This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security
Police and its political dimensions in the Soviet Union West and East Germany and the United
States in the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have established the
facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark
in the annals of atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their leader
Viktors Ar¿js who killed tens of thousands of Jews on Latvian soil and participated in every
aspect of the 'Holocaust by Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with
Latviäs encounter with Nazism ¿ a process that was stunted and distorted by Latviäs domination
by the USSR until 1991. Examining the country¿s most notorious killers their fates on both
sides of the Iron Curtain and contemporary Latvians¿ responses in different political contexts
this volume is a record of the earliest phases of this process which must now continue and to
which this book contributes.
