May 17, 1900 - 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.

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 in Shangrilá, Uruguay 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.

Content sourced from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herberts Cukurs under CC BY-SA 4.0.