On the morning of July 4th, 1941, American Independence Day, while families across the United States were celebrating freedom, a synagogue full of living human beings was being locked from the outside and set on fire in Riga, Latvia. Nobody came to save them. The men standing outside with torches weren’t German soldiers imported from Berlin. They were Latvian.

 They were neighbors. Some of them had gone to school with the people burning inside. Their commander was a 29-year-old lawyer named Viktors Arajs. He had been authorized to form his death squad just 3 weeks earlier. In the 3 years that followed, his unit, known as the Arajs Commando, would be directly responsible for the murder of an estimated 26,000 to 35,000 human beings, men, women, toddlers, grandmothers.

 This is not speculation. This is documented, photographed, testified to by survivors under oath. This is their story, and this is how justice finally caught up with them. You are watching Nazi History Profiles, the channel that doesn’t sanitize history. We go where the evidence leads, no matter how dark. If you are new here, subscribe right now and hit the bell icon.

 Every week we uncover the most shocking, most suppressed chapters of World War II. You need to see what’s coming next. Now, let’s go back to 1941. To understand how the Arajs Commando was even possible, you need to understand what Latvia had just been through. In June 1940, just 1 year before the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union forcibly occupied Latvia.

 What followed was a year of systematic terror. The Soviets deported an estimated 35,000 Latvian citizens to Siberia in a single week in June 1941, just days before the German invasion began. Families were separated at their front doors. Men were loaded onto cattle trains heading east. Many never returned.

 That Soviet trauma was raw. The wounds were still open. And when the Nazis arrived and handed out rifles, some young Latvian men saw an opportunity, not just for power, but for revenge against communism. The Nazis knew exactly how to exploit that hatred. They had done it across Eastern Europe. Latvia was just the latest laboratory.

When German forces entered Riga on July 1st, 1941, the city was already in chaos. Soviet NKVD officers had executed thousands of political prisoners in Latvian jails before retreating, leaving the bodies behind as evidence of Soviet brutality. Those images were used by Nazi propaganda almost immediately.

 SS Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, the Nazi mobile killing unit, arrived in Riga with a specific mission: organize the total annihilation of Latvia’s Jewish population and use local collaborators to make it happen faster. Stahlecker later wrote in an official report to Berlin that he had deliberately encouraged local self-cleansing actions, meaning he wanted Latvians to start the killing themselves so the Germans could claim they hadn’t ordered it.

 It was a calculated lie built into the architecture of genocide. Viktors Arajs walked into Stahlecker’s headquarters and volunteered. Arajs was not an ideological genius. He was not a military hero. A Hamburg University-educated lawyer and former Latvian police officer, he had flirted with right-wing nationalist circles, but never distinguished himself.

 What he had, and what Stahlecker needed, was local credibility, zero hesitation, and a talent for recruiting. He was authorized to form his unit within 48 hours. Arajs set up his headquarters at 19 Valdemara Street, Riga, a confiscated Jewish-owned building. From there, he began recruiting. The volunteers who came were a disturbing cross-section of society: university students, former policemen, out-of-work laborers.

 Some were driven by genuine anti-Semitism. Some were motivated by anti-communist fury. Others simply wanted food, pay, a uniform, and authority in a city that had just collapsed. Here’s a fact that doesn’t get spoken enough. The Arajs Commando was not forced into service. There is no evidence of a single member being coerced to join.

 They came voluntarily. They stayed voluntarily. And [clears throat] when opportunities arose to avoid the worst massacres, most of them didn’t take those opportunities. By late July 1941, the unit had grown to several hundred men. They were housed in the same building as their headquarters, fed by the Germans, paid a salary, and given rifles.

 They wore Latvian police uniforms with German-issued armbands. They operated under German SS command, but were led day-to-day by Arajs himself. Their first major mission came within days of formation. The evening of July 4th, 1941, began with a roundup. Arajs Commando units fanned out across Riga’s Jewish neighborhoods. Jewish men were dragged from their homes, beaten in the streets, and forced into trucks.

Some were taken to the Great Choral Synagogue on Gogoļa Street, one of the most architecturally stunning buildings in the entire city, built in 1871, capable of holding over 1,000 people. The doors were locked from the outside. The building was doused in fuel and set alight. According to testimonies collected by the Extraordinary State Commission after the war, some of the victims inside managed to break windows, only to be shot by Commando members standing outside with rifles.

 The fire burned for hours. Other synagogues across Riga, at least six, were attacked the same night. Jewish men who were not taken to the synagogues were marched to courtyards and executed in front of their own neighbors. The shootings were public. The Nazis wanted fear. They got it.

 By morning, the black smoke over Riga was visible from miles away. The Jewish community of Riga, which had existed for over 300 years, was beginning its final chapter. Through July, August, and September of 1941, the Arajs Commando operated on a brutal schedule, two to three actions per week. Jewish men were arrested on the streets under any pretext, accused of being communists, Soviet agents, or simply of being Jewish.

 They were loaded into trucks and driven to Biķernieki Forest, a large pine forest northeast of Riga that would eventually become the mass grave of over 46,000 people, one of the largest Holocaust burial sites in the world. At the forest, the victims were ordered to dig. When the pits were deep enough, they were shot.

 Survivors who managed to flee described hearing volleys of rifle fire echoing through the trees every single morning. Riga residents living near the forest reported the same. The killings were not secret. They were loud, frequent, and broadly known. The pattern was exported to the rest of Latvia, in Jelgava, Valmiera, Daugavpils, Jēkabpils.

