On June 22, 1941, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its former partner in the war against Poland. Within weeks, German forces swept across vast stretches of the East, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three Baltic states that Stalin's Soviet Union had annexed the previous year.
The German occupation transformed life across the region. Jews were stripped of their rights and property and forced into ghettos. Civilians were deported for forced labor. Soviet prisoners of war were held in appalling conditions, and entire communities faced persecution and collective punishment.
Behind these policies of repression stood men who had wielded enormous power over the populations under their control. Among them was Friedrich Jeckeln, one of Heinrich Himmler's most powerful SS commanders, a man responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people.
In January 1946, he and seven senior German occupation officials would stand before a Soviet military court in Riga, the capital of Latvia. There, the men who once ruled the Baltic territories would face the crimes committed under their leadership and be forced to answer for them.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with the German attack on Poland. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded its former partner, the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks German forces had overrun the territory of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which the Soviet Union had occupied and annexed in 1940.
The occupied lands were placed under a German civil administration called the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the Reich Commissariat for the East, which covered the Baltic states and the western part of present-day Belarus. What happened there over the following three years was among the most concentrated killing of the entire war.
Nearly the entire Jewish population of Latvia, roughly 70,000 people, was murdered during the Holocaust, most of them in the first months of the Nazi occupation. The Jews of Riga were driven into a ghetto, sealed off on October 25, 1941, holding about 30,000 people. Five weeks later, the largest part of it was emptied.
On November 30 and December 8, 1941, about 25,000 Jews were forced to walk 10 kilometers southeast of the city to the Rumbula forest and were shot at the edge of pits dug there in advance. It was the largest single massacre in Latvia and one of the largest atrocities of the Holocaust before the creation of the death camps.
The ghetto was left behind, and the empty houses were soon filled with Jews deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the Baltic region to be killed there. Many of them were in turn shot in the Bikernieki forest at the northeastern edge of Riga, where about 35,000 people died during the Nazi occupation.
It was not the Germans who carried out most of the killings in Latvia, but local collaborators. The most important of these was a Latvian paramilitary unit led by Viktors Arajs, a former police officer whose men killed Jews across the country and also took part in the killings at Rumbula. They operated throughout under the direction and supervision of the SS.
The man who organized the killings at Rumbula was Friedrich Jeckeln. During the Second World War he served as Higher SS and Police Leader, first in southern Russia and then in Ostland, answering only to Heinrich Himmler, head of the entire German SS and police, and through him to Adolf Hitler.
Jeckeln had served as an officer in the German Imperial Army during the First World War and afterward worked as an engineer. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and was accepted into the SS in December 1930. He rose rapidly through the ranks, and by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union he was one of Himmler's most trusted regional commanders.
His career left a trail of mass graves along the line of the German advance. In Ukraine, between August 26 and 28, 1941, his forces shot about 23,600 Jews in Kamianets-Podilskyi, a city in the west of the country. A month later, units under his command took part in a massacre that killed 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
In the autumn of 1941, Jeckeln was transferred to the Baltic region, where he applied the same methods. He devised a method for executing large numbers of people that his men called the "Jeckeln system," or "sardine packing." Victims were forced to lie face down in the pit on top of those who had gone before, before being shot.
German occupation forces in the Baltic region used other methods of killing as well. Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war died of hunger, disease, and executions. Villages suspected of aiding partisans were burned with their inhabitants inside. In the prisons of occupied cities, prisoners were beaten and subjected to electric shocks.
Civilians were deported for forced labor to Germany, and entire areas were stripped of their food, livestock, and machinery. In Estonia, the occupation authorities applied a policy of "Germanization," which included imposing taxes on the local population, imprisoning those deemed untrustworthy, and confiscating their property to make room for German settlers. When the front lines shifted and the Germans withdrew, they destroyed everything they could not take with them.
The Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union, retook the Baltic region and took control of Riga on October 13, 1944. Some German commanders failed to escape west in time, while others were captured in the final collapse of Germany. Jeckeln was taken prisoner near Halbe, a small town south of Berlin, on April 28, 1945.
The Soviet authorities had been documenting the crimes of the occupation for years through the Extraordinary State Commission, established in Moscow in November 1942. The commission gathered documents, opened mass graves, and recorded the testimony of survivors and witnesses. By the end of the war, the Soviets held the evidence and some of the perpetrators, and decided to try them in a public proceeding.
The Riga trial opened on January 26, 1946, before a military court of the Baltic Military District, one of the Soviet army's regional commands. There were eight defendants, all tried under a decree issued by the Soviet leadership on April 19, 1943, which set out how German war criminals and their local collaborators were to be tried and punished.
The defendants had administered the occupation at every level. Alongside Jeckeln stood Alexander Boecking, who had been the district commissioner in Estonia during the war and sent 3,000 people to Germany for forced labor, and six generals of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces.
Siegfried Ruff was the military commander of the city of Riga in 1944, the year the Germans destroyed the city before withdrawing from it. Albrecht Digeon von Monteton, who commanded forces at Libau, known today as Liepaja on the Latvian coast, was held accountable, among other crimes, for the deportation of more than 22,000 people from that area and for the burning of villages.
Bronislaw Pawel ran prisoner-of-war camps in Ostland, camps that became sites of mass extermination. Friedrich Jeckeln held field commands in the Baltic states and other Soviet territories, and was accused of issuing orders that led his men to shoot and burn alive hundreds of civilians. According to the indictment, soldiers under his command even placed children in sacks and killed them by striking them against trees.
Hans Kuepper was held accountable for the killing of civilians suspected of supporting the partisan movement and for the destruction of entire areas during the withdrawal of German forces. Wolfgang von Ditfurth had commanded Security Division 403 in Lithuania and Belarus. The indictment accused him of arresting and executing Soviet citizens near Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, in July and August 1941, an operation in which about 4,000 Jews were killed. He was also accused of operations against the civilian population around the Belarusian city of Vitebsk between September 1941 and March 1942, and of his conduct as military commander of the Russian city of Kursk in the spring of 1942.
Jeckeln, whom the Riga court held responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Jews, Roma, and others, was interrogated 29 times before being brought into the courtroom. His statements, together with captured German documents and the testimony of survivors and men who had served under him, left no room for doubt about his guilt. He did not deny the killings. Instead, he claimed he had acted on Himmler's orders and therefore bore no personal responsibility.
The court rejected this defense, and on February 3, 1946, it issued its verdict. All eight defendants were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence against von Ditfurth was not carried out, however, and reports said the reason was his health; he died of heart failure in the Riga prison hospital on March 22, 1946.
The other seven were taken to the gallows at noon the same day. The condemned men were forced to stand at the back of trucks with nooses around their necks. The trucks then moved forward and left them hanging as at least 4,000 people watched them die. Among the onlookers were Red Army soldiers and residents of Riga who had lived through the occupation and lost family members to the killings these men had directed.
Jeckeln had turned 51 the day before, and he died in the city whose Jews had been killed in the pits of Rumbula. The Riga trial, whose verdict was never in doubt as was often the case in the Soviet judicial system, was as much an instrument of Stalin's state as it was a court of justice. Yet it achieved something few courts had done before. The men who had administered the killing of Jews and other civilians faced evidence of their crimes and were forced to answer for them in the places where those crimes were committed.
The message of the Riga trial was clear. The killings had followed a chain of command, and the men responsible for them could be identified and brought to justice.