Riga Ghetto

and forbidden to use the sidewalk 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. 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. 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. 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 (Wachtmeister) 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 (Treuhandverwaltung), 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. 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 (the so-called "Reich Jews") 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". 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. ==Organization of the German ghetto==

The German Jews organized themselves by their cities of origin. Each group had a representative on the Jewish Council. The head of the Jewish Council was a man from Cologne named Max Leiser. Unlike the Latvian Jews, the German Jews were directly under the authority of the Gestapo, which set up an office in the German ghetto on Ludzas street. A Jewish Ghetto Police force was also established. In general the Latvian and the German ghettos were subject to separate administration, although the occupation Labor Authority drew personnel from both ghettos. ==Krause becomes commandant==

In December 1941, Kurt Krause, whom Kauffman describes as a "man-eater", became the German commandant. Krause was a former Berlin police detective and his assistant Max Gymnich, was a Gestapo man from Cologne. Krause and Gymnich used a large and dangerous dog to help enforce their commands. A Latvian Jewish survivor Joseph Berman, is recorded as stating the following about described Gymnich: ==Lithuanian Jews deported to ghetto==

In February 1942 about 500 Lithuanian Jews were deported to the Latvian ghetto from the Kaunas Ghetto. They told the Latvian Jews of the mass killings that had taken place in the old forts around Kaunas (see Ninth Fort). There were many skilled craftsmen among the Lithuanian Jews, who gradually merged into the Lithuania Jewish population of the ghetto. Very few of them were to survive. ==Ghetto population changes==

By December 22, 1941, there were about 4,000 German and 3,000 Latvian Jews housed in the entire ghetto. As of February 10, 1942, the approximate ghetto and concentration camp populations of German Jews in Riga and the vicinity were: Jungfrauhof: 2,500, German ghetto: 11,000, Salaspils: 1,300. Of the Latvian Jews, there were about 3,500 men and 300 women in the Latvian ghetto. Altogether 20,057 Jews from the Reich had been deported to Riga by February 10, 1942. Only 15,000 remained alive on that date. According to German ghetto survivor Schneider, the inhabitants of the German ghetto did not realize how many German Jews had been killed following deportation, and remained under the impression that deportation and forced labor were the worst that were going to happen: ==Conditions in the ghetto==

Access to and from the ghetto could only be made through the police yard. People exiting or entering the ghetto were searched here and often beaten. Internal government Both the Latvian and German ghettos had an internal Jewish government. All communications from the "Aryan" society with Jews were to go through the Jewish Council (Judenrat). Frida Michelson wrote much later that while some members of the Jewish Council tried to improve things for the Jews, in her opinion, "the Judenrat was a fiction, created to help the Nazis organize the annihilation of the Jewish population". Gertrude Schneider said of the German Judenrat that it employed a number people, worked efficiently, but "was sometimes used for sinister purposes, mainly in the beginning when the German authorities decided that the ghetto was becoming too crowded, with many people drawing food rations but not producing enough". Food Legally, food could only be purchased from shops within the ghetto, and only with ration books. What food was available was of poor quality. The council made the decision to allocate ration cards according to how much work a person was performing for the occupation authorities. There was a black market in food. Finances and property The Nazis, under an October 13, 1941 edict issued by Lohse, entitled "Directions concerning treatment of Jewish property" officially decreed the forfeiture of almost every item of value possessed by the Jews. As a result, the Jews concealed as much property and valuables as they could in hiding places within the ghetto. Special efforts, including smuggling and bribery of the Latvian guards, were made to make sure that food, which was allocated by the Germans according to work outside the ghetto, could be obtained for the teachers. The separate schools were consolidated after the murder of large number of parents and smaller children in the Dünamünde Action, and despite this shock, Professor Lemberger continued to develop separate lesson plans for each pupil. Other academics continued to give lessons privately. Their payment was food. For example, Professor Schwartz gave instructions in mathematics to older students so that, should they be released from the ghetto, they would not have fallen behind their peers. During the summer of 1942, singing events were held out of doors in the vacant lots behind the houses. Krause, Gymnich, and Neumann attended a few of these, but stood off a bit, not sitting on the ground like the Jews but leaning up against a tree or a building smoking cigarettes. Medical care and sanitation At the outset of the Latvian ghetto, there was only a single out-patient clinic available for medical care, although because the ghetto was only in existence for a short time, medical supplies were more than sufficient. The people were also under extreme psychological pressure and there were suicides. Latvian ghetto survivor Kaufmann praised the efforts of the physicians: ... the physician Dr. Josef tried with all his might to alleviate our sufferings. During the ghetto's short lifespan our doctors performed virtually superhuman feats. Because there was no room in the clinic for all the patients, they treated other patients at home, voluntarily and free of charge. One could see Dr. Mintz and Dr. Kostia Feiertag going to visit their patients day and night. And the other doctors were no less committed. ==Forced abortions and sterilization==

