Features of Local Murders and Murderers (Latvia Case Study)

This article examines the subject of collaborationism. The author for the first time examines the materials of the trial, held in Riga in October 1965. Some documents of the criminal trials against former SS guards, held in the USSR in 1945-1965 are also introduced for the scientific use for the first time. Special attention is attached to the collaborators' personal participation in single, localized murders.The circumstances and sites of these murders are usually little-known and remain beyond the scope of scientific research. This is explained by the fact that, unlike Babi Yar or Zmievskaya Balka, the number of victims of these localized murders is incomparably small and therefore, could never acquire a symbolic meaning and be used for propaganda purposes. The author draws attention to certain behavioral features of some of the crimes participants. In the author's view, the politicized claims of some researchers regarding the prominent role of certain ethnicities in Nazi crimes are debatable. The article emphasizes that the ethnic composition of local Nazi collaborators within the occupied territories depended on the ethnic composition of the population of those territories. Crimes and criminals transcend national boundaries. As one of the proofs of his thesis, the author cites the ethnic composition of the SS guards in the Stutthof concentration camp and in the Trawniki training camp.This article may stimulate researchers' interest to the problem of localized murders, including the possibilities to determine crime sites, number of victims and their names, the crime participants and perpetuate the memory of the dead.