More about Riga

[Malle]

Nazi hunting groups hope ads will help find perpetrators of Holocaust

ASSOCIATED PRESS

RIGA, Latvia, Jan. 17 - Latvian newspapers published ads Friday announcing a $10,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of aging Nazi war crimes suspects.

The advertisements are part of ''Operation Last Chance,'' an effort to prosecute Nazi war criminals led by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. They were to appear Saturday as well.

''The fact that somebody has got away with this for 50 years does not diminish the nature of the crime,'' said Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office.

The ads show grainy photo of Jews being led to killing sites, luggage in tow.
Prosecutors in the former Soviet republic said gathering evidence against the few surviving suspects - men in their 80s and 90s - has been difficult.

''If anyone comes forward with information we are ready to investigate,'' said Dzintra Subrovska, a spokeswoman for Latvia's Prosecutor General's Office.

Similar ads ran in neighboring Lithuania late last year and will run in Estonian newspapers later this month.

About 100 people responded to the ads in Lithuania, Zuroff said, but the information has not led to any arrests.

Some 80,000 Jews in Latvia, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population, were killed during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation. Thousands of Jews from Europe were also sent to Latvia for execution.

''During the Holocaust, local collaborators helped the Nazis murder about 100,000 local and foreign Jews,'' reads the text, which included telephone numbers for the Latvian prosecutor's office.

Officials convicted hundreds of people accused of Nazi atrocities in Latvia after the Baltic country was annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. But Latvia has yet to prosecute any Nazi suspects since it regained independence with the Soviet collapse in 1991.

The ads were designed and funded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Miami-based Targum Shlishi Foundation.

To put it nicely, they must suck out the last drop of blood about this story. Invest $10,000 and you will get 1000 $millions back! That's Holocaust!

[Hannover]

I wonder who will curiously step forward to claim this "reward"? Some people will say anything when they can make a buck.

And ofcourse there is zero evidence for these "80,000", or for the other "thousands allegedly "sent to Latvia to be executed"
- stupid allegation, why send them all the way to Latvia?
- show me the mass graves

I would like to see this "grainy photo". More than likely it's merely a photo of people carrying luggage with a fraudulent caption added. That would be the norm, as multitudes of phony 'holocau$t' photos attest.

Officials convicted hundreds of people accused of Nazi atrocities in Latvia after the Baltic country was annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. But Latvia has yet to prosecute any Nazi suspects since it regained independence with the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Ofcourse they don't mention the well known Show Trial nature of Communist post war proceedings which can hardly be considered truthful, and I doubt we'll ever see the transcripts nor the alleged evidence against the accused.

Could it be that post Soviet, non-Communist Latvia has seen the error of the previous rigged trials in their country and decided to stop the outrageous nonsense?

Could it be that Latvians are aware of the true mass murderers during WWII and resultant Communist occupation....the Communists?

Could it be the judeo-supremacist organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is worried and is on the offensive in order to counteract the increasing awareness of the fraud of the 'holocau$t' as alleged?

As usual, they 'doth protest too much, methinks'.

- Hannover

[Sailor]

Officials convicted hundreds of people accused of Nazi atrocities in Latvia after the Baltic country was annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. But Latvia has yet to prosecute any Nazi suspects since it regained independence with the Soviet collapse in 1991.

I don’t think that there are many Latvians from that time left in that country.

According to a census of 1935 there were less than 2 Million people living in that country, including some 94,000 Jews.
Quite a few people emigrated up to 1940, including the majority of the Jewish upper class.

Latvians were not particularly anti-Semetic.

The Red Army occupied the country in 1940, and about 60,000 Latvians were executed or deported to the Soviet Union right from the start, including the representatives of the Latvian government.
Latvian business men and Latvian farmers were disowned in line with the Communist philosophy. Because a large percentage of the communist party in Latvia were Jewish, hate of Jews developed, undifferentiated, irrational, cruel. And there were pogroms of Jews during the German invasion. Probably trials similar to the ones in East Poland.

The Latvians sided with the Germans during the war and many served in the German Wehrmacht, army, navy and airforce. They served with great honor and distinction. Many lost their lives.
Latvians of the 15. Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS belonged to the last defenders of Berlin. The 15. Füsilier-Bataillonwere settled in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Reichs air traffic ministry) and fought “Unter den Linden” with a total of 80 men to the last men.

Ignatz Bubi, bossman of the “Zentralrat der Juden” (Central Jewish Council) in Germany, complained bitterly to the German Government in 1994 of hidden anti-semitism, because the Latvian “partners-in-crime” receive a pension from Germany while the survivors of the ghetto in Riga receive nothing. Asks Strauss, author of “Wer verteidigte das Rote Libau?” (Who defended the Red Libau [Town in Latvia]?): There were no ghettos in Latvia.

After the war about 250,000 Latvians fled towards the West, and the Soviets deported in May 1947 another 300,000 men, women and children to Siberia or some such lousy place.