The Germans take Riga

On Tuesday 1 July 1941, the ninth day of the German–Soviet war, the main body of the German 18th Army entered Riga. The last Red Army units had left the city the night before, and a day earlier the members of the government of the Latvian SSR and the leadership of the Communist Party had fled to Valka on the Estonian border. Smoke still hung over Old Riga. Two days earlier, in the fighting for the bridges over the Daugava, the spire of St Peter’s Church, the tallest structure in the city, had burnt down, and with it the town hall and the medieval House of the Blackheads. Many Latvians greeted the German soldiers with flowers. After a year of Soviet occupation and annexation, ending in the June deportations, they saw the Germans as liberators and hoped that an independent state would return with them. For the roughly 40,000 Jews of Riga who had not managed, or had not been able, to flee eastwards, the arrival of the Germans marked the beginning of their annihilation.

Popular war chronologies record Latvia’s fate under three dates. Under 1 July they state that German troops took Riga “on the way to Leningrad”, which is accurate. Under 10 July they write that “the occupation of Latvia officially began”, and under 28 July that the Germans were consolidating their hold on the Baltic states, where “the local Jewish population was being exterminated”. Together these three entries tell a single story: the first month of German rule in Latvia. The second of them needs correcting. No act beginning the occupation was proclaimed on 10 July. It was at about that time – between 8 and 10 July, according to various studies – that the Wehrmacht took the last remaining corners of Latvian territory in the north-east of the country. The formal establishment of the occupation regime, for its part, stretched over the whole summer.

The road to the Daugava

Latvia lay in the path of Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North, whose objective was Leningrad. Under the plan for Operation Barbarossa its armoured formations were to seize the crossings over the Daugava as quickly as possible, before the Red Army could establish a new line of defence behind the river, while the infantry of Colonel General Georg von Küchler’s 18th Army was to advance along the coast through Courland and Semigallia towards Riga, cutting off the Soviet forces that remained west of the river.

The first part of the plan succeeded faster than expected. On 26 June the 8th Panzer Division of General Erich von Manstein’s corps captured the bridges at Daugavpils intact, and three days later General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s corps crossed the Daugava at Krustpils (PL) and Jēkabpils. The Soviet North-Western Front failed to organise a defence on the river. Its 8th Army, retreating from Lithuania, did escape encirclement, but the command ordered it to fall back further north towards Estonia, and the 27th Army east towards the old Latvian–Russian border and the fortifications of the so-called Stalin Line. Riga found itself in the rear of a disintegrating front. In the west of the country only the fighting for Liepāja lasted longer: the port and base of the Baltic Fleet, whose defenders – sailors, soldiers of the 67th Rifle Division and volunteer workers’ detachments – beat off German attacks until 29 June.

The battle for the bridges and the fall of the city

In Riga itself the Soviet authorities had few troops. The city was guarded by an NKVD operational regiment, from which a division began to be formed in the first days of the war, and on 25 June Jānis Kalnbērziņš, first secretary of the Communist Party of Latvia, ordered three workers’ battalions to be raised from volunteers, including Latvian veterans of the Spanish Civil War, to defend the bridges. Meanwhile armed opponents of Soviet rule came out into the open in and around the city: former members of the Aizsargi paramilitary organisation, former soldiers and officers of the Latvian army, and students from the academic fraternities. They fired from windows on the columns of retreating troops, and on 27 June a fierce fight broke out in a hall of the Central Market between a group of insurgents and a workers’ battalion, in which most of the insurgents were killed.

On the morning of 29 June the advance battle group of the 1st Infantry Division, attacking through Bauska and made up mainly of men of Colonel Otto Lasch’s 43rd Infantry Regiment, reached the part of Riga on the left bank. The Germans tried to seize the bridges on the move. A few assault guns and a group of sappers got across to the right bank, but the defenders blew up the pontoon bridge, and the detachment that had broken into the city centre was surrounded and destroyed. Sources describe the fate of the railway bridge in different ways: according to some, the defenders blew it up; according to others, they ran out of explosives and held it by fire. In the fighting, in which both sides used artillery and the Soviet command, according to Latvian studies, even ordered the city centre to be shelled with coastal defence guns, Old Riga caught fire. The spire of St Peter’s, on which Soviet observers had set up a fire-control post, burnt down; each side later blamed the other for its destruction, and German propaganda attributed it to the “Bolsheviks”. Lasch was awarded the Knight’s Cross for the battle for Riga.

The first attempt to take the city on the move failed, and for the next twenty-four hours the two sides exchanged fire across the river. But when the main body of the 18th Army came up to the Daugava and began building a crossing south of the city, the Soviet command judged further defence hopeless. During the night of 30 June to 1 July the last units of the 8th Army and the workers’ battalions left the city, heading north. On the morning of 1 July German columns entered Riga almost unopposed; there were only isolated skirmishes with stragglers.

