Riga Ghetto


Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, where Nazis forced Jews from Latvia, and later from the German "Reich", to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis evicted the ghetto's non-Jewish inhabitants and relocated all Jews from Riga and its vicinity there. Most Latvian Jews were killed on November 30 or December 8, 1941, in the Rumbula massacre. The Nazis transported a large number of German Jews to the ghetto; most of them were later killed in massacres.
While Riga Ghetto is commonly referred to as a single entity, in fact there were several "ghettos". The first was the large Latvian ghetto. After the Rumbula massacre, the surviving Latvian Jews were concentrated in a smaller area within the original ghetto, which became known as the "small ghetto". The small ghetto was divided into men's and women's sections. The area of the ghetto not allocated to the small ghetto was then reallocated to the Jews being deported from Germany, and became known as the German ghetto.

Restrictions on Jews

At the beginning of July, the Nazi occupation organized the burning of the synagogues in Riga, and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to incite the Latvian population into taking murderous action against the Latvian Jewish population. At the end of July, the city administration switched from the German military to German civil administration. The head of the civil administration was a German named Heinz Nachtigall. Other Germans involved with the civil administration included Hinrich Lohse and Otto Drechsler. The Germans issued new decrees at this time to govern the Jews. Under "Regulation One", Jews were banned from public places, including city facilities, parks, and swimming pools. A second regulation required Jews to wear a yellow six-pointed star on their clothing, on pain of death. Jews were also allotted only one-half the food ration of non-Jews. By August, a German named Altmayer was in charge of Riga and the Nazis registered all the Jews there. Further decrees mandated that all Jews wear a second yellow star, this one in the middle of their backs, and that they not use sidewalks. The reason for the second star was to make Jews readily distinguishable in a crowd. Later, when Lithuanian Jews were transported to the ghetto, they were subject to the same two-star rule. Jews could be randomly assaulted with impunity by any non-Jew.
Officially the Gestapo took over the prisons in Riga on July 11, 1941. By this time, however, the Latvian gangs had killed a number of the Jewish inmates. The Gestapo initially set up its headquarters in the building of the former Latvian Ministry of Agriculture on Raiņa Boulevard. A special Jewish administration was set up. Gestapo torture and interrogation were carried out in the basement of this building. After this treatment the arrested persons were sent to prison, where the inmates were starved to death. Later the Gestapo relocated to the former museum at the corner of Kalpaka and Brīvības boulevards. The Nazis also set up a Latvia puppet government under Latvian General Oskars Dankers, who was himself half-German. A "Bureau of Jewish Affairs" was set up at the Latvian police prefecture. Nuremberg-style laws were introduced to force people in marriages between Jews and non-Jews to divorce. If the couple refused, the woman, if Jewish, was forced to undergo sterilization. Jewish physicians were forbidden to treat non-Jews, and non-Jewish physicians were forbidden to treat Jews.

Construction of the ghetto

On July 21, Riga occupation authorities decided to concentrate Jewish workers in a ghetto. All Jews were registered and a Judenrat was set up. Prominent Riga Jews, including Eljaschow, Blumenthal, and Minsker, were chosen for the council. All of them had been involved with the Jewish Latvian Freedom Fighters Association and hopes were this would give them leverage in dealing with the occupation authorities. Council members were given large white armbands with a blue Star of David on them, which gave them the right to use the sidewalks and the street cars. On October 23, 1941, Nazi occupation authorities ordered all Jews to relocate to the Maskavas Forštate suburb of Riga by October 25, 1941. About 30,000 Jews were concentrated into this small 16-block area The Nazis fenced them in with barbed wire. Anyone who went too close to the barbed wire was shot by Latvian guards stationed around the perimeter. German police from Danzig commanded the guards. The guards engaged in random firing during the night.
When Jews relocated to the ghetto, Nazis stole their property. They were allowed to take very little into the ghetto, and what was left was handled by an occupation agency known as the Trusteeship Office, which sent entire trainloads of goods back to Germany. The Germans overlooked the theft of large amounts of other, usually less valuable, property by Latvian police, seeing it as a form of compensation for the killings. Individual appropriations and self-interested appropriations by Germans were also common. Author Ezergailis believes that the SD was more interested in killing Jews than in stealing their property, whereas the reverse was true among the men of Lohse's "civilian" administration.

Mass killings

At the urging of Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler in September 1941 ordered the deportation of German Jews to the east. Since the originally planned destination, Minsk Ghetto, was already overcrowded, subsequent deportation trains were rerouted to Riga, which was itself overcrowded.
On November 30 and December 8 and 9, the Nazis shot about 27,500 Jews from the ghetto at pre-dug pits in the nearby forest of Rumbula. The large ghetto had been in existence for only 37 days. Only about 4,500 skilled male workers from the work su
squads, held in "the small ghetto", and about 500 women classified as seamstresses survived the Rumbula massacres.
The first transport of 1,053 Berlin Jews reached Šķirotava Railway Station in Riga on November 30, 1941. Everyone aboard was murdered the same day in Rumbula Forest. The next four transports, approximately 4,000 persons, were accommodated on the order of the commander of Einsatzgruppen A, Walter Stahlecker, at an empty yard, the so-called provisional concentration camp Jungfernhof.
A historical dispute about whether Latvian Jews were killed at Rumbula to make room for Reich Jews, has long caused bitter feelings between Latvian and German survivors. The evidence is not clear on this, but certainly deportations of Reich Jews followed closely in time after the Rumbula shootings.

