Herberts Cukurs

Herberts Albert Cukurs (17 May 1900 – 23 February 1965) was a Latvian aviator and Nazi collaborator. He served as the deputy commander of the Arajs Kommando, a collaborationist unit that carried out the largest mass murders of Latvian Jews during the Holocaust. Although Cukurs never stood trial, the accounts of multiple Holocaust survivors, including Zelma Shepshelovitz, credibly link him to personally supervising and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity for the duration of the German occupation of Latvia. His crimes included shooting Jewish children and babies in captivity, burning Jews alive, and sexually assaulting Jewish women.

Two decades after World War II, Cukurs was identified in Brazil by a Holocaust survivor, who attempted to alert the authorities after seeing Cukurs' face on the cover of a magazine. Following the discovery, Cukurs was investigated and, in 1965, assassinated by Nazi hunters who were working for Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. In the aftermath of the assassination, Israeli journalist Gad Shimron and one of the Mossad agents ("Künzle") who killed Cukurs authored a book on the experience, titled ''The Execution of the Hangman of Riga''. In it, they referred to Cukurs as the Butcher of Latvia, a name later used by several other sources.

One of the main goals of Cukurs's assassination was to pressure West Germany into extending the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. In 1964, the West German government announced that it would allow the statute of limitations to expire in 1965. Following Cukurs's assassination, however, the deadline was extended to 1969, then to 1979, then abolished entirely. Provided by Wikipedia