Nazi occupation · Latvia · 1941–1944
German authorities and Latvian collaborators made the city a centre of persecution.
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1941–1944
Nazi occupation · Riga’s residents are isolated, then murdered
German authorities and Latvian collaborators made the city a centre of persecution.
July 1941
German forces occupied Riga in July 1941. German killing units and Latvian auxiliaries attacked Jews, and authorities established a ghetto. Nazi racial ideology and local antisemitism reinforced persecution. The perpetrators were identifiable organizations and individuals, not an undifferentiated Latvian population.
Rumbula
In late November and early December 1941, German and Latvian perpetrators murdered thousands of Riga’s Jews at Rumbula. The killings were organized, with people driven from the ghetto to the killing site. A supposedly dangerous racial category had been turned into a list of civilians to murder.
The ghetto also holds deportees
Jews deported from Germany and other places were also sent to Riga. Their presence reveals the wider reach of Nazi persecution. A record from the city may therefore describe a local resident or someone forcibly brought from elsewhere. Both were subjected to a system that treated ancestry as guilt.