Daugavpils Ghetto

The city of Daugavpils is also known by the Russian name of Dvinsk and the German name of Dünaburg. Many of the killings associated with the ghetto occurred in the nearby Pagulanka forest, which is also seen spelled as Polulanka and Pogulianski. Although known as a "ghetto", this old fortress was converted into a prison to hold Jews on a temporary basis before they were killed in the Pagulanka forest. Similar places in Latvia were called "concentration camps". == The Holocaust begins in Daugavpils ==

At that time, about 12,000 Jews lived in Daugavpils. In front of the German army, a huge column of refugees, including not only Jews from Lithuania, but Red Army soldiers separated from their units, began to move northeast on the highway from Kaunas (also known as Kovno) to Daugavpils, where the refugees expected to find safety or perhaps board a train for the east. Some Jewish refugees managed to reach the Soviet border, but they were prevented from crossing by NKVD guards. Eventually some were allowed to cross, but it was too late for most. Following several days of aerial bombardment, the German army captured Daugavpils on June 26, 1941, but there was still fighting in the near vicinity for several days. A fire burned in the city, which the Nazis later chose to blame on the Jews. According to EK 1b's official report: On June 29, 1941, at the order of Robert Blūzmanis, who had been appointed by the Germans as the police chief of the Latvian police in Daugavpils, Some of them were put to work burying the bodies of civilians and Red Army soldiers killed in the fighting, and later, dead horses. Many others were forced to dig their own graves and simply murdered outright. , Latvia, in July 1941, shows native Latvians armed and guarding Jews == Early killings ==

Mass killings of Jews in Latvia were part of an overall plan developed at the highest level of the German government. Aspects of the plan as it was applied to Latvia had been applied in other countries, such as burning of synagogues (Germany) and ghettoization (Poland). Latvia presented a new development in the Holocaust, which was the implementation of mass killings immediately upon the occupation of a country. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD) attempted to stir up local anti-Jewish feeling by forcing Jews to dig up mass graves of Latvians who had been murdered by the NKVD in the Soviet occupation that had begun in June 1940. This was part of an overall SD plan to associate the Jews with Communism and Russians, both unpopular in Latvia. Latvian guards at early executions would ask the Jews waiting to be executed if they felt like singing "Katyusha". (Katyusha was a popular Russian patriotic song of World War II.) On June 28, 1941, two days after the fall of Daugavpils, the Nazis rounded up Jews in a synagogue, and then took them out and shot them. Other Jews were randomly murdered simply walking down the street. On Sunday June 29, 1941, the German army began rounding up Jewish men in Daugavpils to subject them to terror, humiliation and imprisonment under brutal and overcrowded conditions. At gun point the Germans made them shout "Heil Hitler", and sing Deutschland über alles. Survivors reported: The Germans accused them of setting fire to Daugavpils. According to Stahlecker's official report: Jews in general and Lithuanian refugees in particular were accused of being communists. On July 8, 1941, a newspaper in Daugavpils (Daugavpils Latviešu Avīze), published an editorial consistent with the German efforts to blame the Jews for communist atrocities: As time went on, increased numbers of Latvian auxiliary police guarded the prison where the Jewish men were held. By July 8, the work had become so hard that the Jews were literally being worked to death. One assignment included rolling huge blocks of stone to the top of a hill, another including carrying heavy timbers several kilometers. German guards struck prisoners with whips at will. == Railroad Park massacre ==

By July 7, 1941, the Latvia police had arrested about 1,250 people, including 1,125 Jews, and were holding them in the main prison in Daugavpils. Professor Ezergailis believed these may not have been properly described to the court. The next day, July 9, the Germans began shooting Jews and pushing the bodies into the ditches. The Germans filled-in all the trenches dug on July 8 with the bodies of the persons murdered on July 9, but there were still a lot of people left alive whom they had intended to kill. At the end of the killings on July 8, the survivors were put to work digging new graves and tamping down the earth over the bodies in the previous trenches. The next day, July 10, the killings resumed. The survivor Iwens reported after the war what he had learned from another survivor, Haim Kuritzky, about what occurred at the pits: Kuritsky was saved when the Germans turned out to have miscalculated the number of bodies they could place in the pits: Anyone not working fast enough to cover the bodies was ordered to lie down on them and was shot by the German officer, who screamed at them "faster, faster", and raved hysterically against the Jews. Jews were required to wear in Latvia and also the requirement that they walk in the roadway and not on the sidewalk == Measures against Jews ==

