Man in the Icebox

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, Septima Seccion 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 Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Cukurs was mentioned several times at the Nuernberg 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 Sao Paulo. His wife recalls no threats, no enemies. She does remember a recent acquaintance who called himself Anton Kuenzle and cabled Cukurs from Montevideo last Feb. 19, asking him to fly there.

"At Last." In Montevideo meantime, as police reconstructed it, another man calling himself Oswald Heinz Taussig, from Vienna, rented Casa Cubertini for two months and one afternoon moved in a large packing crate--presumably containing the yellow trunk. "At last," he quipped to a neighbor, "we have the icebox." Cukurs arrived in Montevideo Feb. 23 and registered at the Victoria Plaza Hotel about noon. Two hours later, a black Volkswagen rented by Kuenzle arrived at Casa Cubertini, and Cukurs and a companion walked into the house. An hour later, say neighbors, a group of men left the house and drove off. No one heard anything resembling the sounds of a struggle.

At week's end all the police seemed to have were theories. "Kuenzle" and "Taussig" had long since disappeared. Cukurs' son claimed that Soviet agents had killed his father for his harsh wartime treatment of Communists. Nearly everyone else suspected a secret group of Jewish agents. No one in Germany or Israel admits knowledge of a group called "Those Who Can Never Forget." Yet last week, in an anti-Nazi demonstration in Tel Aviv, some marchers carried boldly lettered signs that read: "We can never forget."

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