Riga ghetto

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Riga Ghetto (ca.1942)

The Riga ghetto was a small, cordoned-off area in the Maskavas forštate ( Moscow suburb ) district of the Latvian capital Riga , where German occupiers interned Jews from 1941 during the Second World War . Almost all of them were murdered - within the provisional concentration or assembly camp or in the neighboring forests or neighboring concentration camps - as part of the Nazi extermination of Jews (Shoah) . Latvian Jews were initially housed in a confined space in the so-called Riga Ghetto . From the end of 1941, Jews were also deported there on trains from the German Reich .

Jewish prehistory

The first Jews settled in Riga in the 17th century. Despite multiple expulsions, the city grew into the political and cultural center of the Latvian Jews. In 1935 the Jewish proportion of the city's population was 11% (43,000 people); about half of the Latvian Jews lived in Riga. There was a Jewish theater, Jewish schools and hospitals, and three Yiddish daily newspapers. The Germans were also a minority in Latvia, and during the democratic period of Latvia's independence between World War I and World War II, there was frequent cooperation between Jews and Germans.

According to the Secret Additional Protocol to the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Latvia was to come under Soviet influence, and the German government preventively relocated around 50,000 Baltic Germans to the Reich, most of them to the Polish Wartheland . In the summer of 1940 Soviet troops occupied Riga and in the winter began deporting the country's political and economic elite. Between June 13 and June 19, 1941, several thousand Jews were deported from Latvia to Soviet camps; most of them were members of Jewish organizations and Zionists. The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin probably wanted to ease the situation with Hitler : Leaving the nationalists and Jews in the Baltic States could have been misunderstood as a provocation and served as a pretext for war.

Pogroms

Nine days after the start of the German war against the Soviet Union , on July 1, 1941, German troops took the city. Several thousand Jews, including Red Army soldiers , fled. On the same day there were pogroms against Jews, in which Latvian nationalists stood out and murdered more than 6,000 people in Riga and the surrounding area within the next three months.

The trigger for the attacks was a radio broadcast on July 1st by the Riga station, which was taken over by the German troops. The old Latvian national anthem was followed by the Horst Wessel song and several speeches. Among other things, the Latvian nationalist and collaborator Voldemārs Veiss called on the population to fight openly against the “traitors” and the “enemy within” - meaning the sympathizers with the Soviet Union and the Jews; The idea of ​​“ Jewish Bolshevism ” was widespread in National Socialist ideology , that is, that Bolshevism was primarily a project by Jews. In this way of thinking, attacks on Jews appeared to be a useful means of fighting against Soviet rule. One of the leaders of the pogrom was the former policeman and lawyer Viktors Arājs , whose " Arājs command " from the so-called "Latvian Security Auxiliary Police" murdered around half of the Latvian Jews.

From the conquest of Riga to September 1, 1941, the city was under the military administration of the Wehrmacht . She was partly responsible for the massacre, as she recognized the Latvian "self-protection", promoted its development and enlisted its men to cooperate. After the arrival of Einsatzgruppe A in Riga, when the majority of the Riga Jews had already been murdered, its leader, SS Brigade Leader Walter Stahlecker , ordered that self-protection be dismantled. In its place a Latvian auxiliary police was organized, which was subordinate to the German police stations. When he arrived, Stahlecker reported to Berlin: "Pogroms are starting."

Ghetto formation

Map of the ghetto printed in the Nazi-controlled Latvian newspaper Tēvjia in August 1941

On July 21st, the Riga Economic Command decided to concentrate the Jewish workforce in a fenced off area ( ghetto ). All Jews were registered, had to wear the yellow star, were not allowed to use public transport, not to walk on the sidewalks, not to enter public places, not to attend educational institutions, not to work (with a few exceptions). Access to food was made more difficult, ritual slaughtering was prohibited, and forced labor was ordered. The occupation authorities set up a Judenrat , an apparent self-government with little authority. The ghetto, fenced with barbed wire , was built in the Moscow suburbs , where Jews and Russians had traditionally lived. The police were ordered to shoot people climbing the fence without warning. After the lockdown of the ghetto on October 25, 1941 at 6:00 p.m. there were 29,602 Jews living in a cramped space in run-down houses, of whom 15,738 were women, 8,222 men and 5,652 children.

