Diversion podcasts. A note this episode contains descriptions of graphic violence. Listeners discretion is advised. Way back in episode one, I talked about my reason for doing this podcast. I'd written a book about Meo and Herbert Suckers, but I was left feeling there was something missing in the story, the answer to the question of why why did Herbert Suckers go from being a national hero to a mass murderer.
As I researched Massad's mission to assassinate Sukers, I picked up clues here and there from the people I've been talking to. But really, I've saved answering that question that this episode because it turned out to have more sides to it than I originally thought. I'm Stephen Talty and this is good Assassin's Hunting the Butcher, Episode ten Motives for Murder. So the opinion of most people I spoke to was that Suckers had always been a secret anti Semite.
He had to be. Before the war, he'd hidden his hatred inside himself, but really, down deep, he hated Jews, and when the war came, the Nazis gave him a chance to use that hatred, and he did terrible things end of story. But that just didn't fit the facts. So I kept looking, and in that search I found Zelma. Zelma was a bright, beautiful Jewish girl. During the war, on the day her family had been murdered, Zelma had been hidden by a Laughyan guy who was hopelessly in
love with her. His nickname was Nank, and she stayed in hiding, undercover as it were, and learned things that take us to the heart of Zuker's life. Her story also involves psychiatric asylums and escaped Sweden, suicide attempts, and much more. But her story is mostly about suffering and love and never forgetting. Zelma is the key to knowing the question of why, or at least one side of it.
So I want to tell you Zelma's story. Zelma was a Latian Jew studying foreign languages at a college in Riga. She was in her early twenties at the time the Russians invaded in Her dream was to learn foreign languages and escape Latvia. She was fiery and she was beautiful. In my book, I compare her to a Jewish Rita Hayworth. I think the description fits. Selma came from a very close family she had a younger sister and an older brother.
She'd grown up in a small town in Latvia, but her ambitions were to league to see the world and to eventually settle in Palestine. When I went to Israel in two thousand eighteen to research this story, I met with Zelma's daughter, Naomi. Naomi was hesitant at first to speak with me. She was very protective of her mother. So I started out with something simple, tell me what your mother was like. No, it's throughother complicated, you know, to describe AND's own mother. You know, she was, first
of all, she was a loving personality. She loved people, and she she was a very devoted person. But as I knew her since I was a child, she was loving, a devoted mother. But you know, like I don't know, if you know what they say about the Jewish mothers, they are crazy, always worried and devoted and loving, like without any limit. But I think that it was also because of her past. She was always worried that I shouldn't be cold and that I would have enough food.
Why Zama was so worried that her daughter would have enough food, Well that becomes clear a little later. So Zelma was a college and Riga. During the Soviet occupation, she suffered along with everyone else, but when the Germans came in, everything changed. Her family was forced into a ghetto in one of the poor neighborhoods of the city. Barbed wire went up. Food was scarce, but Zelman and her sister got jobs outside of the ghetto. She went
to work and returned every night. One day she was detained by the police and brought to the building in Riga with the Rage Commando, the unit that Herbert Supers served in had its headquarters. Here's Zelma describing how she remembers that night from an interview she did with the USC show a Foundation. We are already inside, as I mentioned, inside the courtyard, jewelry is being confiscated, shouting, heilding. So the girls were driven, including me of course, into the cellar,
which was dark. There was a small lamp overhead. It was dirty and there were signs that people had spent there the night because it was rather dirty. In one corner there was a so called toilet and we were sitting on the floor. Guard was all the time watching us, without saying anything, without asking questions, And this went on until the late afternoon. Towards evening, these Perk and Crouse people started coming to to the cellar one after the other,
and they picked out girls, including me. Upstairs. They were all drunk, I could tell it easily. There were all head pistols in their hands. So the so called officer are facing me, said upstairs. And I did go upstairs because there was no other way out. She was brought to a room where Victor Rush, the leader of the commandos, was waiting. She begged him to let her go, but
he refused. It was in his office he rated me, He humiliated me, He tortured me sexually, and I thought that at the end his name was Arrays, lictors Arrayes. How did she know it was Robed himself who was the perpetrator. I wouldn't have known it. But when I was crying and weeping and asking for mercy, he said, you bitch, don't you know who is standing before you? He said, I am niktos Arra is the boss of
this place. Some months later, Zelma was told that the Nazis were going to round up the Jews and take them to a work camp outside of Latvia. Her father was hopeful, maybe the Nazis would let them live. Of course, there had been atrocities and murders, but who knew. It was still early in the war, and stories about concentration camps and the gas chambers hadn't started circulating yet. But
Zelma sent something terrible was happening. So one day she said goodbye to her parents as usual and told her sister what she was planning. Please don't tell our parents. I shouldn't know anything. They will not survive if they hear what I'm going to do. I'm going to commit suicide. I'm not going to give them a chance to torture me, to rape me again and to kill me. I will die away. I found correct. She was going to commit suicide by opinion the Daugava River that flowed through Riga.
