Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 18.sējums "Holokausts Latvijā

Andrievs Ezergailis. Six Versions of the Holocaust in Latvia
a number of Western governments during the 1980s. It took several trials, exhaustive
investigations, and millions of dollars to discover that the KGB had given the westerners
a run around. In as much as Ducmanis, who originally compiled these names, had done
it with total disregard for truth, no successful prosecution could result by pursuing the
names on the lists. The first major case in which the KGB and survivors’ accounts were
tested was that of Vilis Hazners in 1979. The OSI (the Office of Special Investigations)
picked up Hazners’ name, but no evidence, from KGB literature. It was up to the
hapless American prosecutors to hunt up witnesses and establish credible evidence.
They thought they found the witnesses and evidence among the Jewish survivors in
Israel and the West. The evidence that they garnered from them was not better or
worse than one usually gets from eye witnesses – full of errors, misidentifications,
and contradictions. Hazners’ defense attorney Ivars Bērziņš made short shrift of the
witnesses, thus persuading the trial judge of Hazners’ innocence. The trial records
show that the prosecution would have been better off without calling any eye-witnesses
at all. For example, one Jacob Noy testified that on three occasions he observed
Hazners in the company of the German ghetto commandant, selecting working Jews
at the ghetto gate. The downfall of Noy’s testimony was the assertion that Hazners
was dressed in a Nazi uniform with SS insignia. It was not difficult for the defense
to show that at the time Hazners was wearing a Latvian Army uniform without any
identifying markings. 17
I observed another example of dubious, questionable testimony at a conference
in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where a survivor from Germany,
who had been transported to Latvia in December 1941, told the audience that upon
arrival in Riga, he was received by Latvian SS men with machine guns and whips.
The good of this assertion was that it was not delivered from a witness chair at a
war crimes trial. As in the Hazner’s case we can say with confidence that in 1941 no
Latvian was sporting SS insignia. If there were any Latvians at the rail depot, they
most likely were wearing a Latvian Army uniform with a green armband from which all
insignia was removed.
*
Is it possible to amalgamate the six disparate versions of the Holocaust? Or will they
forever be fated to remain compartmentalized in their ethnic and ideological ghettos? If
a consensus among historians, local and international, of the Holocaust is to happen,
it can only come on the principles that the post-war German courts, specifically those
of Hamburg and Hannover, have established. A historian cannot reject any evidence,
eye-witnesses must be paid their due, but they cannot be privileged over other sources
of information – documentary or forensic. A sworn testimony, regardless under what
conditions the oath was administered, is preferable to uncontested stories. In criminal
79