In July 1941, Riga fell into a silence more terrifying than shellfire.
The Red Army had withdrawn. German forces had entered the Latvian capital. The city itself was not completely destroyed, but something worse had opened inside it: a power vacuum filled with fear, revenge, and hatred.
In that deadly space, the SS found exactly what it needed.
Local men.
Local knowledge.
Local language.
And men willing to kill their own neighbors.
This was how the Arajs Commando was born.
Its leader, Viktors Arajs, was a young Latvian lawyer in his early thirties. He was ambitious, opportunistic, and ready to serve the new occupiers. To the SS, he was useful. He knew the city, understood the people, and could recruit men who would make Nazi terror look local.
With approval from SS commander Franz Walter Stahlecker, Arajs formed a unit that was not a normal military force.
It was a death squad.
At first, it had only a few hundred men. Soon, with SS protection, weapons, and permission to act outside the law, it grew much larger. Its members wore identifying armbands and carried rifles, but their most dangerous weapon was impunity.
They could arrest.
They could rob.
They could kill.
And no one in power would stop them.
The first signal came quickly.
On July 4, 1941, Riga’s synagogues were attacked. The Great Choral Synagogue became one of the most horrifying scenes of the early Holocaust in Latvia. Jewish people trapped inside were burned alive while the city learned a brutal new truth: law had ended, and terror had become public policy.
After that, the violence spread.
Arajs Commando members moved through streets, apartments, courtyards, and alleys. Jews were dragged from homes. Some were shot in front of their families. Others were taken outside the city, forced toward pits, and murdered in groups.
The terror was not only physical.
It destroyed the idea of community.
People saw former neighbors wearing armbands and carrying guns. Men who had once walked the same streets now helped decide who would live and who would disappear.
By the end of summer 1941, murder was no longer random.
It had become procedure.
The deadliest stage came in late 1941.
At Rumbula forest, near Riga, the killing machine reached its full scale. On November 30 and December 8, 1941, about 25,000 Jews were murdered in one of the largest mass shootings of the Holocaust. Most came from the Riga Ghetto. They included women, children, and the elderly.
The process was organized with terrifying precision.
Victims were forced to walk in freezing conditions.
They were stripped of valuables and clothing.
They were driven toward prepared killing pits.
Then they were shot in layers, bodies falling over bodies, until the ground itself became a grave.
Arajs Commando members helped guard, control, and funnel victims toward death. They were not distant observers. They were part of the machinery.
The violence did not stop at Riga.
In Liepaja, near the Baltic Sea, killings took place at the dunes of Šķēde. Photographs from the period captured victims standing in the cold wind before execution, watched by men with guns and armbands. These images became among the most chilling visual records of the Holocaust in Latvia.
By early 1942, much of Latvia’s Jewish community had already been destroyed.
Before the war, Latvia had around 93,000 Jews. By the time the killing campaign had advanced, tens of thousands had been murdered. The country had been turned into a landscape of hidden graves, burned buildings, and families erased from memory.
The Arajs Commando did not remain only in Latvia.
By 1942 and 1943, as many Jewish communities in Latvia had already been annihilated, members of the unit were sent into German-occupied Belarus and nearby regions. There, they took part in so-called anti-partisan operations.
But “anti-partisan” often meant something far broader and darker.
Villages were burned.
Civilians were executed.
People suspected of helping resistance fighters could be killed without trial.
Again, the language of security became a cover for mass violence.
Some members of the unit became infamous.
Herberts Cukurs, once celebrated as a Latvian aviator, became associated with the Arajs Commando and was later accused by survivors of brutal crimes against Jews. His postwar fate became one of the most controversial stories of Nazi hunting: after escaping to South America, he was killed in Uruguay in 1965 by Israeli agents linked to Mossad.
Viktors Arajs also escaped immediate justice.
After the war, many former members of the unit removed their uniforms and disappeared into refugee flows. Some changed names. Some built new lives. Some hoped that the dead could no longer speak.
But the scale of the crimes was too large to erase.
Soviet authorities prosecuted many former members in the decades after the war. Others were pursued later in the West.
Arajs lived for years under a false identity in West Germany. In 1975, he was arrested in Hamburg. After a long trial, he was convicted in 1979 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1988.
Justice came late.
For many victims, it came far too late.
The legacy of the Arajs Commando is not only found in court records or execution sites.
It is found in the near destruction of Jewish life in Latvia.
It is found in the question of how quickly ordinary structures of society can collapse when hatred receives permission.
It is found in the warning that genocide does not always arrive as an outside force alone.
Sometimes it needs local hands.
Local voices.
Local ambition.
Local silence.
After Latvia regained independence in 1991, the memory of wartime collaboration remained painful and contested. Some tried to frame certain collaborators through nationalist myths, but the truth cannot be repaired by changing the language around it.
A killer does not become a patriot because he wore a national uniform.
A death squad does not become honorable because its members claimed to fight for a larger cause.
The Arajs Commando shows how evil can hide behind politics, revenge, and the promise of belonging.
It also shows why memory matters.
Mass graves covered with grass may look silent, but history is not silent.
It waits for people willing to listen.
And the lesson of Riga, Rumbula, Liepaja, and the villages burned beyond Latvia is painfully clear:
When a society allows one group of people to be treated as less than human, the distance between prejudice and murder can become terrifyingly short.
