On 30 November and 8 December 1941, the SS and Latvian auxiliary forces shot around 25,000 Jews in two days of killing in the Rumbula forest, ten kilometres south-east of Riga. The dead were almost all the surviving members of the Riga ghetto, plus around 1,000 German Jews who had just arrived in Riga from a deportation train out of Berlin. Rumbula was the second largest two-day shooting operation of the Holocaust, after Babi Yar. It was carried out, like Ponary further north, mostly by local volunteers under German command.
The Riga ghetto
The German army took Riga on 1 July 1941. Within weeks, the local Latvian Arājs Commando, an auxiliary unit of around 300 men under the lawyer Viktors Arājs, had begun shooting Latvian Jews in the forests outside the city. By October the surviving Riga Jews had been concentrated in a small ghetto in the Maskavas district. Around 30,000 people, in conditions of extreme overcrowding, with rations designed to starve them slowly, awaited a decision on what would happen next.
The decision came in November. Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Riga ghetto be liquidated to make room for German Jews who were about to be deported to the city from the Reich. The local Higher SS and Police Leader, Friedrich Jeckeln, who had organised the Babi Yar killing two months earlier, took personal charge of the operation.
The two days
On 30 November 1941, between four and seven in the morning, the Rumbula operation began. Jeckeln’s force of around twenty German SS men and several hundred Latvian auxiliaries went into the ghetto. The Jewish residents were ordered to assemble in marching columns. The march to Rumbula took several hours. The elderly and the disabled, who could not walk fast enough, were shot in the streets of the ghetto and along the route. Witnesses recorded that snow falling that morning was stained pink along the line of march.
At the killing site, the same procedure as at Babi Yar was followed. The pits had been dug in advance by Soviet prisoners of war, who were themselves killed when the digging was finished. The Jews were made to undress, marched in groups to the pit, and shot as they lay on top of those killed before them. Around 14,000 people died on 30 November. The operation continued on 8 December 1941, when most of the remaining ghetto residents were brought to Rumbula and killed in the same way. Around 11,000 died in the second wave.
The German Jews on the Berlin train
One subset of the Rumbula victims is particularly haunting. On the morning of 30 November, a deportation train arrived in Riga from Berlin, carrying around 1,000 German Jews who had been told they were being resettled in the east. They were taken straight from the train to the killing site at Rumbula and shot alongside the Latvian Jews. The German Jews on that train have particular significance because they were among the first German Jewish deportees to be murdered on arrival rather than confined in a ghetto. The pattern of immediate-arrival killing would become standard at the death camps the following year.
This particular operation produced an unintended consequence. The order to murder the Berlin Jews on arrival had been given without authorisation from above. Himmler, when he heard, was furious and reprimanded Jeckeln. The point was not that the Berlin Jews should not have been murdered. The point was that Jeckeln had killed them before the Reich Security Main Office had decided how the killing of German Jews was to be procedurally handled. The reprimand is one of the documents historians point to in the argument over when the decision to murder all of European Jewry, including the Jews of the Reich itself, was actually made.
The survivors and the testimony
Around forty Riga Jews who had been working outside the ghetto on the morning of 30 November survived the Rumbula operation, returning to find an empty ghetto. They formed a small remnant population in the so-called small ghetto, a smaller fenced area, which was used as a labour reserve for the next two years. Most of them were eventually killed too. A handful survived the war, hidden by Latvian friends or by escaping to partisan units in the forests. The most-quoted account is the memoir of Frida Michelson, a young Latvian Jew who threw herself face-down at the killing site, was buried under shoes that the killers piled on her, and dug her way out after dark.
The Latvian record
The Rumbula killings were largely the work of Latvians. The Arājs Commando, the Latvian auxiliary police, and individual Latvian volunteers carried out the round-ups, the march, and most of the shooting. Viktors Arājs himself was tracked down in West Germany after the war, tried in Hamburg in 1979, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in prison in 1988. Many of his men were not prosecuted. The Latvian state, after independence in 1991, has been slower than the German state to confront the wartime collaboration of its own citizens. The Rumbula site was originally marked, under Soviet rule, as a memorial to murdered Soviet citizens, with no specifically Jewish reference. The current memorial, built in 2002, names the dead as Jews and acknowledges the Latvian role.
See also
Sources
- Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941-1944, Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996
- Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia, Northwestern University Press, 2000
- Frida Michelson, I Survived Rumbuli, Holocaust Library, 1979
- USHMM: Riga