Drawing of Holocaust survivor testifying at trial of accused Latvian war criminal

Charles Rodger (Hap) Hazard was born in 1947 to Charles O. and Stella Dernoga Hazard in Baltimore, Maryland. His father served in the United States Army during World War II. He worked as a topographical engineer for British Intelligence, mapping the French coastline in preparation for the D-Day landings, and was later transferred to the Pacific theater. After the war, he worked in the advertising art department for the Baltimore Sun. His mother Stella worked at the Sun during the war as the first female staff artist. Charles has a sister who is also a professional artist.

After graduating high school in 1965, Charles enrolled at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). However, due to the conflict in Vietnam, he enlisted in the US Army and was assigned to military intelligence because of his gift for languages. In 1968, prior to his deployment overseas, Charles married his wife Miriam; they would have four children. Upon his return, he began his work as a political illustrator for the Baltimore Sun newspapers. During a career that spanned more than 30 years, Charles created illustrations and court room drawings of history’s most memorable political events for the newspaper. After retiring from the Sun, Charles worked as an editorial artist for the Washington Times newspaper. At one point, Charles was contracted with the National Park Service to provide illustrations for numerous national landmarks. He came out of retirement to create fourteen illustrations of scenes from the Battle of Gettysburg for background murals for the exhibits at the Museum and Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park which opened in 2008.

Karlis Detlavs was born in 1911 in Latvia. The Soviet Union occupied and annexed Latvia in June 1940. Nazi Germany invaded Soviet territories in June 1941 and occupied Latvia. It became part of the Reich Commissariat Ostland, a German civilian administration for the Baltic States and western Belorussia. In 1941, Latvia had about 94,000 Jews, half of whom lived in Riga. During the German occupation, German mobile killing units, assisted by Latvian and Lithuanian units, massacred most Latvian Jews. Detlavs was a member of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and the Latvian Legion, whose members wore German SS uniforms. In June 1943, Karlis married Milda Vanags in Riga. World War II ended in Europe with the surrender of Germany on May 7, 1945.

Detlavs emigrated to the United States from Munich, Germany, in 1950 as a displaced person with his pregnant wife, and their almost 2 year old daughter. He told US officials that he had been a forestry worked from 1936-1944. The family settled in Baltimore, Maryland. Detlavs worked for General Electric in an insulated cable factory for 23 years, when he retired. He never became a US citizen. His first wife died and he remarried. In 1973, he lost a leg due to cancer.

In October 1976, Detlavs was accused of war crimes and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) filed a deportation action. Beginning November 1977, Detlavs was tried in federal court for withholding information and denying involvement in Nazi war crimes upon becoming a permanent resident of the US in 1950. He was accused of the execution of Jews in the Riga ghetto and selecting Jews for execution in the Dwinsk ghetto. The first hearing lasted four days. When the judge, Martin Travers, announced a continuance to permit the government to obtain more evidence, the Jewish Defense League, which had been monitoring the hearing, staged what some newspapers described as a riot in the courtroom. They began shouting at the judge and were thrown from the courtroom. Travers was murdered on June 8, 1978, while on vacation in the Virgin Islands.

New hearings were scheduled for November 1978 and the judge, Emil Bobek, discounted all testimony from the first trial. There were four days of testimony in November 1978 and four in January 1979. George L. Parker was the chief prosecutor. Deltavs was charged with lying on both his visa and his residency applications and accused of participating in war crimes. Detlavs had told the US officials in Munich who interviewed him for immigration purposes that he had been a forestry worker from 1941-1945. During the trial, eyewitnesses were brought to testify to Detlavs identity. Frida Michelson, a 72 year old Soviet emigre to Israel, identified Detlavs from a 1950 photograph shown her in thr late 1970s by Israeli police. She said he was the green uniformed Nazi collaborator whom she begged for her life during the massacre at Rumbulu forest on December 8, 1941. More than 30,000 Jews were murdered in two days. She said he responded by knocking her documents from his hand with his fist. Someone else hit from behind on the head. Detlavs then ordered her to remove her clothes and leave her belongings, and forced her, with hundreds of other Latvian Jews, to an execution ditch. She threw herself in the snow and the other prisoners threw their shoes on her and she was soon hidden under hid under a pile of shoes before the crowd was machine-gunned. She stayed hidden until night fall and was the only survivor. Frida and other witnesses identified Detlavs from photographs of Latvian guards taken at the time. Frida never identified Detlavs in the courtroom. Another witness, Boris Tsesvan identified Detlavs as one of the uniformed guards who beat and took away another Jewish forced laborer from the Hotel Roma in Riga in June 1943. Abraham Lipchin identified Detlavs as one of a group of Latvian police officers shooting Jews in what became known as Bloody Sunday, on November 30, 1941.

Detlavs admitted being forced by the Germans into joining the Latvian Legion, but denied any participation in beatings or mass executions in the Riga ghetto during the early 1940s. In 1980, in making his ruling, Bobek admonished Detlavs for his lack of credibility and for lying under oath multiple times. However, he ruled that after 37 years, the identifications of Detlavs were unreliable, and the witnesses may have been influenced by Israeli police. Bobek said that the admitted lie was not sufficient to warrant deportation. In March 1980, the US Department of Justice appealed Bobek’s decision. The decision was upheld on appeal in 1981. Detlavs, age 72, died in Baltimore in 1983.