Murder of Latvian Jews

Jews from the ghetto are using forced labor to build a building for the Salaspils concentration camp (December 1941)

In September 1941, at the urging of Heydrich and Goebbels , Hitler ordered the deportation of German Jews to the East. Since the Minsk ghetto, originally planned as a destination, was soon unable to accept any more displaced persons, further trains were diverted to Riga. Himmler intended the city as a deportation destination for 20,000 Jews from the Altreich , Austria, Bohemia and Moravia . But the Riga ghetto was also overcrowded and could not take in the deportees from Germany. A first transport train carrying 1,053 Berlin Jews reached the Šķirotava train station on November 30, 1941. All of them were murdered on the same day in the Rumbula forest near Riga. The next four incoming transports with around 4,000 people were temporarily accommodated on the orders of Walter Stahlecker on an empty estate - later called the " Jungfernhof camp ".

The ghetto in Riga was "cleared" on November 30, 1941 to make room for Jews deported from Germany. The Latvian Jews were murdered by the Latvian SS under the supervision of the German SS. On November 30, around 15,000, and on December 8 and 9, another 12,500 people were shot dead in pits in the nearby forests of Rumbula. The Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln was in charge of the executions . Only skilled workers from the work details survived the murder. They were interned in the small ghetto on the northern edge of the former large ghetto.

Jews from Germany

Jews in the Riga ghetto are not allowed to use the sidewalks, but have to walk on the street. (1942)

Jews from Germany began arriving in the ghetto in December, including the artist Alice Haarburger . The sixth deportation train from Germany to Riga arrived on December 10, 1941 with Jews from Cologne and found shelter in the "cleared" and reduced ghetto. A contemporary witness reported: “There was still leftover food on the table and the ovens were still warm.” An example of the deportation transports is the confidential report of Paul Salitter , the transport manager of the Ordnungspolizei , who carried out a deportation train with 15 policemen from Düsseldorf to Riga in December 1941 led.

Another 3,000 Jews had arrived from Germany by the end of the year, including around 1,000 Jews from Hanover and 1,000 Jews from Kassel . A “self-administration” was set up, and the former head of the Cologne welfare office, Max Leiser, was appointed head of the “ Council of Elders of the Reich Jews in the Riga Ghetto”. The ghetto police of around 70 people, the labor deployment center, a school system, and street cleaning and waste disposal were later subordinate to the Jewish ghetto council. The German Jews renamed streets in the ghetto after their cities of origin, possibly in order to be able to pronounce them better. Ghetto resident Max Kaufmann reports of a tense relationship between Latvian and German Jews. For example, the Jewish doctor Hans Aufrecht, who was kidnapped from Cologne and interned in Riga, collaborated with the commandant's office as a ghetto doctor. When ghetto inmates were deported to the Kaiserwald camp near Riga , he argued that Latvian Jews in particular had to leave. After the war he was sentenced and executed for his “hard-hearted treatment of the Jews”. The ghetto resident Lilly Menczel also saw positive connections: Although German Jews were forbidden to go to the small Latvian part of the ghetto, the other way round, Latvian Jews often came to the German part - with permission. Young people in particular got to know each other during the encounters, some of whom survivors married after the liberation.

By mid-February 1942, 10,000 Jews from various German cities and Prague were added. 4,700 Latvian and Lithuanian Jews from Kaunas were housed in a separate area . It remains unclear how many of the 15,073 German Jews on the transport lists were actually admitted to the Riga ghetto. A few dozen men were sent directly from the Šķirotava train station to the Salaspils concentration camp ; In some transports from Theresienstadt, however, frail people were probably selected and shot on the day of arrival.

Forced Labor and Selections

Ghetto inmates testify to Max Gymnich's brutality (1948)

The shortage of labor in peat extraction, agriculture and construction was considerable, especially as Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel as "chief representative for the labor requested" more and more workers for use in the kingdom. Nevertheless, the ghetto commandant was reluctant to comply with the wishes of the civil employment office: The Jews from Germany were only temporarily housed here, their operational capabilities were limited due to their age, the work details were needed to expand the camp in Salaspils or were already used for the logistics of the Wehrmacht employed in the port, on freight trains and in airport construction.