Children were not supposed to be born in the ghetto. After the Rumbula massacres, very few women survived in the Latvian ghetto, and they were housed separately from the men. In the German ghetto, there was no segregation of the sexes. Even so, the Germans forbade sexual relations. This proved impossible to enforce. However, the consequences were that abortions were the most common sort of medical operation performed by the Jewish doctors. A few children were born alive in the ghetto in the first year; they were killed by an injection of poison. Krause, the German commandant, hated the idea of young Jewish women becoming pregnant, and often watched abortions at the clinic. He would threaten to have both the father and the mother sterilized. For a woman to have a second abortion meant mandatory sterilization, consequently the Jewish doctors attempted to perform such abortions in secret. ==Forced labor==

During the early days of the occupation, Latvian Jews came to rely on work permits (German: Ausweis Some Germans were protective and even kind towards the Jews who were working for them. Another survivor, Frida Michelson, sent to work on sugar beet fields near Jelgava for six weeks in the summer of 1941, told her fellow forced laborers: On the other hand, the occupation authorities, including both the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht confiscated both housing and furniture at will from Jews. Anyone standing in the way was simply murdered. Skilled craftsmen worked for the German war effort in various positions. They had a better chance to survive hence these positions were highly sought after. Many of the German Jews had been professionals or merchants, and lacked the ability to perform a craft, and without this, their rate of survival would be greatly reduced. At the end of 1942 approximately 12,000 Jews of the Riga ghetto were in work assignments. Of these, about 2,000 were housed outside the ghetto at their workplaces, 2,000 worked in workshops within the ghetto, and more than 7,300 were led from the ghetto in columns to their workplaces. An account from the year 1943 lists 13.200 Jews in the ghetto. There were many instances of work-related killings during the history of the Riga ghetto. • Shortly after the German Jews arrived, the guard Danskop accused 18 young German women of stealing during the course of the work they were doing cleaning of the apartments of the murdered Latvian Jews, and had them shot. • In January 1942, the Nazi authorities picked 900 of the youngest and strongest Jews and sent them southeast to a town 18 km from Riga to build a concentration camp, which became known as the Salaspils concentration camp. There these Jews were worked to death, so that in June 1942, only 60 to 70 "living skeletons" returned to Riga. In addition to the many who died during the course of the camp construction, Rudolf Lange and the Schutzstaffel Nazi SS man Richard Nickel executed a number of people for even the slightest infraction. ==The Dünamünde Action==

In March, 1942, the Nazi authorities in Riga decided the German ghetto was getting too crowded, and organized two massacres of the German Jews. These massacres became known as the "Dünamünde Action" in which they killed about 3,800 people, mostly children, the elderly and the sick, using a ruse to trick the victims into believing they would be going to an easier work assignment. Instead they were all shot. ==Executions in the ghetto==

The Nazi authorities established a prison in the German ghetto, and both German and Latvian Jews were subject to being incarcerated on even a suspicion of infraction of the many ghetto rules. Many were never seen again after being taken to the ghetto prison. Among other things, bartering, and smuggling forbidden items, such as food, into the ghetto, which were necessary for survival, were punishable by death if one were apprehended. It was also punishable by death to possess a newspaper or other written material. ==1942 in the German Ghetto==

