Taking into consideration the gravity of the charge leveled against the accused, namely that he personally supervised the killing of more than 30,000 men, women and children, and considering the extreme display of cruelty which the subject showed when carrying out his tasks, the accused Herberts Cukurs is hereby sentenced to death. Accused was executed by those who can never forget on the 23rd of February, 1965. His body can be found at Casa Cubertini Calle Colombia, Séptima Sección del Departamento de Canelones, Montevideo, Uruguay.
That announcement of sentence and execution, in letters arriving simultaneously at the A.P. and Reuters bureaus in Bonn, Germany, and at the U.P.I. office in Frankfurt, was at first dismissed as the work of a crank. The writer turned out to be more than ordinarily insistent. "I am one of those who can never forget," announced a voice over the phone to the A.P. a few days later. Did you get our letter?" Finally the A.P. sent a routine cable asking its Montevideo bureau to notify Uruguayan police. What they found was anything but routine.
10,600 at Once. Casa Cubertini proved to be a small beach house in a remote suburb of Montevideo. Inside on the floor were two large pools of dried blood, and the walls were a smear of bloodstains. Heavy tracks of blood led into a second room, where police found a locked yellow trunk containing a hammer and the battered body of a man. The head was crushed to a pulp. An air ticket and passport thumbprint identified him as Herberts Cukurs, 65, a resident of São Paulo, Brazil.
Cukurs was mentioned several times at the Nürnberg trials as a relatively minor but extremely vicious Nazi executioner in Latvia. Because his whereabouts was unknown, he was never formally charged. Yet current German and Israeli governments and private Jewish organizations, such as the Federation of Jewish Communities, have a full file on him. On July 4, 1941, according to the federation, he ordered 300 Jews locked in a synagogue in Riga, then set it afire. A few weeks later, he ordered the drowning of 1,200 Jews in a lake at Kuldiga. And on November 30, 1941, says the federation, he participated in the murder of 10,600 people in a single night, personally overseeing the "liquidation" in a forest near Riga.
Cukurs apparently fled to Germany with retreating Nazi troops, and turned up in Brazil in 1946. Feeling himself safe from extradition (Brazilian law prohibits extradition for crimes that could lead to a death penalty), he did not bother to change his name, got married, had three children, and set up a thriving tourist-excursion service, first in Rio, then in São Paulo. His wife recalls no threats, no enemies. She does remember a recent acquaintance who called himself Anton Künzle and cabled Cukurs from Montevideo last Feb. 19, asking him to fly there.