THE extraordinary story of a Jewish-born SS officer who as the head of a Nazi labour camp saved and killed fellow Jews has stirred a new debate about wartime collaboration in the Baltic states and anti-Semitic currents in modern Germany.

Fritz Scherwitz, according to a biography drawing on fresh archive material, was either an Oskar Schindler figure — protecting Jewish workers at the Lenta Camp outside Riga from certain death — or a skilled confidence trickster. “Was he a Schindler or a swindler?” asked Margis Vestermans, head of the Jewish Museum in Latvia. “That is the question that Jews, Latvians and Germans now have to answer for themselves.”

Scherwitz was born in 1903, the son (he later claimed) of a Jewish craftsman in the Baltic village of Buscheruni.

He grew up speaking Yiddish, German and Russian. As a 17-year-old he joined the Freikorps and in 1933 became an early member of the SS. The Nazi troop did not investigate his family tree and accepted his “Aryan” credentials, backed up by references from Nazi colleagues. His village, he said, had been destroyed along with his birth certificate; in fact he may have invented the place.

Scherwitz rose through the SS ranks and belonged to the notorious Einsatz Gruppe A2 which, with Latvian collaborators, murdered about 32,000 people — mostly Jews — near Riga in 1941. Scherwitz later denied that he was present at the massacre but the Nazis clearly trusted him to supervise a labour camp. Once installed he played off one section of the SS against another. Some 90 Jewish workers earmarked for liquidation were assigned by him to renovate SS villas and given life-saving identity papers. He converted the camp into a massive tailors’ workshop producing uniforms, evening gowns, stockings and silk underwear for the families and friends of the SS. As a result many Jews survived; the camp swelled to 900 inhabitants. Even so, he was in charge when Jews were deported to death camps.

During the war he kept his Jewish identity secret. After the war, having fled to Bavaria, he hid his role in the camp but declared his origins to the American occupation forces, who allowed him to head a trust fund aimed at compensating Jewish victims. The German authorities did not investigate his war record too closely, being nervous that their wartime anti-Semitism would be exposed.

In 1948, however, he was denounced and sentenced by a German court to six years’ jail for killing three people who tried to flee from his labour camp. The judges ruled that the punishment should be severe since “it was a reprehensible case of a Jew killing members of his own race”.

The concealed anti-Semitism in this verdict is what prompted Anita Kugler, an author, to start a new trawl through the files. Some argue that Scherwitz, who died in 1962, was a fraud who pretended to be a Jew after the war in the hope of misleading war crimes investigators. Frau Kugler, whose book Scherwitz: The Jewish SS Officer, was published last August, believes that Scherwitz was a kind of Schindler. “

When shootings began in the Riga ghetto he locked up his workers in his factories so they could avoid execution,” she writes.

The Germans seem reluctant to honour him in the way that they celebrate Oskar Schindler: Scherwitz remains, in the official understanding, a Jew, whereas Schindler has been defined as a Good German.

And the Latvians have been confronted with some unpleasant facts about their own war record. Latvian history books tend to stress the cruelties of Soviet occupation over the Nazi occupation; this in turn has led to a playing down of the Jewish tragedy in the Baltic republics. The German Goethe Institute has offered to finance the translation of the book into Latvian, but it may still be too controversial to find a publisher.

Some Riga newspapers are starting to hail the life of Scherwitz as throwing open a window on the past; others are grumbling about a “Jewish distortion” of history.

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