On June 22, 1941, under the codename “Operation Barbarossa,” Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its former partner in the war against Poland. Within weeks, German forces had swept through vast territories in the east, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three Baltic states that had been occupied and annexed by Stalin’s Soviet Union the previous year. The German occupation transformed life across the region. Jews were stripped of their rights and possessions and forced into ghettos.
Civilians were deported for forced labor. Soviet prisoners of war were held in horrific 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 for years. Among them was Friedrich Jeckeln, one of the most powerful leaders of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, a man responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people.
In January 1946, he and seven other senior German occupation officials would appear before a Soviet military tribunal in Riga, the capital of Latvia. There, the men who had once ruled the Baltic territories would face the crimes committed under their command and be forced to answer for them. World War II had begun on September 1, 1939, with the German attack on Poland. On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded its former partner, the Soviet Union, and within weeks German troops had overrun the territory of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which the Soviet Union had occupied and annexed in 1940.
The occupied territory was placed under a German civilian administration called the “Reichskommissariat Ostland,” or Reich Commissariat for the East, which covered the Baltic states and the western part of modern-day Belarus. What happened there over the next three years was among the most concentrated killing of the entire war. Nearly the entire Jewish population of Latvia, about 70,000 people, was murdered during the Holocaust, most of them dying in the first few months of the Nazi occupation. Riga’s Jews were herded into a ghetto, which was sealed on October 25, 1941, with about 30,000 people inside.
Five weeks later, most of it was emptied. On November 30 and December 8, 1941, about 25,000 Jews were forced to march 10 kilometers southeast of the city to the Rumbula forest, where they were shot at the edge of pits that had been dug there in advance. It was the single largest massacre in Latvia and one of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust until the death camps were established. The ghetto they left behind was soon filled with Jews deported from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the Baltic region to be killed.
Many of them were in turn shot in the Bikernieki forest at the northeastern edge of Riga, where about 35,000 people lost their lives during the Nazi occupation. The Germans did not carry out most of the killing in Latvia; local collaborators did. The most important 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 killings at Rumbula. They worked at all times under the direction and supervision of the SS.
The man who organized the killings at Rumbula was Friedrich Jeckeln. During World War II, he served as the Higher SS and Police Leader, first in southern Russia and then in Ostland, answering only to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the entire German police and SS, and through him to Adolf Hitler. Jeckeln had served as an officer in the Imperial German Army during World War I and then 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 leaders. His career was built on a willingness to carry out the most brutal orders without question. Jeckeln’s methods were chillingly systematic. He had developed a technique he called “sardine packing,” in which victims were lined up and shot one after another, lying close together in mass graves, to speed up the killing process.
This method was first used at Rumbula and later refined elsewhere. The shootings were carried out by his men, but the orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi regime. Jeckeln was not a rogue actor; he was a committed Nazi who believed in the ideology he served. He had been decorated for his service and had been entrusted with some of the most sensitive and murderous tasks of the war.
By the time the war turned against Germany, Jeckeln’s actions had caught up with him. In 1945, as the Red Army advanced into the Baltic states, he retreated westward, but he was captured by Soviet forces. His trial in Riga in January 1946 was swift. The Soviet authorities were eager to demonstrate that the atrocities committed in their territory would be punished.
Jeckeln and his co-defendants were tried as war criminals. They were not given the chance to argue that they were simply following orders, a defense that had been rejected at the Nuremberg trials. The evidence against them was overwhelming, and the testimony of survivors and local witnesses painted a damning picture of the occupation regime. Jeckeln did not deny his involvement.
Instead, he admitted to organizing the mass shootings and estimated that his units had killed more than 100,000 people. He claimed that he had been acting under orders, but the court rejected this defense. In February 1946, Jeckeln and six of his co-defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. They were hanged in Riga shortly after the trial, their deaths marking the end of a brutal chapter in the history of the Baltic states.
The massacre at Rumbula and the other atrocities committed in Latvia were not isolated incidents. They were part of a broader campaign of genocide that the Nazis carried out across Eastern Europe. The murder of the Jews of Latvia, like the murder of millions of other Jews, was a carefully planned and executed operation. It was carried out with the active participation of local collaborators who shared the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology or who were motivated by greed, fear, or a desire for revenge against the Soviet occupation.
The legacy of these events would shape the region for decades to come. For the survivors, the memories of the killings and the loss of their families and communities would never fade. For the people of Latvia, the war left deep scars that took generations to heal. The Soviet Union, which had annexed the Baltic states in 1940, reoccupied them after the war, and they remained part of the Soviet bloc until 1991, when they regained their independence.
The history of the Holocaust in Latvia was suppressed during the Soviet era, and it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the full extent of the atrocities became widely known. Today, the memory of the victims is honored in memorials at Rumbula and other sites across Latvia. The massacre at Rumbula is recognized as one of the worst single atrocities of the Holocaust, and it stands as a grim reminder of the dangers of hatred and extremism. The men who carried out these crimes were held accountable, but the scale of the tragedy remains almost beyond comprehension.
The story of Friedrich Jeckeln and the occupation of Latvia is a sobering example of how ordinary people can become complicit in extraordinary evil when they are driven by ideology, fear, or ambition. It is a history that must never be forgotten.