On June 22, 1941, German forces crossed the Soviet border and launched Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s war of invasion, destruction, and mass murder in the Soviet Union. Behind the front lines followed the mobile killing units known as the Einsatzgruppen, tasked with exterminating entire population groups in Eastern Europe, including Jews, Communists, and others considered enemies of the Reich. Among the first territories occupied by Nazi forces was Latvia, one of the three Baltic states brutally annexed by Stalin in the summer of 1940. On November 30 and December 8, 1941, over two days, nearly 25,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto were told they would be resettled.
Instead, they were stripped of their clothing in the freezing winter air and driven to the edge of massive pits dug in advance in the Rumbula forest near Riga, where almost all of them were murdered. In the years that followed these atrocities, known as the Rumbula massacre, those responsible were tracked down and eventually forced to pay for their crimes with their lives. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than two years later, on June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
One month later, the German army entered Latvia, advancing eastward in Hitler’s war against the Soviets. The Nazi plan for the newly occupied Baltic territories was not only to defeat the Soviets but also to wage a racial war in these lands. Jews were to be rounded up and killed. In October 1941, the Riga Ghetto was established, and thousands of Jews were forced to leave their homes and were crowded behind barbed wire under heavy guard in the Latvian capital.
Overcrowding, starvation, and disease spread quickly. Families were crammed into small rooms without adequate food, heating, or medical care. The ghetto was completely isolated from the rest of the city, cutting off its inhabitants from all contact with the outside world. To carry out the liquidation of the Riga Ghetto, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, turned to SS Group Leader Friedrich Jeckeln, a man with proven experience in mass murder.
Jeckeln had previously organized large-scale executions in Ukraine, including the Babi Yar massacre near Kyiv, where more than 30,000 Jews were shot in September 1941. His methods were efficient, methodical, and cruel. Himmler knew exactly why he had chosen him. Heinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar for Ostland, raised some concerns.
He did not report to Himmler but to Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Lohse did not oppose anti-Jewish measures, but he feared that killing Latvia’s Jews would damage economic production and deprive the German war effort of valuable forced labor. On November 5, 1941, Jeckeln’s unit, consisting of about 50 killers and support personnel, arrived in Riga. Jeckeln did not arrive with them himself but traveled to Berlin, where he met with Himmler between November 10 and 12, 1941.
Himmler ordered him to kill all the inhabitants of the Riga Ghetto and to inform Lohse, if he objected, that this was an order from Himmler and Adolf Hitler himself. He told him: “Tell Lohse that this is my order, and it is also the Führer’s wish. ”
Jeckeln returned to Riga and began searching for a site to carry out the massacre of the Jews. He ultimately chose the Rumbula forest, about 15 kilometers or 9 miles southeast of the city.
The sandy soil there was easier to dig than the marshy ground around most of Riga, allowing large mass graves to be prepared quickly. The site was near railway lines but far enough from the city to conceal the operation that was about to begin. The operation began in the middle of the night on November 29, 1941. SD squads, the SS intelligence agency, along with protective police, Latvian collaborators, and about 80 Jewish ghetto police, stormed the sealed streets.
Residents were pulled from their sleep and ordered to assemble within half an hour. Holocaust survivor Max Kaufmann later described thousands of Germans and Latvian collaborators, many of them completely drunk, breaking into apartments and chasing residents amid hysterical screaming. Doors were smashed, and families were beaten out of their beds. Panic spread from building to building as armed men forced their way into cramped rooms and courtyards.
Children were torn from their parents, and some were thrown from third-floor windows. The Arājs Commando, a Latvian auxiliary unit formed under German authority and led by Viktors Arājs, played a central role in the violence. Its members had already participated in mass executions throughout Latvia. Among them was Herberts Cukurs, once a world-famous Latvian aviator, who became one of the most visible Latvian SD men at the scene.
Anyone who resisted or moved too slowly was killed on the spot. Within hours, thousands stood crowded in the bitter darkness, waiting to be pushed toward the forest. By the time the evacuation of the ghetto was complete, the violence had already claimed hundreds of lives. Between 600 and 1,000 people were killed during the night as residents were forced from their homes.
The streets were strewn with the bodies of those who had resisted, moved too slowly, or could not endure the brutality. Eventually, columns of about 1,000 people were formed and pushed toward the eastern edge of the city. With the first light of day, on November 30, 1941, the columns began to move. The Jews were told to bring small amounts of luggage, a ruse intended to make them believe they were being relocated rather than led to their deaths.
Mothers clutched their infants wrapped in blankets, while elderly men leaned on sticks, and neighbors supported the sick and disabled as they were driven in long columns out of the ghetto onto the road. The first column reached the Rumbula forest at around 9:00 a. m. on November 30, 1941.
Near the edge of the forest, people were ordered to hand over their luggage. Bags and bundles piled up in growing heaps as coats were removed, shoes placed in one pile, and clothing in another. The undressing area was under close watch. Here, in the brief moment before death, resistance could have erupted.