She wouldn't allow the Nazis and their accomplices to hurt her again. She decided for herself how her life would end, so she walked toward the river. But before she arrived, she visited an apartment where a Latvian man was living, the guy Knock that I mentioned before. She just wanted to leave a message for a family friend, but Nanc was in love with Selma had been ever since he spotted her at a country dance months before, and when she told him what she was about to do not consistent.
She stayed there in the apartment and Zelma agreed not saved her and risked his life in the process. Had he been caught, he would have been shot alongside Selma. So the thing about non apartment was he had two roommates, and these guys worked for the Rage Commando who were helping the Nazis round up and killed Jews. This was
Herbert Supers unit. Later it would come out that the Rage Commando or Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews, roma, Latvian communists, mental health patients, and others. They were notorious, violent, bloodthirsty. So Zelma was hiding from the Nazis inside this apartment where Nazi collaborators came all the time. They had parties there, brought their girlfriends, not introduced Elma to these guys as
his fiancee. Then it worked, but the Nazis were still conducting sweeps looking for people hiding Jews who was really dangerous. In the first place, they used to come to get to eat, drink, and sing all their songs. Even there, the national songs, not the Anzeme, but folk songs had a parody against Jews. Let's throw the Jews into into the river and let's kill them, something like that. You can't imagine what I felt like sitting among them, But I had only one aim and didn't think of anything
that of anything they're saying. Remember, remember forever their name, the surname, what school they went to, what they were doing before the war, whatever you can. You have a mission. Why did the rest perish? Why did you stay alive? And your mission is the oaths you have. You have given at the mass graves in the community that if you stay alive, you will destroy them as many of them as you can. And this is what I did.
Someone tried to find out what happened to her family, but it was hard to ask questions like that, Why should it supposedly gentile Latvian girl care about what happened to some Jewish family. Finally she spotted the next boyfriend of hers, a Jewish guy who had somehow escaped to sweeps. She asked him if he knew about her family. He passed her a note telling her that both their families were dead, along with thousands of other Jews. Zelma was devastated.
Of course, her brother had escaped to Russia, but her mother, her father, and her younger sister were gone. She began to have nightmares. Her daughter told me that they lasted for the rest of her life. Yes, she had nightmares as far as I remember myself. You know, when I was a child, there was not a single night that fast quietly for her. And as my dad was you're
a pathologist, he knew how to treat her. Of course, so she took a lot of medicines in order to just to sleep at least a few hours during the night. And she was shouting at night and she was crying. So with her family gone someon was alone in Riga. All she had a nunk and every day she was
in danger of being discovered. Once the Gestapo came to the apartment where they lived, and so they knocked on the door and my mom she well nunk the left when who saved her just he told her to in the little room near at the kitchen it was usually the maid's room, and closed the door and my mom put on a kerchief. And by the way, she was
a great actor and they came into the room. They opened the door, and then she behaved like some simpleton, like, you know, like a person who was in a psychiatric state. Not so, let's say normative as they say nowadays. Yes, so, as they asked, and who are you? And so she mumbled something that they said, Okay, leave her, that's not
the case, and they closed the door. Zelma had a lucky escape, but she stayed with nanc and despite the danger and the surveillance, she became obsessed with doing something about the murders of her family. She wanted the killers to be punished, so when the commando members came to visit,
she would listen very closely to their conversations. I heard the names of their frinds, of their collaborators they used to come to the house, particularly to meet already, not so much to Stubbylon and they those people had no idea who I was, as they kept sitting and boasting how many people they've shot water day, and I knew exactly whether they came from, what their names were, etcetera.
