On the morning of January 26, 1946, eight men who had once governed the Baltic territories under Nazi occupation stood before a Soviet military court in Riga, the capital of Latvia. They were charged with crimes committed during the German occupation of the region, a period that had turned the Baltic states into one of the most concentrated killing grounds of the entire war. Seated among them was Friedrich Jeckeln, one of the most powerful SS leaders in the Nazi hierarchy, a man who by his own command had overseen the murders of more than one hundred thousand people. The invasion that brought Jeckeln to the Baltic began on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany turned on its former partner and attacked the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa.
Within weeks, German forces swept through Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, territories the Soviet Union had occupied and annexed only the previous year. The German occupation that followed transformed daily 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. Entire communities were subjected to persecution and collective punishment. The occupied territories were placed under a German civilian administration called the Reichskommissariat Ostland, which covered the Baltic states and the western part of what is now Belarus. What occurred there over the next three years ranked among the most concentrated killing operations of the war.
Nearly the entire Jewish population of Latvia, roughly seventy thousand people, was murdered during the Holocaust, most of them in the first months of the occupation. In Riga, Jews were forced into a ghetto that was sealed on October 25, 1941, confining some thirty thousand people. Five weeks later, the ghetto was largely emptied. On November 30 and December 8, approximately twenty-five thousand Jews were marched ten kilometers southeast of the city to the Rumbula forest, where they were shot at the edge of pits that had been prepared in advance.
It was the largest single massacre in Latvia and one of the largest atrocities of the Holocaust before the death camps were established. The abandoned ghetto was soon refilled with Jews deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, many of whom were subsequently shot in the Bikernieki forest on the northeastern edge of Riga, where around thirty-five thousand people perished during the occupation. Most of the killing in Latvia was not carried out by Germans alone. Local collaborators did much of the work.
The most significant of these was a Latvian paramilitary unit led by Viktors Arājs, a former police officer whose men murdered Jews across the country and also took part in the Rumbula massacre. They operated at all times under the direction and supervision of the SS. The man who organized the killings at Rumbula was Friedrich Jeckeln. During the war, he served as the highest commander of all SS and police forces, first in southern Russia and later in Ostland.
He answered only to Heinrich Himmler, head of the entire German police and SS apparatus, and through him to Adolf Hitler. Jeckeln had served as an officer in the Imperial German Army during World War I and afterward worked as an engineer. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and was accepted into the SS in December 1930. He rose quickly 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 German advance. In Ukraine, between August 26 and 28, 1941, his forces shot approximately 23,600 Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi. A month later, units under his command took part in the massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. In the autumn of 1941, Jeckeln was transferred to the Baltic region, where he applied the same methods.
He devised a technique for executing large numbers of people that his men called the Jeckeln system, or Sardinenpackung, meaning sardine packing. Victims were forced to lie face down in the pit on top of those already shot before being killed by gunfire. The German occupation authorities in the Baltic used other methods of killing as well. Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war died from starvation, disease, and execution.
Villages suspected of helping partisans were burned along with their inhabitants. In the prisons of occupied cities, inmates were beaten and subjected to electric shocks. Civilians were forcibly deported to Germany for slave labor, and entire regions were stripped of food, livestock, and machinery. In Estonia, the occupation authorities pursued a policy of Germanization, imposing taxes on the local population, imprisoning those deemed unreliable, and confiscating their property to make room for German settlers.
When the front lines shifted and the Germans withdrew, they destroyed whatever they could not take with them. The Red Army recaptured 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 collected documents, opened mass graves, and recorded the testimony of survivors and witnesses. By the end of the war, the Soviets held both evidence and perpetrators, and they decided to put them on trial in public. The Riga trial opened before a military tribunal of the Baltic Military District.
Eight defendants stood accused, all tried under a decree issued by the Soviet leadership on April 19, 1943, which specified how German war criminals and their local collaborators were to be tried and punished. The accused had administered the occupation at every level. Alongside Jeckeln stood Alexander Boecking, the district commissioner in Estonia during the war who had sent three thousand people to Germany for forced labor, and six Wehrmacht generals. Siegfried Ruff had been the military commander of Riga in 1944, the year the Germans destroyed the city before withdrawing.
Albrecht Digeon von Monteton had commanded forces in Liepāja on the Latvian coast and was held accountable, among other crimes, for the deportation of more than twenty-two thousand people from that region and for the burning of villages. Bronislaw Pawel had administered prisoner-of-war camps in Ostland that had become sites of genocide. Friedrich Jeckeln had held field commands in the Baltic states and other Soviet territories and was accused of issuing orders that drove his men to shoot and burn hundreds of civilians alive. According to the indictment, soldiers under his command had even put children into sacks and killed them by beating them against trees.
Hans Küpper was held accountable for killing civilians suspected of supporting partisan movements and for destroying entire areas during the German withdrawal. Wolfgang von Ditfurth had led the 403rd Security Division in Lithuania and Belarus. The indictment accused him of arresting and executing Soviet citizens near Vilnius in July and August 1941, an operation in which approximately four thousand Jews were killed, as well as operations against civilians around Vitebsk between September 1941 and March 1942. Jeckeln, whom the court held responsible for the deaths of more than one hundred thousand Jews, Roma, and others, was interrogated twenty-nine times before being brought into the courtroom.
His statements, along with captured German documents and the testimony of survivors and men who had served under him, left no 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 that defense.
On February 3, 1946, it delivered its verdict. All eight defendants were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence against von Ditfurth was never carried out. Reports indicated he was in poor health, and 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. They were forced to stand in the backs of trucks with nooses around their necks. The trucks then drove forward and left them hanging as at least four thousand people watched them die. Among the spectators were Red Army soldiers and Riga residents who had lived through the occupation and lost their families to the killings these men had directed.
Jeckeln had turned fifty-one the day before. He died in the city whose Jews he had ordered murdered in the pits of Rumbula. The Riga trial, like many in the Soviet judicial system, was an instrument of Stalin’s state as much as a court of justice. The verdict was never in doubt.
Yet it accomplished something few trials before it had done. The men who had administered the murder of Jews and other civilians faced the evidence of their crimes and were forced to answer for them in the very places where those crimes had been committed. The message of the Riga trial was clear.
The killings followed a chain of command, and the men responsible could be identified and brought to justice.