Holocaust history in Latvia

Holocaust in Riga

Excerpt from the article “Riga | Holocaust Encyclopedia”

German forces occupied Riga, Latvia in July 1941. Soon after, they established a ghetto in the city. German SS and police units and Latvian auxiliaries murdered thousands of Riga’s Jews in shootings. Over three days in November and December 1941 alone, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot in the Rumbula Forest. By the city’s liberation in 1944, almost all of the Jews in Riga had been killed.

German Einsatzgruppen together with Latvian auxiliaries, shot several thousand Jews shortly after German forces entered the city. In mid-August, the Germans ordered the establishment of a ghetto in the southeastern area of the city; this ghetto was sealed in October 1941, imprisoning some 30,000 Jews. In late November and early December of 1941, the Germans announced that they intended to settle the majority of ghetto inhabitants “further east.” On November 30 and December 8-9, at least 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot by German SS and police units and their Latvian auxiliaries in the nearby Rumbula Forest. 

  …when the people got there they were told to undress, put the shoe in one pile, the shoes in one pile, clothing in another pile, driven to the edges of these mass graves, and machine-gunned. It was going on all night and the next day. Fifteen thousand of our people were massacred in that particular day. 

The surviving 4,000-5,000 Jews were incarcerated in an area of the ghetto known as the “small” or “Latvian” ghetto. The Germans also deported some 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Riga. The section of the ghetto where these foreign Jews were imprisoned was called the “big” or “German” ghetto, established as a separate entity from the “Latvian” ghetto. A transport of 1,000 Jews from the German Reich shared the fate of the murdered Riga Jews. Most of the remaining German Jews deported to Riga were also later killed in the Rumbula Forest. 

Several hundred Jews in the Riga ghetto organized resistance activities against the Germans. Small groups sought to escape from the ghetto and join partisans in the surrounding forests. In October 1942, German police discovered a small band of members of the Jewish underground outside the ghetto. In reprisal for partisan activities, the Germans seized and killed more than 100 people from the ghetto and executed almost all Jewish policemen on suspicion of participating in resistance activities.

In the summer of 1943, the Germans deported some ghetto inhabitants to the Kaiserwald concentration camp, which had been established in March in the north of the city. Others were deported to Kaiserwald subcamps nearby. The Germans destroyed the ghetto in December 1943 and deported the last Jews to Kaiserwald. The surviving Jews in Latvia, from the destroyed ghettos of Riga, Liepaja, and Dvinsk, were concentrated in Kaiserwald and its subcamps.

 In 1944, in an attempt to destroy evidence of mass murder, the Germans forced prisoners to reopen mass graves in Rumbula and burn the bodies. Once the work was completed, the Germans then killed these prisoners. In the summer of 1944, the Germans murdered thousands of Jews then held in Kaiserwald and its subcamps. Those remaining alive were later deported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany.

On October 13, 1944, the Soviet army liberated Riga. Almost all of Riga’s Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.  Text Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC … more History