From December 1941, Obersturmführer Kurt Krause , a former Berlin police officer and previously commandant of the Salaspils camp, was in charge of the Riga ghetto. His assistant and driver was SS-Unterscharfuhrer Max Gymnich , a Gestapo man from Cologne. Krause, called “the ogre” by prisoners, and Gymnich used large dogs to enforce their orders. The Latvian Jew Joseph Berman, who survived the Holocaust, described Gymnich in 1947 as personally responsible for the deportation to certain death (" Ascension Command "). He was responsible for countless murders in the ghetto.

In March 1942, around 1,900 unfit for work were selected during Operation Dünamünde and, under the pretext of being used in light work in the fish processing industry in Dünamünde , they were taken to the Biķernieki forest , where they were shot and buried. 

At the end of 1942, around 12,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were on the job. Around 2,000 were barracked at the workplace, 2,000 worked in workshops within the ghetto, and more than 7,300 were led in columns to the workplace. A statement from 1943 assumes 13,200 Jews in the ghetto. 

Dissolution and Kaiserwald concentration camp

However, the shortage of labor in companies that were important to the war effort, as well as the economic advantage that the WVHA gained from hiring out Jewish forced laborers, did not provide permanent protection against the Nazis' intentions to destroy. In June 1943, Himmler ordered “all Jews still in ghettos in the Ostland area to be grouped in concentration camps ... 2) From August 1, 1943, I prohibit any removal of Jews from the concentration camps to work. 3) A concentration camp is to be built near Riga, to which all of the clothing and equipment manufacturing that the Wehrmacht has outside today is to be relocated. All private companies are to be eliminated. [...] 5) The unneeded members of the Jewish ghettos are to be evacuated to the east. " 

In the summer of 1943, the fenced-in Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp in which eight barracks were intended for prisoners was built in the villa suburb of Mežaparks-Kaiserwald . The first four hundred Jews were brought there from the ghetto in July 1943. For the prisoners this meant separation from their relatives; Prisoner clothing, hair shearing, and loss of privacy all came as a shock.

From this point on, the gradual dissolution of the ghetto in Riga began. Occasionally, people managed to escape from the ghetto. About eight people hid in Riga with Anna Alma Pole , who was posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations . In November 1943 the ghetto was essentially cleared. Far-reaching plans to expand the concentration camp and build a second one were no longer realized. Several factories set up camps in which the slave laborers were barracked. Children and the sick were deported to Auschwitz in November 1943 . From August 1944, prisoners were "evacuated" by sea to the Stutthof concentration camp .

A total of around 25,000 German Jews were deported to Riga. Very few of them survived.

Post-history

There has been a small Jewish museum in Riga since 1989, which is supposed to commemorate the ghetto. This also gave rise to the “Association of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto”, which has been campaigning for financial aid for the survivors since 1993. On September 21, 2010, the Ghetto Museum was opened in Riga. It is located in the "Moscow suburb" on the border of the former ghetto.

literature

  • Andrej Angrick , Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006. ISBN 3-534-19149-8 .
  • Wolfgang Benz (ed.): Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-57238-3 .
  • Alexander Bergmann : Records of a subhuman. A report on the ghetto in Riga and the concentration camps in Germany. Ingrid Damerow's translation. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2009, new edition 2015 (e-book), ISBN 978-3-86108-316-0 .
  • Riga. In: Guy Miron (ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust. Volume 2. Jerusalem 2009, ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , pp. 652-658.
  • Este Hagar: Riga . In: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Volume III, 1990, pp. 1276-1279.
  • Gerda Gottschalk: The last way . Südverlag, Konstanz 1991. ISBN 3-87800-010-3 .
  • Karl Heinz Gräfe: From the thunder cross to the swastika. The Baltic States between dictatorship and occupation . Edition Organon, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-931034-11-5 , pp. 228-292.
  • Peter Guttkuhn: The Lübeck siblings Grünfeldt. About the life, suffering and death of "non-Aryan" Christian women . Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2001. ISBN 978-3-7950-0772-0 .
  • Josef Katz: Memories of a Survivor . Neuer Malik-Verlag, Kiel 1988. ISBN 3-89029-038-8 .
  • Anita Kugler : Scherwitz, the Jewish SS officer. Publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004. ISBN 3-462-03314-X .
  • Bernhard Press: Murder of Jews in Latvia 1941–1945 . 2nd, change Edition - Berlin: Metropol, 1995 ISBN 3-926893-13-3 .
  • Wolfgang Scheffler , Diana Schulle (ed.): Book of memories. The German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States. KG Saur, Munich 2003. ISBN 3-598-11618-7 .
  • Gertrude Schneider : Journey to Death. German Jews in Riga 1941–1944 . 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Laumann Verlag, Dülmen 2008. ISBN 978-3-89960-305-7 .
  • Heinz Schneppen: Ghetto commander in Riga Eduard Roschmann . Facts and fictions . Metropol, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-938690-93-2 .
  • Hilde Sherman : Between day and dark. Girl years in the ghetto . Frankfurt, Berlin 1993. ISBN 3-548-20386-8 .
  • Marģers Vestermanis : The National Socialist Prison and Death Camps in Occupied Latvia 1941–1945. In: Ulrich Herbert , Karin Orth , Christoph Dieckmann (eds.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps: Development and Structure . Volume 1, Göttingen 1998, pp. 472-492.
  • Jeanette Wolff : sadism or madness. Experiences in the German concentration camps in the east . Sachsenverlag, Dresden 1946.