Small ghetto

After the mass killings at Rumbula, the survivors were formed into the small ghetto. Large posters were placed around Riga, stating "Anyone reporting to the authorities a suspicious person or a hidden Jew will receive a large sum of money and many other gratuities and privileges". Jews could sometimes be identified by whether they would eat pork. Internal passports were used to control the population, and were necessary, for example, to obtain a pharmacy prescription. The Nazi commandant of the small ghetto was named Stanke, and had also participated in the liquidation of the large ghetto. He was assisted by a Latvian named Dralle, who earned a reputation among Jews for brutality. Like in the large ghetto, the perimeter was guarded by Latvians. Within the ghetto, on Ludzas Street, the Nazis maintained a special company of guards, consisting of policemen from Danzig, commanded by Hesfer.
A work detail of Jews from the small ghetto was formed to gather up the property in the large ghetto of the Jews killed in the Rumbula shootings. The detail was headed by Aismann, a Jew from Daugavpils, who stood in favor with the Nazis and was distrusted by the other Jews. Many Jews tried to get back into the large ghetto to claim their property, including the valuables they had hidden. The guards were quick to execute any Jew from the small ghetto whom they found in the large one without authorization. Some of the effects from the large ghetto were redistributed to Latvians by occupation authorities. In other cases the German military authorities sent in trucks to load up furniture and other items. One general, Dr. Bamberg, picked out some items for himself and had them shipped back to Germany.

Jews from Germany

Following the first train on November 29, whose occupants were killed at Rumbula, Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia began arriving in Riga on December 3, 1941. The Reich Jews were not immediately housed in the ghetto, but rather they were left at a provisional concentration camp established at Jumpravmuiza, also known as Jungfrauhof. Rudolf Lange supervised the arrival of the transports in Riga, aided by Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Maywald, whom Schneider describes as Lange's "sidekick". Lange personally shot a young man, Werner Koppel, who he felt was not opening a rail car door fast enough.
A local Nazi occupation official, Territorial Commissioner Otto Drechsler, who was a subordinate of Lohse, wrote a memo to Lange protesting at the relocation of Jews into the ghetto. Drechsler's real concern, however, was that Drechsler's men were still busy searching the buildings recently vacated by the murdered Latvian Jews for money, jewelry and furs. Consistent with this purpose, buildings were declared off-limits to the arriving Jews from Germany until they could be combed through by Drechsler's squads.
The first transport to go directly to the ghetto arrived on December 13, 1941, carrying Jews from Cologne. Their luggage had come with them on the train but it was all confiscated by the Gestapo using a ruse. Each piece of luggage had the owner's name on it. For men, the name "Isaac" had been added, and for women "Sarah". Schneider reports that a gas van was used in Riga to kill some of the arrivals from the last transport from Germany.
At least in the case of the December 11, 1941 transport from Düsseldorf, the train was composed of third-class passenger cars for the Jews and a second-class passenger car for the guards. Apparently efforts were made to keep the train heated. A rail car on another transport to Riga from Vienna was reported not to have been heated, which resulted in at least one person having frostbit feet, which later turned gangrenous and had to be amputated.
In cold weather the people were taken to the ghetto on the same day they arrived, without any property of any kind other than what they were wearing or carrying, under the guard of SS Death's Head troops. They were given no food of any kind, and had to live from whatever they could find in the vacated sector of the large ghetto to which they'd been assigned. In the next month, trains arrived from Vienna, Hanover, Bielefeld, Hamburg, Bavaria, Saxony, and from Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czech Jews who originally came from Prague. About 15,000 to 18,000 people arrived on the German transports. Some German women who arrived in the ghetto were not Jews but were married to Jewish men and had refused to leave them. In contrast to the Latvian Jews, the German Jews wore only one star, on their chests, and the word Jude was written on the star.
OriginDepart dateArrive dateDestinationNumberComment
Berlin27 Nov 194129 Nov 1941Rumbula1000All transported except about 50 young men shot at Rumbula, 30 Nov 1941
Nürnberg29 Nov 1941Jungfernhof714
Stuttgart1 Dec 1941Jungfernhof1,200
Vienna3 Dec 1941Jungfernhof1,042
Hamburg6 Dec 19419 Dec 1941Jungfernhof and Stutthof808The transport, originally scheduled to depart on the 4th of December, 1941, did in fact depart on the 6th.
Cologne7 Dec 1941Ghetto1,000
Cassel9 Dec 1941Ghetto991
Düsseldorf11 Dec 1941Ghetto1,007
Bielefeld12 Dec 1941Ghetto1,000
Hanover15 Dec 1941Ghetto1,001
Theresienstadt9 Jan 1942Ghetto1,000
Vienna11 Jan 1942Ghetto and Jungfernhof1,000
Berlin13 Jan 1942Ghetto1,037
Theresienstadt15 Jan 1942Ghetto and Salaspils1,000
Berlin19 Jan 1942Ghetto1,006
Leipzig21 Jan 1942Ghetto1,000
Berlin25 Jan 1942Ghetto1,051
Vienna26 Jan 1942Ghetto1,200
Dortmund27 Jan 42Dortmund1,000
Vienna6 Feb 1942Ghetto and Rumbula forest1,000Notorious war criminal Alois Brunner was in command of this transport.