So she kept a list. Sometimes they would brag about what they'd done that day, about how many Jews they'd killed. She would listen carefully to catch the men's names, with schools they went to, what towns they were from. There were other Jews hiding in Latvia, but as far as I can tell, no one had kept a list like Zelma. It was as if while the war was still going on, that she'd become a Nazi hunter e. Simon Biesenthal and to be a freedman. Even those two never really began
their search until after the war. Zelma did it under the nose of the Castapo. I asked Naomi about this. Why did her mother take on this job? Was the survivor's guilt? She never well. We talked a lot, of course, but she never told me that she had any feeling of guilt. It may be deep in her soul. She felt it like many Like many people. There were many people who couldn't just continue and committed suicide. Yes, because they couldn't live with it. I asked Naomi. Why was
her mother so determined? Why was she so determined? I think it was very important for her. I don't think there are just a few people who just were so tolerant, you know, and didn't want to find the murderers. She was determined to do it. Yes, because perhaps it's also yes, you are right, you know, perhaps it's also due to
her character. This is amazing. I don't know any other examples, and I've researched this of solo Jews actively surveilling and hunting Nazis during the war while they were still in power. She was the turn like, I'm not going to stop util we find this and this and this and that one, you know, and I want to do it, and that's it, you know, well, it was It was her character because she looked upon herself as a very strong person, and she was very strong in different aspects of her life. Yes,
not only in this aspect. One night, there was a party at the apartment, lots of men crowding in, drinking, and in the middle of it, Zama heard that someone special had arrived. It was Herbert Suckers. When he came in, she heard him say something. He was showing the others his gun, and he announced the crowd that with that gun he killed dirty Jews that day. It was the only confess shin that Zukers would ever make. Zelma memorized
his words. She added Suckers to her list of killers, and she waited in just Before the war ended, Zelma and Knock escaped to Sweden together. One of the first things Selma did was to write an account what had happened in Riga. She included all the names of the killers that she had written down, so this was still Zelma's report was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. There were lots of stories during the war of the camps and the atrocities, but in n there
weren't yet available first person eyewitness accounts like Zelma's. Had she been able to get it out into the world, it would have been a big deal. She brought the report to the big newspapers at Stockholm, but was rebuffed. Most important newspaper in Sweden is Dugan's Unitary. I had a report for them. I went there to the editor, to the chief editor, and that was a time when they still hope that the Germans would win the war. And when I told him the contents of my report,
he said, I am sorry for such things. We have no space in our newspaper. She brought a report to the attention of American and British embassies in Sweden, and their reaction was even worse. There the report, they were terribly frightened. There was a list of a number of war criminals. They destroyed it. There was a list of survivors, which they destroyed partly, and and that's it. So after the war, I thought I would never see it again. Most of Latvia's Jews were already dead, but others were
still hiding and being pursued. It was still time to save them and to arrest the man who had killed Zelma's family. They were still in Latvia. They could be captured, but nobody did anything. The Germans were still powerful. People were afraid getting on their wrong side. At that point, it was thought perhaps they'd win the war. Who knew. Zelma was shocked, depressed. Nobody seemed to care or to believe her. She never mentioned what exactly, but she was
very much disappointed. Yes, that the people didn't want to hear about it there in Sweden, that's right, Yes, I think for something political, you know that they didn't want to spoil the relationships. Yes, she was very much disappointed her whole life about it. That's right. After the war, Zelma and Nac returned to Latvia. There the Soviets were taking over again, and Nac was arrested for anti Soviet activities.
He'd deposed the occupation back in. Zelma, who now thought of him as a friend and not a husband or a lover, tried to help. She went to the authorities and offered to take his place, but they told her if she stuck by Knock, she would go to prison too. As she lobbied for Knock's release, Zelma met and fell in love with the Jewish doctor, the man who become Naomi's father. They married and eventually had two girls, Naomi and her sister. Knock, by the way, I knew all
about this, he'd even given his approval. He and Zelma were just friends by this time, and Nac wanted her to be happy. So Zelma had all this information about Herbert Suckers and the other perpetrators, but she was stuck in Latvia. The Soviets wouldn't let her leave. Things got bad because she wouldn't denounce Knock and becoming an informer for the Soviet spy agency. She was thrown in a psychiatric asylum. The conditions were horrible and she lost hope.
