On June 22, 1941, German forces crossed the Soviet border, launching Operation Barbarossa. Behind the front lines came the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units tasked with annihilating entire populations in Eastern Europe. Among the first territories occupied by the Nazis was Latvia, one of the three Baltic states brutally annexed by Stalin in the summer of 1940.
On November 30 and December 8, 1941, 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 pre-dug in the Rumbula Forest near Riga, where they were almost all murdered. In the years that followed, those responsible for the atrocity were tracked down and forced to pay for their crimes.
The Nazi plan in the newly occupied Baltic states was not only to defeat the Soviets but also to wage an ethnic war. Jews were to be rounded up and killed. In October 1941, the Riga Ghetto was established, and thousands of Jews were forced from their homes into a tightly guarded area behind barbed wire. Overcrowding, starvation, and disease spread quickly.
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 mass 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, systematic, and cruel.
On November 5, 1941, Jeckeln’s unit of about 50 killers and support personnel arrived in Riga. Jeckeln himself traveled to Berlin, where he met with Himmler between November 10 and 12. Himmler ordered him to kill all inhabitants of the Riga Ghetto. If Lohse objected, Jeckeln was to say it was Himmler’s order and the will of the Führer.
Jeckeln returned to Riga and chose the Rumbula Forest, about 15 kilometers southeast of the city, as the execution site. The sandy soil was easier to dig than the marshy ground around most of Riga, allowing for large mass graves to be prepared quickly. The location was near railway lines but far enough from the city to conceal the operation.
The operation began at midnight on November 29, 1941. SD squads, 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 hunting down residents amid hysterical screaming.
The Arajs Unit, a Latvian auxiliary force formed under German authority and led by Viktors Arājs, played a central role in the violence. Its members had already taken part in mass executions across 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.
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. Columns of about 1,000 people were formed and pushed toward the eastern edge of the city. With the first daylight on November 30, 1941, the columns began to move.
The Jews were told to bring small luggage, a trick meant to convince them they were being relocated, not led to their deaths. The first column reached the Rumbula Forest at around 9:00 a.m. Near the edge of the forest, people were ordered to hand over their luggage. Coats were removed, shoes were piled up, and clothing was stacked in another pile.
The undressing area was under close watch. Here, in the brief moment before death, resistance could have broken out. Nothing happened. The process proceeded with mechanical precision. Men, women, and children were stripped to their underwear in the freezing air and marched through police cordons toward the pits.
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 those already shot, who were still writhing and bleeding. Using automatic Russian weapons set to single fire, the shooters fired from about two meters away, hitting each person in the back of the head.
The pit filled layer by layer until no space remained. Jeckeln referred to this system as "sardine packing," a method he had used while personally leading mass killings in western Ukraine. Even some experienced Einsatzgruppen members were later said to have been horrified by the cruelty of the procedure.
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 were dead. Kaufmann later wrote that the ground trembled for a long time due to the many people still alive. Naked, wounded survivors wandered near the pits until 11:00 a.m. the next day, searching for help in vain.
Guards were placed at the pits, and a Latvian auxiliary police unit was sent to guard the area. Orders were given 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 Jeckeln may have been unsettled by the difficulties encountered during the first massacre, including resistance and disorder in Riga. Executions stopped for a week. Many in the ghetto believed the worst had passed.
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 fake resettlement point.
When the convoys reached the forest, the shooting had already begun. Frida Michelson, one of the few survivors of the Rumbula massacre, 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 taken to Rumbula on December 8, only three known individuals survived. Frida Michelson escaped by pretending to be dead under piles of shoes. Elle Madre claimed to be a Livonian, and Matis Lutrag hid under clothing in a truck returning to Riga.
In total, it is estimated that about 25,000 Jews were executed in the Rumbula Forest. Approximately 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. They were the first group killed on Sunday, November 30, 1941.
World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. But for many who organized and carried out the Rumbula massacre, the moment of reckoning had just begun. Friedrich Jeckeln 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 in 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 next day.
The commanders of the Einsatzkommando units faced varied fates. Herberts Cukurs fled to South America, but met his end in 1965 when Mossad agents lured him into a trap near Montevideo, Uruguay. Initially, they wanted to kidnap him, but he resisted fiercely. They killed him on the spot and left his body with documents detailing his crimes and responsibility for the deaths of 30,000 people.
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 the 356 identified members, 352 were tried, 44 were sentenced to death, and 30 of them were executed.
During World War II, about 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.