Come to This Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler

Author:Linda Kinstler [Kinstler, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub

17

Forgotten Trials

In the summer of 1973, a former member of the Arājs Kommando living in Ludwigsburg, Germany, receives a set of letters in the mail. His name is Jānis Eduard Zirnis − a strange man, well known to West German authorities for his somewhat exaggerated commitment to tracking down Latvian war criminals, a commitment that, up until that moment, has yet to produce any actual leads. For seven months, from March to October 1942, Zirnis had served under Arājs’s command. ‘According to his own account, his ejection from the unit was the direct result of his refusal to follow an order to participate in a mass shooting,’ the historian Richards Plavnieks writes in his definitive account of Arājs’s pursuit and trial. After leaving the Kommando, Zirnis spent several months in German custody, where he is said to have been tortured. One friend of his told German authorities that he had been ‘broken in the chambers of the SD’, despite having once been a member of the SD himself.

After the war, Zirnis settled in Ludwigsburg, not far from the Zentralstelle, where he was repeatedly interviewed by West German police and prosecutors. But he had never once supplied the authorities with valid or new information. When an ‘annoyed investigator’ from the Central Office was sent to interview him in 1964, the investigator reported that Zirnis’s ‘affectation of mysteriousness could easily be seen through. He hardly knows anything about the crimes.’1 In other words, he was a crank, an armchair investigator peddling useless information, a man consumed by conspiracy.

Then came these letters. Both were written by the same source, whose identity Zirnis refused to disclose to the authorities. And both letters contained the same information: Viktors Arājs has been killed by Soviet agents in West Germany. One of the letters, later obtained by the German police, read as follows:

First I would like to disclose to you that the SD chief, Sturmbannführer Viktors Arājs was executed by Soviet security officers in the area of Nordrhein-Westfalia on 19 January 1973.

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