She even tried to commit suicide, but a Latvian nurse saved her. Eventually, Zelma was released, but she was still an outcast. Finally, twenty years later, she and her family emigrated to Israel, and then things got interesting. In the late seventies, Victor Raj, the leader of the violent commando unit that was responsible for the deaths so many during the war. The man who had raped Selma, was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, where he was living under an assumed name.
He was brought to trial in Hamburg in nineteen The trial was made possible only because of Selma and other survivors who volunteered to testify against the Nazi collaborator. Without them, they would have been no case. Zelma was nervous, but she agreed to fly from Israel to Hamburg to face arrage thirty years after he detacked her. I knew I have to be strong. I knew I have to do
my job. I knew that it has to be proven that this man is the greatest murderer of East due during the war, that he is responsible for the killing of Latin jury, and he has to spend his life in prison. Naomi went with her mother promotional support. They were afraid, but it was a chance to get justice and to find out why and as I told you, I was with her in Hamburg, you know, during the trial of our Eyes, and I saw her there. How she behaved and how she you know, she was so strong.
She just didn't break down. I think it was very hard for her, but she did it. Finally, a raj was brought into the courtroom. Selma got up and told her story, the roundups, the violent rape, the killings. At the end, the juris asked her a few questions. Then the presiding judge leaned over to address her. This is hard to believe every word you are saying. Then a black and white photograph was placed before her, showing about thirty men in uniform. The judge told her, then he
was a young man. Now before you, an old ailing man is sitting. Could you identify him? I cooked on my glasses, go ahead, pointing at him. At him, the court was silent. The defense attorney approached her and asked, but how did you know? Is that what was done to you was done by days? So I said, He said to me, you bitch, do you know who's standing before you? He said, habit kind of an argument. I have no more questions. The attorney nodded to the judge
and the cross examination was over. Rags sentence was probably sealed at this point, but prosecutors wanted to know about his unit and about Herbert Suckers. On the witness stand, they pressed Garage about his second in command, and Arraje finally revealed what it had caused Suckers to join up. Rage described his first meeting with Sukers, around the time of the German invasion. He said the Aviator had left his farm and come to the capitol to meet with him.
They talked, and Suckers began asking for refuge. Rumors were circulating in the countryside. Suckers told him claiming that he had worked as a Soviet collaborator during the occupation. The gossip apparently contained details not only had he turned Bolshevik, but the Soviets had given him a Cadillac as payment for his services. Other sources I was able to find confirmed this. In During the first Soviet occupation, Zuckers had been called to Moscow by the Vice Minister of the
aviation industry. The man had heard about suckers brilliance and designing air plants. He asked the Aviator to help the Russians build long range Palmbers. It was a tough moment for Suckers. Soviets were hated in Latvia for the horrors they were inflicting on the people there. But this was a huge opportunity. Suckers could become a major player in world aviation. So he took the job. Later with the
Nazis and control Churs was afraid. He must have sensed the murderous rage that Latvians felt towards anyone who had worked with the Russians. He was faced with the same accusation being made against the Jews and Nazi propaganda being broadcast daily on the radio. Every Jew is a Bolshevik. If he didn't find a way to separate himself from the rumors, he could share the jews fate, and so he sought out a raj who took him on as
his second in command. This was what I've been looking for the answer to why Zukers thought he could be executed. So he joined the commando unit and began killing Jews. It wasn't anti Semitism, it was plain self preservation survival. He was scared. He was a coward, But what an awful transaction. Savior skin but helped take the lives of thirty thousand innocent people. It was in a way worse
than I had thought. If Sukers had been a true believer, someone that really believed that Jews were with the Nazis said they were, that was one thing, But to kill your neighbors and friends just to stay alive. It actually bothered me more than my original theory. So I had an answer, or at least a partial one, but I wanted to run it by one more person. I wanted to know if Zuker's still mattered. Good Assassin's Hunting the
Butcher isn't over. Next week I talked about some of Massad's greatest operations, with snipers, stolen airplane, fall, Harris Masterminds, and other surprises. I think you'll like it, and I hope you tune in kill. I'd heard about attempts to rehabilitate Zuka's reputation. In two thou fourteen, There's actually been a musical about him, which played in Latvia to cheering crowds. This is a number from the show that asked whether Zuker's is a killer or a misunderstood national hero. The