 Town after town, the Commando arrived, rounded up the local Jewish population, marched them to the outskirts, and shot them into pits. In some towns, the entire Jewish population was erased in a single afternoon. By the end of summer 1941, the Germans had killed or enabled the killing of roughly half of Latvia’s 93,000 Jews.

 The autumn of 1941 brought the final order from Berlin: total annihilation. Every Jew in Latvia was to be killed. The Riga Ghetto had been established in October 1941, a sealed, overcrowded district where approximately 30,000 Jews had been crammed into a small residential area. Starvation and disease were already spreading. Then, on November 30th, 1941, the liquidation began.

 Before dawn, Arajs Commando soldiers and German police entered the ghetto. Columns of people were assembled at gunpoint. The sick dragged from their beds, the elderly pulled from their chairs. The temperature outside was below freezing. The march to Rumbula Forest was approximately 9 km. Guards beat anyone who slowed down. Those who fell and couldn’t rise were shot in the road and stepped over.

 At Rumbula, enormous pits, 100 m long, 3 m deep, had been pre-dug by Soviet prisoners of war. Victims arrived at one end of the pit, were forced to surrender all remaining valuables and clothing, and were walked to the edge. They were ordered to lie down on top of the bodies of those killed minutes before them.

 Then they were shot in the back of the skull. SS-Gruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, one of the senior German officers overseeing the massacre, had personally developed a killing method he called Sardinenpackung, meaning sardine packing, layering bodies in pits to maximize the number that could be killed and buried in one location.

 He was later tried and hanged for it. The massacre was repeated on December 8th, 1941. Over both days, an estimated 25,000 people were murdered at Rumbula, making it one of the largest two-day massacres of the entire Holocaust. The Arajs Commando controlled the columns, guarded the perimeter, and participated directly in the shootings. In the coastal city of Liepāja on the Baltic Sea, the Arajs Commando participated in a series of massacres in late 1941.

 What made Liepāja different, what burned it into history permanently, was that German soldiers photographed everything, not secretly, openly, as if it were a military exercise. The images showed Jewish families standing in the freezing sand dunes, stripped of their clothing, children holding their parents’ hands, women shielding their faces, rifles raised by uniformed men, bodies falling into sand.

 These photographs, later used as evidence at war crimes trials, became among the most harrowing documents of the Holocaust. Survivors from Liepāja identified multiple Arajs Commando members in the photographs by name. By early 1942, approximately 70,000 of Latvia’s 93,000 Jews were dead. The Arajs Commando had played a central operational role in almost every major massacre.

 In 1942 and 1943, as the Eastern Front shifted and partisan resistance grew, the Commando was redeployed to German-occupied Belarus for so-called anti-partisan sweeps. The reality was systematic village destruction. Entire communities suspected of supporting Soviet resistance fighters were surrounded, marched into fields, and shot.

 Houses were burned. Animals were killed. In some cases, villagers were locked inside barns before the buildings were set on fire, a direct echo of what had been done in Riga’s synagogues a year earlier. German officers valued the Kommandos’ experience in organizing rapid mass shootings. They had become ruthlessly efficient.

 Witnesses described villages of 200 to 400 people being completely erased in under 3 hours. When the war ended, the men of the Arajs Commando scattered. Some surrendered to the Soviets. Some fled to West Germany. Some emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, and South America, blending into immigrant communities and living quiet, ordinary lives for decades.

 The Soviet Union prosecuted aggressively. Of 356 identified Commando members, 352 were tried. 44 received death sentences. 30 were executed. The rest were sent to hard labor camps, sentences of 10 to 25 years. Herberts Cukurs, Latvia’s celebrated pre-war aviator who had served as a senior Commando officer and personally participated in executions, fled to Brazil and then Uruguay, building a small aviation business and living under his real name, seemingly untouchable.

 In February 1965, Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence service, lured him to a rented villa near Montevideo under the pretense of a business meeting involving a new aviation venture. Cukurs arrived expecting a deal. Instead, agents killed him and left his body sealed inside a large trunk. Attached to the trunk was a formal document signed, “Those who will never forget,” detailing his personal role in the murders of over 30,000 people.

 His execution sent a message heard in every country where war criminals were hiding. Time does not erase guilt. Viktors Arajs himself survived for 30 years after the war, living quietly in West Germany under a false identity. A determined German investigator named Joachim Richter tracked him down and had him arrested in 1975. His trial lasted years.

 The evidence was overwhelming. Survivor testimonies, German military records, photographs, his own unit’s operational reports. He was convicted and died in a West German prison in 1988, aged 76. He never apologized. After Latvia regained independence in 1991, some convicted Commando members were controversially rehabilitated by Latvian courts, a decision condemned by historians and Jewish organizations worldwide.

 The Arajs Commando was never larger than 1,500 men, but they burned six synagogues in a single night. They shot thousands into mass graves at Biķernieki. They marched 25,000 people to their deaths at Rumbula. They photographed and killed families on the frozen beaches of Liepāja. They erased villages in Belarus that no longer exist on any map.

 When the guns finally went silent, Latvia’s Jewish community, 700 years old, was gone. The few who survived returned to find their homes occupied, their possessions stolen, their neighbors silent. The Arajs Commando did not act alone, but they chose to act. Every single one of them. History recorded their names. Justice found most of them.

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