Roberts Blūzmanis, the Latvian police chief in Daugavpils, carried out the SD's wishes for certain Jewish restrictions. It was Blūzmanis, acting for the SD, who ordered that all Jews in Daugavpils over four years of age wear six-pointed yellow stars on the front and back of their clothing. == Construction of the ghetto ==

Construction of the ghetto began on July 18, 1941, as confirmed by Stahlecker himself: "Apart from organizing and carrying out measures of execution, the creation of Ghettos was begun in the larger towns at once during the first days of operations.". "In July, as the initial wave of shootings subsided, the local Germans and their Latvian counterparts rounded up some 14,000 Jews from Daugavpils and the outlying areas of Latgale and crammed them into the old Daugavpils fort, 'the Citadel'." == Forced relocation to the ghetto ==

On July 25, 1941, the Germans issued an order that all Jews were to relocate to the ghetto by the next day. == Perpetrators ==

Einsatzgruppe A was assigned by Reinhard Heydrich to kill the Jews of the Baltic states, including Latvia. Franz Walter Stahlecker was in command of Einsatzgruppen A. It operated in smaller squads known as Einsatzkommandos. Latgale and Daugavpils were assigned to Einsatzkommando 1b, who, under Erich Ehrlinger, had killed about 1,150 people, mostly Jews, by July 11, 1941. The chief of the local auxiliary police, Robert Blūzmanis, was in charge of the local Latvian auxiliary police. His role in the killings was to confine the Jews to the Grīva fortress ghetto and move them out to the killing places. Latvian self-defence men and Arājs murderers were also involved. It appears that Latvian police from the Daugavpils municipality were also involved. One of the precinct chiefs, Arvīds Sarkanis, wrote explicitly of "the liquidation of the Jews", providing the most detailed account of the participation of the Latvian police. Zaube, the German commandant of the Daugavpils ghetto, stood out for his extreme cruelty. He executed people who infringed his many rules, especially those who had smuggled in food, on the inner square of the ghetto in front of all inmates to frighten and to intimidate them. It was in Daugavpils that the liquidation of ghetto inmates started. From November 8 to 10 1941, 3,000 people were killed in Mežciems. The operation was headed by Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Günter Tabbert, who was then 25. Participation by local Latvians in the Daugavpils killings and ghettoization was initially minimal; but after two weeks of the German occupation, it became extensive. A Latvian SD unit was set up in Daugavpils, as well as a unit of auxiliary police. Along with the SD, these organizations persecuted, confined and eventually killed the Jews of the Daugavpils ghetto, but the precise extent of their involvement is unclear, because for the major killings, the Arājs commando would be brought in from Riga. == July and August killings ==

Ruse employed In the parlance of the perpetrators and the victims, the German word "aktion" (literally, action) came to mean "mass shooting." 'Actions' went on continuously in the Daugavpils area from late July when the ghetto was formed, until near the end of August. the date was July 27, 1941. Thousands of people were crammed into the small old fortress, with only two water taps, almost no sanitary facilities, and no food. Many people were naturally anxious to leave. A column of 2,000 people was quickly where Germans and Latvian auxiliaries shot The earthen cover heaped on the graves was quite thin, and two boys only slightly wounded and on the top of the heaped bodies dug themselves out and escaped. The executioners were often quite drunk. Another Nazi report states that 9,256 Jews were executed in Daugavpils up to October 15, 1941. There was a halt in the actions for 10 weeks after August 22, 1941, when Hamann was reassigned and Obersturmbannführer Günter Hugo Friedrich Tauber took over. He was then 25 years old. == Life in the ghetto ==

Jewish administration The ghetto was not a ghetto in the sense of a city district mandated or set aside by custom for Jews. It was an improvised prison, to hold the Jews until they could be done away with.) Movshenzon's father had been in charge of the city of Daugavpils in 1918, when the Germans occupied the city during World War I. Jews from other towns and villages of Latgalia and as far away as Vidzeme province were forced into the ghetto. Iwens described the situation from his point of view as a Jew who had been allowed to live as a skilled worker: Another survivor, Frankel-Zaltzman, described how the last survivors of the ghetto learned from a German soldier that they would not be massacred, as they had feared, on June 26, 1942, which was the one-year anniversary of the fall of Daugavpils: No matter what, the relationship between Jews and Germans remained strange at best: "Regardless of how friendly a German became with a Jew, awareness that one had absolute power over the other made such an association seem unnatural." Individual executions The German authorities enforced discipline in the Daugavpils ghetto by hanging people who were perceived as violating their many rules: A Jewish Ghetto police force enforced these rules. On at least one occasion, the police chief, one Pasternak, in early 1942, carried out a hanging, although it was perceived that he was reluctant to do so. In that case, the body of the executed woman, Mina Gittelson, whose crime was walking on the sidewalk and not in the street, and not wearing the Jewish badge, was left hanging for three days. and Mejerow), who was shot before the assembled ghetto inhabitants for exchanging a piece of cloth for two kilograms of flour. Sealing of the ghetto A few days after the November massacre, the ghetto was closed, or in the bureaucratic term, "quarantined". This meant that the few people who were authorized to leave the ghetto to work in the city could no longer do so. This cut off their ability to smuggle in food. People died of hunger. Typhus epidemics broke out in December 1941 and in February 1942, killing additional occupants. == November shootings ==

