[1] Viktors Bernhard Arājs was born on 13 January 1910 in the town of Baldone, then part of the Russian Empire (now Latvia).
Arājs attended Jelgava Gymnasium, which he left in 1930 for mandatory national defense service in the Latvian Army.
In 1932, Arājs studied law at the University of Latvia in Riga, but completed his degree only in 1941 after the Soviet occupation.
He was a member of the elite student fraternity Lettonia, which may have helped him get a job with the Latvian police after he left the university.
[citation needed] On 2 July, Arājs learned from Stahlecker during a conference that his unit had to unleash a pogrom that was supposed to appear spontaneous.
On the same day, the Germans ran a recruiting advertisement in the occupation-controlled Latvian language newspaper Tēvija (Fatherland): "To all patriotic Latvians, Pērkonkrusts members, Students, Officers, Militiamen, and Citizens, who are ready to actively take part in the cleansing of our country of undesirable elements" should enroll themselves at the office of the Security Group at 19 Valdemāra Street.
[6] On 4 July Arājs and his henchmen trapped about 20 Jews, who had not been able to take flight before the advancing Germans, in the Riga Synagogue on Gogoļa Street.