THE GOOD ASSASSIN

THE GOOD ASSASSIN is the story of how a small republic turned into a killing zone, the man who led this forgotten holocaust, and the twenty-year quest to bring him to account.

Herbert Cukurs rose from humble roots to become a world-famous aviator - the "Charles Lindbergh of his country" - by pioneering risky, non-stop flights to Gambia and Tokyo, flying in an aircraft he designed himself. By 1940, Cukurs was perhaps the most famous man in Riga, Latvia, an out-of-the-way place where Jewish and Catholic citizens lived in harmony.

Then came World War II and the Nazis marched into Riga. In the following months, hidden from the eyes of the world, Cukurs joined the SS and became a leader of the militia known as the "Perkonkrust" (Thundercross). Along with his compatriots, he descended into the purest savagery. Cukurs led pogroms in the ghetto. By 1945, the aviator was responsible for the death of 30,000 Jews, one-third of the total population in the country. The survivors, many of them young children, gave Cukurs a name: "The Butcher of Riga". Unlike Eichmann and other war criminals, Cukurs had personally taken part in the genocide and even seemed to relish it. He was a personification not of the men who had planned the Holocaust but the faceless killers who had carried it out.

After the war, Cukurs escaped the Allies and fled to Brazil with the help of the Catholic Church. Cukurs told journalists the stories from Latvia were a lie, even as he brought out his SS uniform for the cameras. The Brazilian authorities believed him. When the USSR requested Cukurs' extradition for trail on war crimes, Brazil refused on the pretext that Latvia no longer existed. The Butcher of Riga seemed untouchable. But in 1964, Israel decided that allowing Cukurs to walk the earth was an affront to decency and that he must be brought to justice. There was no chance of brining the aviator to Israel for trial; the only option was to infiltrate his inner circle and assassinate him.
THE GOOD ASSASSIN is the story of how a small republic turned into a killing zone, the man who led this forgotten holocaust, and the twenty-year quest to bring him to account.