musical ignited a debate. Some denounced it but others on the far right said he was in fact innocent and should be publicly exonerated. I wondered if the spirit of Herbert Suckers still lived on in Riga. So I called Ilya Lensky. He's a director of the Jews and Latvia Museum in Riga and he studied history at the University of Latvia. He's young Jewish. I called him up at his office on Zoom. I started out by asking him how many Jews are left in Riga today and if
they felt safe. So we estimate that it could be at minimum of eight thousand Jews and all the Latvia, well majority of them in Riga. Sometimes it's estimated to be up to ten thousand. And then of course there is much broader group of people who could potentially being affiliated with the Jewish community, so having Jewish roots or whatever,
but that's different stories. So we could estimate about eight thousand people to identify themselves as Jews, and most of whom are connected to the Jewish community religiously culturally in different ways. So nowhere there is legal discrimination, of course, but also there is no unificial discrimination. And we would presume that Latvia is one of the few countries in Europe where basically the jewsh community does not see anti
Semitism as the major challenge to its existence. I mean, we cannot say that there is no anti Semitism, and of course also to of course story is part of story of antism mimatism as well, but but anti Semitism we do not consider to be the major challenge. Wow, that's surprising. He's saying that there's almost no anti Semitism in Latvia anymore, which is great and not what I was expecting to hear. I had a few more questions
on that. So do you think that Latvians have sort of faced up to their role in the Holocaust, you know, in a sort of full and honest way. Uh, that's a good question. I don't have an answer to this, because actually we don't know what is a full honest way. I worked for the museum for almost fifteen years, and for all of this time I've been involved in one way or another and researching how Latin society sees the
Holocaust today. And so I can say the definitely Latin society has made a significant progress in last thirty years, and we have to understand that also during the Soviet times. There's was a complex It's a multi layered issue of how halcost is perceived. I asked Elia what he thought
was causing this change. I think as the generations change, and generally as we are more becoming more and more European, particularly with the joining the EU and so on, the paradigm changes in the sense that there's, for example, is basically gone, at least in the public sphere, the concept that the Holocaust was just a revenge for the atrocitus of the Jewish communists. Yeah, so, I mean this was something that they could still encounter in the nine takes.
People say, yeah, Latvians were participating, it's a bad thing. But the Jews where the main perpetrators during the communist terror in nineteen, which is basically reproducing Nazi propaganda because the Nazis used this as an excuse for their integers repressions. They used this to recruit Latins to collaborate. So today we basically do not see that in public discourse. I mean, again, we see it on the internet, but I don't think that any sin politician today would dare to say something
like that. This was really incredible. It was earlier, really saying that struggle against anti Semitism was over. I cannot say that we are in the end of the way of how we speak about the Holocaust. But the fact that the Holocaust is being now also portrayed rather openly in cultural products. We could say we have it in the literature, we have it in the movies. I think
it's a sort of a good sign. So I would say that I don't know if we're doing good, but I can say that not being we have a great progress, and that's what makes me very optimistic. So good news. Zukers was far less popular in Latvia than I'd imagined, but I still wanted to ask Ilia the big question about motives. I'm just wondering what your personal opinion of Zukers is. One of the reasons I wanted to do
the podcast is the whole question of why. I mean, he was a man who had some Jewish friends, or he was seen in cafes talking to Jews before the war. His father employed Jews in his workshop. He didn't have a terrible reputation. He visited the Palastine, He's visited health, he gave it. He gave a talk Palistine in the Jewish club. Absolutely, so he was kind of a hero
for Jews and non Jews alike in the thirties. Have you thought about this idea of betrayal why he seemed to turn on his Latvian neighbors, even people he knew well. First of all, as we knew so responsibly, could have been suspected of cooperating with the Salviettes. Yeah, because he tried to work as an engineer for the SOB. It's okay they failed with a different story, So it could be that he was afraid that. It's only small part of the explanation. It could be an explanation why he
joined the r I S Unit. But the biggest question, so why did he actively collaborate? The answer is pretty simply, he just didn't see any issue. You see, that's the most weird thing that when we discussed Sucker's case, we do not discuss the case of a fervent And toes mind, this had never occurred to me that Suckers killed Joos because he didn't see any issue. It was the weirdest