Nothing happened. The operation proceeded with mechanical precision. They stripped down to their underclothes in the freezing air. Men, women, and children walked through police cordons toward the pits.
If too many arrived at once, they were held in the nearby forest until their turn came. From the edge of the graves, they could see the bodies below, some still, some still moving. They were pushed down the slopes in single file, ten at a time. Victims were forced to lie face down on top of those already shot, who were still writhing and moving, bleeding and reeking of brains and excrement.
Using Russian automatic weapons set to single fire, the shooters fired from about two meters away, hitting each person in the back of the head. When the bottom layer died, another group was ordered into the grave and forced to position themselves with their heads at the feet of those beneath them, on top of the corpses. They too were shot from above. The pit filled layer by layer until no space remained.
Jeckeln referred to this system as “sardine packing,” a method he had already used when personally leading mass killings of men, women, and children in western Ukraine. Victims were arranged with their heads at the feet of those below them in tight rows, each layer placed directly on top of the corpses beneath. It was later noted that even some experienced members of the Einsatzgruppen were horrified by the cruelty of this procedure. Inside the pit, the suffering continued.
Some wept, others prayed or recited the Torah. Victims helped each other, assisting the elderly and disabled into the grave. The shooting continued in fading light and likely ended around 5:00 p. m.
as darkness fell. By the end of the first day, about 13,000 people had been shot, but not all had died. Max Kaufmann later wrote that the ground continued to tremble for a long time because so many people were still alive. Naked, wounded survivors wandered near the pits until 11:00 a.
m. the next day, searching for help, but in vain. Historian Andrievs Ezergailis described what was still inside the graves. The pit itself was still alive.
The bleeding, writhing bodies were regaining consciousness. Moans and groans could be heard late into the night. There were people who had only been slightly wounded or not wounded at all. They crawled out of the pit.
Hundreds must have suffocated under the weight of human bodies. Guards were placed at the pits, and a unit of Latvian auxiliary police was sent to secure the area. The orders were to finish off all survivors on the spot. Anyone found moving was shot again.
The killings did not resume immediately after November 30. It was later said that Friedrich Jeckeln may have been unsettled by the difficulties he faced during the first massacre, including resistance and disorder in Riga. Executions stopped for a week. Many in the ghetto believed the worst had passed.
However, on Monday, December 8, 1941, the violence began again. The brutality inside the ghetto was even harsher than before. About 300 Jews were killed while being forced from their homes. Snow was falling that morning.
This time, the 20-kilogram bags were left behind, as people were told their luggage would be transported by truck to a fictitious resettlement point. Mothers with small children and the elderly were told they could ride on sleds, reinforcing the deception. When the columns reached the forest, the shooting had already begun. Frida Michelson, one of the few survivors of the Rumbula massacre who was forced to march that day, recalled: “As we reached the forest, we heard shooting again.
This was a terrible omen for our future. If I had any doubts about the intentions of our tormentors, they all vanished. ”
Of the approximately 12,000 people deported to Rumbula on December 8, only three known individuals survived: Frida Michelson, who escaped by pretending to be dead under piles of shoes; Elle Madre, who claimed to be a Latvian; and Matiss Lutrag, who hid under clothing in a truck returning to Riga. In total, an estimated 25,000 Jews were executed in the Rumbula forest.
About 24,000 of the victims were Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto, and about 1,000 were German Jews transported to the forest by train, which left Berlin on Thursday, November 27, and arrived in Riga on Saturday, November 29, 1941. They were the first group killed on Sunday, November 30, 1941. World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. But for many of those who organized and carried out the Rumbula massacre, the moment of reckoning had only just begun.
Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS leader who oversaw the Rumbula massacre, was captured by Soviet forces in 1945. He was tried before a Soviet military court in Riga, convicted of war crimes, sentenced to death, and publicly hanged in February 1946. Rudolf Lange, an SS leader and one of the main organizers of the Rumbula massacre, disappeared during the Battle of Poznań in February 1945. He was likely killed fighting against Soviet forces or committed suicide when the city fell.
Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A and one of the main organizers of mass executions in the Baltic region, was fatally wounded on March 22, 1942, and died the following day. The leaders of the Einsatzkommando units met varied fates. Herberts Cukurs escaped to South America but met his end in 1965 when Israeli Mossad agents lured him into a trap near Montevideo, Uruguay. Initially, they wanted to kidnap him, but he resisted fiercely.
So they killed him on the spot and left his body with documents detailing his crimes and responsibility for the deaths of 30,000 people. Ultimately, the Soviet Union tried the majority of captured Einsatzkommando members. Between 1944 and the mid-1960s, trials were held in Riga and other Latvian cities. Of 356 identified members, 352 were tried, 44 were sentenced to death, and 30 of them were executed.
During World War II, approximately 75 percent of Latvia’s pre-war Jewish population was killed, making Latvia one of the countries with the highest proportion of Jewish victims in all of Europe.