Talk:Arajs Kommando

Category: Law enforcement in Latvia

Genocide never was law enforcemnet, at least not according to the Nuremberg Trials. I think this category is misplaced. Philaweb T-C 19:58, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

They were volunteers

According to Ruth Bettina Birn, aChief Historian, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section, Department of Justice, Canada, they were volunteers. She writes:

"A classic example of non-Germans, who fit the picture Goldhagen wishes to paint of Germans, is the 'Arajs Kommando'. Named after their leader, Viktor Arajs, this was a group composed of Latvian men, mainly students or former army officers with right wing political backgrounds. Within days of the arrival of the German forces in Riga, Arajs made contact with the leader of Einsatzgruppe A, Stahlecker, and offered his services. In the following months, his group, officially known as the 'Latvian Auxiliary Security Police', did nothing but kill Jews. They were active in Riga and moved around all of Latvia; parts of the group were sent to Byelorussia. The guards in camps located in Latvia were Arajs Commando members. The killing actions were extremely gruesome, with the perpetrators literally wading in blood, getting drunk during the killing, and afterwards participating in large celebrations. Survivor accounts describe the terrible conditions under which the Jews were kept in the basement of the commando headquarters. There they were tortured, degraded, and raped. All of the Arajs Commando members were volunteers. They were free to leave at any time. Goldhagen offers evasive explanations for non-German perpetrators: 'The Germans had defeated, repressed and dehumanized Ukrainians and there were pressures operating on the Ukrainians that did not exist for the Germans' (pp. 408-9). He also states that the 'German's conduct towards their eastern European minions ... was generally draconian' (p. 409). Apart from smacking considerably of standard revisionism, these assumptions certainly do not apply to the Arajs Commando. All the ' typical German' patterns of behaviour like 'rage, lust for vengeance, that unleashed the unprecedented cruelty' (p. 4I4) were present here as well. How does this fit into Goldhagen's explanatory framework?"
(Revising the Holocaust. Author(s): Ruth Bettina Birn and Volker Riess. Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 195-215. Published by: Cambridge University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3020959)--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:17, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

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Every time

Every time someone on Wikipedia praises these savages or denies their crimes or both, I will add another citation detaily describing their crimes--QazyQazyQazaqstan (talk) 20:00, 15 October 2023 (UTC)