answer honestly I'd gotten in three years of research. I think Elias sensed my confusion because he went on, Yeah, so we're discussing a regular person who just did not see an issue. Okay, I go there, I work there. Okay, Yeah, I kill people, but it's it's a situation. I mean, in different situations, I would not be killing people. In this situation. I'm doing my work, and part of my work involves occasionally killing people. So so what I mean,
the war is going on. It's bad. It's bad for everyone. Okay, So I don't know it would extent we could say, and we could trust the witness accounts, so that he was really enjoying doing what he was doing, that's the question. We can't presume that at some point. Yes, but I'm not a psychologist, so I don't want to discuss these things. But probably he just didn't see it as an initiation,
that's you see, that's why he was not hiding. For example, in the fifties, living in sixties, living in Brazil, he was not hiding. He was giving interviews, yeah, where he said that the accusations against him are fake and that he didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. So if you really consider yourself guilty, then probably you hide as many you know, real Nazis did, Yeah, German Nazis. But also, for example,
as we know, our eyes was living and hiding. So probably he just did not see any problem with it. And I would say one of the key elements when we discuss the issues of Holocaust and laugh in general, that many people in the r Ice Unit, they didn't have any record of membership and anti Semitic organizations before that. We cannot say that they were like fervent and to someone, No, they were regular people, ordinary man. So probably this could be also an answer to why he did what he did.
In other circumstances, he would not do that. But circumstances were that he did it and probably didn't see it as anything wrong or any anything problematic. Probably he saw it as something wrong, but not too wrong. So Eliot's theory, if you can call it that, who said Suckers didn't see what the big deal was about? So what he helped kill some Jews, That's what was happening in Riga, That's what was happening everywhere, at least in German controlled countries.
It was like in the air you breathe, you couldn't escape it. So Zuckers wasn't taunting these railies when he said he was innocent. He wasn't a sociopath. He was something far more ordinary, a guy who went along with things, who didn't have the courage to stand up and say no. There was another layer to this, one that reminded me of Zuker's behavior when he first got to Brazil in the late forties. In his many newspaper and magazine interviews,
Zuker's promoted himself almost as a victim. He said, you know, the Russians came to my country, and then the Germans, and I was a refugee, and I fought them in any way I could. Dr. Sarah Valente, the professor who studies the legacy of the Holocaust in Brazil, came across a particularly startling example of Sukers doing this as so, he says, Kokers claims to have lived without political preoccupations, devoting his life entirely to aviation, so he was not
a political person at all. He was only flying, he was only a pilot. And that his country was invaded by the Russians on June seventeenth, nineteen forty, and that the Latvian Jews dominated and enslaved the rest of the population, carrying out massacres and tortures. They wiped out more than thirty thousand civilians. This to me is very telling because in this moment he is bringing the blame to the Jews as being the ones who are capable of having
done this. It's a fascinating article from a research perspective in the sense that he has. Kuker further claims that during the Russian occupation, he disguised himself as a peasant and took part in the underground resistance movement. He didn't joined a lot of an army and fought the Russians alongside the Germans when they began their offensive in July of nineteen one. He maintains that he did not take
part in any massacre against Jews. He never changed his name, he's never went into hiding, and was not accused by the Allied authorities. So it's almost like he took on this mantle of victimhood and kept exaggerating it to the point that he couldn't see anything he did is problematic. I asked Ilia about this, as you mentioned, when he came to Brasil, he did give interviews, and one of the interesting things I found is that he promoted himself almost as a victim and couldn't see anything that he
did as of the Maattic. As you said, do you think this is a wider issue for Latvians that the suffering of the Year of Terror was not acknowledged by the wider world and their own suffering wasn't perhaps given the way that they wanted it to. Yes, that's definitely true. I mean, I think many ethnic Latvians in the country, but also in the emigrant community, they felt that their
story is being neglected. And there is interesting memoir. It's a semi fiction, semi memoir but generally trustworthy by Xantha Mauna, a prominent Latvian literary critic, and there she describes the discussion she had with some Latvian intellectuals costing the professor.