By the end of September 1941, the Nazis had killed about 30,000 Jews in Latvia, mostly in small towns. Three large population centers of Jews still remained, at Riga, Liepāja, and Daugavpils. Professor Ezergailis accepts the Nazi figure of 1,134, but this was based on a source which apparently refers to shootings on a single day - November 9, 1941. Others were hidden in the hospital by the nurses, at mortal risk to themselves. Of the several thousand people in the ghetto, only about 900 remained alive after the November shootings. Following the November massacre, a number of Jews with work permits were stationed (kasierniert or "barracked") outside the ghetto at the larger older fortress, sometimes called the citadel, on the north side of the Daugava River. Here they performed various labor services for the German army, and although they were not paid and food was scarce, they were treated better than the Jews who were confined to the ghetto. Because the citadel was under the administration of the German army, Latvian auxiliary police units were not seen. == Associated German and Latvian units ==

The following units of the German army were associated with the Daugavpils ghetto or the administration of forced labor: • Army Barracks Administration (Heeresunterkunft Verwaltung) No. 322. This organization was responsible for supervising Jews working in warehouses and workshops unloading, cleaning, sorting and repairing the uniforms of wounded German soldiers. • Army Barracks Administration (Heeresunterkunft Verwaltung) No. 200. Forty Jewish women worked for this organization, whose duties included cleaning the rooms of German officers. == May 1 liquidation ==

. While a few Jews were housed here, most of them in the Daugavpils ghetto were incarcerated across the Daugava River in a much smaller outpost of this fortress. On May 1, 1942, there were about 1,500 survivors in the Griva fortress/ghetto. The Nazis conducted another "selection" that day, killing the great majority of Jews in the ghetto. or two survived May 1. The May 1 selection followed the pattern of assembling the people to be executed, then marching them out to the Pogulianka Forest, where they were all shot and shoved into pre-dug mass graves. According to Iwens, who was at the citadel, and heard the story a few days later: Extraordinary brutality accompanied the May 1 killings. Among other things, the Nazis executed the older children in the ghetto itself by lining them up against a wall and shooting them. Eyewitness Maja Zarch, quoted in Gilbert, stated the following: Following the May 1 shootings, of the 16,000 Jews in Daugavpils at the time the city fell to the Germans, there remained alive about 250 working in the citadel and 180 to 200 who were working in the city. There were only "a couple" of small Jewish children left alive. (Another source says 1,000 inmates were left in the ghetto.) == Transfer to Kaiserwald ==

In late October 1943, there were still a few Jews housed in the Citadel who were working for the German army. On October 28, the Nazis and Latvian auxiliaries rounded up these people and transferred them to the Kaiserwald concentration camp. By this time, some of the Jews had managed to find or buy arms, and there was resistance to this action. Others killed their family members and then themselves to prevent being taken. A few escaped or hid, some with the help of at least two German soldiers, one named Liederman, the other Bruendl. A very small number (said to be 26 total), were permitted to stay on in the Citadel to work for the German army. On December 4, 1943, the Latvia police arrested these last Jews, leaving only three survivors who were still in hiding in the Citadel. == Number of victims ==

The precise number of victims is not clear. Iwens estimated there were 16,000 Jews living in Daugavpils and only 100 survived the Nazi occupation. Iwens does not draw a distinction between total deaths in the early shootings, the ghetto and the Kaiserwald concentration camp. Ezergailis calculates that about 28,000 Jews lived in Daugavpils and the Latgale district when the Nazi occupation began. Of these the Nazis killed about 20,000, of which 13,000 died in Daugavpils, and 7,000 in the smaller towns in the district. == Notes ==