Of the sixty-six thousand or so Jews living in Latvia in summer 1941, the Arājs Kommando shot about twenty-two thousand, and then assisted in the killing of some twenty-eight thousand more. Like other murderers serving German policy, and like the German murderers themselves, they killed whom they were assigned to kill. Like all of the mass murderers of Jews, they also murdered non-Jews. As they moved through the country, they shot patients of psychiatric hospitals, for example. After most of the Latvian Jews had been killed, the Arājs Kommando was dispatched to combat Soviet partisans, which
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