Riga (Kaiserwald) Concentration Camp and Riga Ghetto

The collection contains primarily:

Lists of prisoners assigned clothing bundles from Concentration Camp Buchenwald, names of Jews deported from Württemberg to Riga, list of jews who were murdered in Riga; register of those Jews shot in Latvia (post-war compilation), list of Jews in Riga who survived, tracing requests from ICRC Geneva, from Danish and German RC as well as correspondence; List of names relating to Jewish individuals in Riga

History of Ghetto Riga 1941-1943:

On 1 July 1941 the German occupation of Riga occurred. Only a few thousand Jews were able to flee eastwards with the Red Army, the majority of the Jewish population of the Latvian capital – approx. 40,000 people – were now answering to the German occupiers. From the first day of the occupation the Jewish population in Riga was subjected to the arbitrary repressions and killing actions of the Special Unit A and the Latvian collaborators supported by the Special Unit leaders. At the end of October 1941 the German authorities ordered the „resettlement“ of the Jews living in Riga to the ghetto set up in the Southern part of the city. The site planned for the ghetto was in a poor suburb without a sewage system. Beginning on 19 November, those Jews possessing a work permit were placed in a special area, separated from the rest of the ghetto: the so-called „small ghetto“. This separation of the Jewish population into laboring and non -laboring divisions was very much a part of the planned liquidation of the ghetto, which, triggered by the decision to deport the German Jews to the newly occupied East European territories, culminated in the Rumbula massacre. Almost 30,000 people were murdered by the Special Unit A and its Latvian aids in the forest area in southern Riga between 30 November and 8 December 1941. An estimated 4,500 people stayed behind in the „small ghetto“. On 27 November the first of the deportation transports from the German Reich arrived in Riga. Jews from the „Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia“ were also deported to Riga. Thousands arrived at the ghetto during the first three months. After such a transformation, the „Large Ghetto“ was referred to from then on as the „German Ghetto“. Only a few months after their arrival, specifically in early 1942, the first executions of approx. 2,000 Jews from the German Reich and the „ Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia “, took place. The official liquidation of the ghetto followed by order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on 2 November 1943. Around 2,000 people, primarily the aged and ill, were deported to Auschwitz. Those camp inmates assessed as being fit to work were sent to Concentration Camp Kaiserwald.

Source: Reichert, Katrin: Riga (Ghetto), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed.by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 200-201.