prejudices the Latvian people as a whole. Angrick and Klein eschew explicitly accusing or absolving Latvians; but from their evidence one concludes that far more Latvians participated, not only directly and indirectly, but also spontaneously, than Ezergailis and most Latvians would care to admit—many more than just the Arajs gang. They also draw a more visible, comprehensible and certainly more consequential connection between the Final Solution in Riga and the Holocaust as a whole.