Movies

  • "We saw it ..." The Riga Ghetto Documentary by Jürgen Hobrecht Berlin 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For a detailed Jewish history in Latvia see the article History of the Jews in Latvia .
  2. ↑ In 1742 the Russian Empress Elisabeth Petrovna ordered the expulsion of the few Jews living in her empire from the empire. The Jews in Riga were also affected. See History of the Jews in Russia
  3. ↑ Gutman, Jäckel, Longerich, Schoeps (Ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews. Volume 2, p. 1228 ff. Argon Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87024-300-7 .
  4. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Final Solution", pp. 34–36.
  5. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 18. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Updated 2nd edition)
  6. ↑ Margers Vestermanis: The Latvian share of the "Final Solution." Attempt an answer . In: Rainer Zitelmann , Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse (eds.): The shadows of the past. Impulses for the historicization of National Socialism . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 431 ff.
  7. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Endlösung", pp. 74 ff., P. 91.
  8. ↑ a b Katrin Reichelt: Rescue knows no conventions. Lukas Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86732-255-3 , p. 7 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  9. ↑ Gutman, Jäckel, Longerich, Schoeps (ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust , Volume 2, p. 1229.
  10. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Final Solution", p. 127.
  11. ↑ Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 . Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 121.
  12. ↑ For details see Angrick, Klein: "Endlösung", pp. 142–159 / Wolfgang Curilla: Schutzpolizei und Judenmord ... in: Alfred Gottwaldt et al. (Ed.): Nazi tyranny. Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89468-278-7 , pp. 253-259.
  13. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The 'Deportations of Jews' from the German Reich 1941–1945. Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 126.
  14. ↑ Angrick, Klein: Final Solution , p. 229.
  15. ↑ Heiner Lichtenstein: With the Reichsbahn in den Tod… , pp. 54–59 / Excerpt in: Kurt Pätzold, Erika Schwarz: Agenda Judenmord… , pp. 97/98.
  16. ↑ Eugen Kogon : Der SS-Staat , p. 243.
  17. ↑ a b Brabara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 376 .
  18. ↑ Jewish councils and ghetto police behaved very differently depending on personalities and ghetto. There were all stages, from the refusal to cooperate with the German superiors to submissive collaboration. See Gutman, Jäckel, Longerich, Schoeps (Ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust .
  19. ↑ Lilly Menczel: Vom Rhein nach Riga , VSA, Hamburg 2012. P. 38, ISBN 978-3-89965-512-4 .
  20. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Endlösung", pp. 238–245.
  21. ↑ Max Kaufmann, pp. 39-46.
  22. ↑ Berman's testimony in the archive of the Wiener Library, London (reference number: 1656/3/8/1030) [1]
  23. ↑ On Max Gymnich's “Actions” in the Cologne area, see also Egon Heeg: The Levys or The Destruction of Old Frechen Judaism .
  24. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Final Solution", pp. 338–345.
  25. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Endlösung", pp. 352 and 383.
  26. ↑ Angrick, Klein: "Final Solution", p. 386.
  27. ^ Website for the film

Coordinates: 56 ° 56 '23.7 "  N , 24 ° 8' 8.3"  E