Viktors Arājs
Viktors Arājs
Latvian former policeman whose Arajs Kommando, under the SS Security Service, murdered about half of Latvia’s Jews
Born in Baldone to a Latvian blacksmith and a mother from a wealthy Baltic German family, he served in the Latvian Army, studied law at the University of Latvia and was a policeman until 1938. When the Germans entered Riga in July 1941 he was introduced to Stahlecker and recruited a unit from his student fraternity and the Pērkonkrusts, which took part in burning Riga’s synagogues on 4 July. The Arajs Kommando murdered some 26,000 people in Latvia and then Belarus, and he was made an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1943. Interned in a British camp until 1949, he lived under a false name and worked at a printing company in Frankfurt. In 1979 the Hamburg State Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for leading the Jews of the Riga ghetto to their deaths on 8 December 1941; he died in prison in Kassel in 1988.
Career timeline
- 1930Service in the Latvian Army
- 1938Left the Latvian police
- 1941–1943Commander of the Arajs Kommando
- 1979Life sentence, Hamburg State Court