On April 2 and May 4, 1942, two transports of Jewish men were taken from the ghetto to Salaspils concentration camp. Krause had wanted the men retained in the ghetto, while Lange wanted them transferred to Salaspils for work duties. Conditions at Salaspils were harsh. In August, 1942 about one third of the transportees to Salapils were returned to the ghetto. Many of those returned were in poor health and died shortly after their return. The German Jews in the ghetto began to rumor among themselves that the Germans had brought them to Riga to be exterminated. Outside of the ghetto there were housed a few Jews whose work duties gave them confirmation of the overall Nazi plan. Some Jews worked at the headquarters of Einsatzkommando 2c were given the task of sorting the clothing and jewelry that had come from the victims of the massacres in Latvia. Many of these came in suitcases, and from the names and addresses on the luggage, the Jews charged with sorting the items could tell where they'd come from. Other personal effects from the victims came into Riga from all over Latvia where murders were occurring. The local SS picked over the effects before they were sent back to Germany, and Jewish women who cleaned the apartments of officers found many valuable things, such drawers full of watches, closets full of furs (with the labels of their original owners still on them). The Nazi gave the task of digging graves to a work detail called "Kommando Krause 2." This group of 38 Jewish men, was housed at the Central Prison. They were instructed not to tell anyone about the mass killings. 16 of these men survived long enough to be returned to the German ghetto, violated their instructions, and told the people there about the mass killings that had been perpetrated in the forests around Riga. . Lilli Henoch, a German world record holder in the discus, shot put, and 4 × 100 meters relay events, and the holder of 10 German national championships, was deported to the ghetto on September 5, 1942, and killed by machine gun and buried in a mass grave shortly thereafter. ==Dissolution and KZ Kaiserwald==

The lack of workers for important war enterprises, and the economic advantage which the WVHA drew by the hiring from Jewish forced laborers, did not, however, protect permanently against the destruction intentions of the Nazis. Heinrich Himmler arranged in June 1943 on to seize: In the summer of 1943, in the Riga suburb of Kaiserwald (Latvian: Mežaparks) the Nazis constructed Kaiserwald concentration camp, where eight barracks for prisoners were planned. The first 400 Jews were transferred there in July 1943 from the ghetto. For them, this meant separation from family. They were confronted also with prisoner clothing, shearing of their hair, and loss of privacy. From this time on the gradual dissolution of the ghetto in Riga began. For the most part it was vacated in November 1943. Extensive plans to remove and second establish the concentration camp were scrapped. Several enterprises furnished camps, in which the forced laborers were housed. Older people, children, people who cared for the surviving children, and persons with illnesses were transferred by train in November 1943 to Auschwitz concentration camp. The total on this transport is in dispute, but most observers believe that 2,000 people were included on the Auschwitz train. By the end of November all the Jews who were not murdered in Biķernieki or elsewhere had been transferred out of the ghetto. ==Riga Ghetto's List==

Riga Ghetto's List (Jewish ghetto in Riga, 1941–1943.). Tamara Zitcere (02.12.1947. – 25.07.2014.) has overlooked and studied 346 books of House registers at Latvian State Historical Archive, including more than 68 house registers of Riga ghetto preserved by nowadays. Total number of houses in Riga Ghetto was 81. Upon the research of information and the generalization of data, the list of more than 5764 Jewish victims of the ghetto was prepared. The Riga Ghetto's List (1941—1943.), List of Riga ghetto imprisoners by Tamara Zitcere based on house registers of Riga ghetto is exhibited at the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum in Riga, Latvia and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. ==Time line==

• 22 June 1941: German invasion. • 1 July 1941: Riga falls to German forces. • 13 Oct 1941: German occupation civil chief Hinrich Lohse issues forfeiture decree. • 24 Oct 1941: Ghetto completely enclosed by barbed wire. • 25 Oct 1941: All Latvian Jews in Riga and vicinity required to live in the ghetto. • 29 Nov 1941: The first trainload of about 1,000 German Jews arrives in Riga. • 30 Nov 1941: First day of Rumbula massacre; approximately 12,000 Latvian Jews from the ghetto murdered; 1,000 German Jews from the first train also murdered. • 1 Dec to 8 Dec 1941: Four trainloads of Jews deported from the Reich arrive in Riga and are housed initially at Jumpravuiža under atrocious conditions; many are shot by the Arājs Kommando in the Biķernieki forest, others are transferred to Salaspils to continue the construction of the concentration camp there. • 8 Dec 1941: Second day of Rumbula; approximately 12,000 more Latvian Jews from the ghetto are murdered. • 16 Mar 1942: First Dünamünde Action. 1,900 Reich Jews from the ghetto are murdered. • 25 Mar 1942: Second Dünamünde Action. 1,840 Reich Jews from Jumpravmuiža are murdered. • 31 Oct 1942: Execution of the Latvian ghetto police. • July 1943: Transfer of ghetto occupants to Kaiserwald (Mežaparks) concentration camp begins. • 8 Oct 1943: Transfer of Liepāja Ghetto survivors to Riga Ghetto • 2 Nov 1943: About 2,000 people, including children, their caregivers, the old and the sick, are transported from the ghetto to Auschwitz concentration camp. • End of Nov 1943: All Jews removed from the ghetto, either by transport to another camp or by murder. ==Sources==