And there she she describes how a few days after Rumbula killings she was talking to this professor and he said that England and France didn't say a word when a hundred thousand children from the Baltics were deported to say read by the Soviets, So why should we care about the Jews being killed? Lots of Latvians suffered horrific things during the war, and that didn't get a lot of attention even today. I think very important point is that the Jews were not seen as part of the society.
It was not only anti Semitisms, it was generally kind of um glass wolves existing within Latvian society. That makes sense. Part of the Latvian mentality is that they're caught between two ancient enemies, and in the forties they were terrorized by both of them. Latvians wanted that story told. I
would too. I had one more question for Ilia. It's great that Jews in Latvia feel little or no hatred towards them today, but his answers made me think us Zookers as an example before the war, a good guy, not an anti semi. In the war comes and he changes completely, but not because of anti Semitism, not really. So even if the situation for Jews in Latvia today is good, did that mean everything was fine or were we missing something? I came to that age old question.
Could something like the Holocaust happened there? Again? That's a good question. The problem, as I said that, actually we don't understand how much this hidden sentiment was present back then. Were to say how much the pre war anti Semitism which which existed them which at some points was rather hardcore. It was non violent, but it was very hardcore, and it was present in the political rhetorics, very it was visible.
To what extent it's connected with the events of the Holocaust, to what extent people who were hating the Jews is non violently in the thirties, they went to killing the Jews in the forties. Yeah, and so I would say this is more threatening somehow than than open anti Semitism. I think this has to do very much with general
human psychology. That's why I always say that the Holocaust, after all, is not only is the part of the Jewish history, but behind it as a whole story of humankind and human being, functions and extreme conditions and so on. It reminds me of this saying I heard once about the military generals are always prepared to fight the last war, meaning they learned the lessons of the past, but failed to anticipate the future. The next war or the next
attempted genocide will probably be different than the Holocaust. We see the past. Clearly, we can't study Seekers as a kind of test case measure his anti semitism. The tradeoffs he made and wanting to survive, but looking ahead that's much harder. I asked Ilia about this. Yeah, so, so when when when you suddenly strike when you think about
the Holocaust and it happens, I guess too many historians. Yeah, I mean, all of us who sported the Holocaust we have rather strong kind of you know, emotional screen because but but even us, at some point we just come to kind of stupor which do not undstand we do. We don't have this key to unlocked the door, because that's the door much ruder than our research than where we comprehend It's it's somewhere in the field of psychology
and how person functions in general. You know, I could tell that Ilia had thought about the same question, probably more than I had, and he come up with what I thought was a fascinating conclusion. Yeah, so, so so so, And that's why I don't like, For example, the question quite often asked in an age discussions, is Holocaust possible today? Let's say, no, Holocaust is not possible today, because Holocaust is what already happened. We already know how Holocaust happened,
and you know it happened. That's it is genocide possible. Well, of course, we see it in Rwanda, in Bosnia, wherever is all the other things? Possibly, yes, possible, Yeah, it would just not be called holocaust and probably will not be aginst juice. But it doesn't matter. So there probably won't be another holocaust because in a way we know what to look for. We're pretty well inoculated against that
particular virus, aren't we. But while we're trying so hard to spout one disaster, is that where a different one might creep up on us. That's what worries Ilia and I can see his point. A New Year's day in janu the great American novelist John Steinbeck sat down to write a letter to a friend, as World War Two was raging around the world and plunging humanity to what looked like the darkest period in modern history. Steinbeck wrote,
not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again, and rise up. It isn't that the evil thing wins, it never will, but that it doesn't die. I don't know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious. The two sides of the mirror are required before one has a mirror that two forces are necessary in Man before he is man good Assassins. Hunting the Butcher is a production of Diversion Podcasts in association
with I Heart Radio. This season is written and hosted by Stephen Tulty, produced and directed by Scott Waxman and Jacob Bronstein. Executive producers Scott Waxman and Mark Francis. Story editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editorial direction from Scott Waxman and Mongesh At Ticketdoor Editing, mixing and sound designed by Mark Francis. Archival research by Adam Shapiro. Thanks to Oran Rosenbaum at U t A. Diversion Podcasts