That same day the Riga radio station, now in German hands, broadcast Latvia’s old national anthem for the first time in a year, followed by the Nazi “Horst-Wessel-Lied” and speeches. One of the speakers, Lieutenant Colonel Voldemārs Veiss, later commander of Latvian SS formations, called on his countrymen to fight the “internal enemy”, meaning sympathisers of Soviet rule and the Jews. In the first days of July Latvian officers and activists tried to seize the moment: they set up committees and came forward with declarations of readiness to fight alongside the Germans and to rebuild the state. The Germans had no intention of allowing it.

The occupation step by step

The Wehrmacht did not stop in Riga. Once the infantry had closed up to the Daugava, on 2 July Army Group North resumed its offensive, sending Erich Hoepner’s armoured formations through eastern Latvia towards Ostrov and Pskov, taken on 4 and 9 July, and the 18th Army north towards Estonia. By 8–10 July the whole of Latvia’s territory was in German hands. This was what the “official beginning of the occupation” mentioned in the chronologies amounted to: not a legal act, but the moment when the last Red Army units left the country.

For the first few weeks Latvia was ruled by the Wehrmacht. The country formed part of Army Group North’s rear area, and German field and town commandants’ offices were set up in its towns. Under Adolf Hitler’s decree of 17 July 1941, Reich commissariats subordinate to Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories were to be established on the conquered Soviet lands. At noon on 25 July the Reichskommissariat Ostland was created, headed by the Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, Hinrich Lohse. At first, however, it covered only Lithuania and the Latvian lands west and south of the Daugava, without Riga itself, and Lohse had his seat in Kaunas. Only on 1 September was civilian rule extended to the rest of Latvia: the General District of Latvia (Generalbezirk Lettland) was created under General Commissioner Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, and Riga became the capital of the whole of the Ostland. Estonia passed to civilian administration only in December.

Latvian hopes were quickly dashed. The Germans dissolved the spontaneously formed committees and recognised no Latvian government. Nor did they return the property nationalised by the Soviet authorities to its owners; instead they placed it under Reich trusteeship. In the Nazi plans set out in the Generalplan Ost, the Baltic states were in future to be Germanised and settled by Germans. The Latvians were allowed only a local administration and auxiliary police, and from 1942 a limited self-administration under General Oskars Dankers, wholly subordinate to the German commissioner. President Kārlis Ulmanis, deported by the Soviet authorities in the summer of 1940, was by then in a Soviet prison and never returned home.

The Riga pogrom and the burning synagogues

Behind the army came units whose task was not fighting at the front. The Baltic states and the rear of Army Group North were the responsibility of Einsatzgruppe A of the Security Police and the SD, commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, who answered to Reinhard Heydrich and ultimately to Heinrich Himmler. Stahlecker arrived in Riga with the first troops, and in Latvia it was above all his Einsatzkommando 2 under Rudolf Batz that operated. As in Kaunas a few days earlier, where the Germans had unleashed a bloody pogrom at the hands of Lithuanian armed bands, the aim was to make the first killings look like a “spontaneous” act of revenge by the local population for a year of Soviet terror. In a secret report of 15 October 1941 Stahlecker admitted that in Latvia this had been “much more difficult”, because the Soviet authorities had murdered or deported the old leadership class, but that by means of “similar influence” on the Latvian auxiliary police a pogrom had been instigated in Riga as well. According to the report, all the synagogues were destroyed in it and some 400 Jews were killed; elsewhere in the same document the figure is 500. The Germans carefully photographed and filmed these scenes so as to have proof that the Latvians themselves had settled scores with the Jews and the communists.

Perpetrators were quickly found. On 1 July Viktors Arājs, a law student and former policeman linked to the extreme nationalist and antisemitic Pērkonkrusts, occupied an abandoned building at 19 Valdemāra Street with a group of armed men. That same day Stahlecker and Batz decided to make him the commander of an SD auxiliary unit. On 4 July the nationalist newspaper Tēvija (“Fatherland”) called on “all nationally minded Latvians” ready to “take an active part in cleansing the country of harmful elements” to report to that address. Thus was formed the unit known as the Arājs Kommando, which by the end of 1941 numbered several hundred men, mainly students, former officers and Aizsargi, and later more than a thousand. One of its officers was Herberts Cukurs, a well-known pre-war aviator.

From 2 July onwards armed young men wearing red-white-red armbands dragged Jews out of their flats and off the streets. They were taken to the police prefecture and the central prison, where they were beaten and humiliated, and women were raped. Doctors, lawyers and engineers were particularly sought out. On 4 July the Great Choral Synagogue on Gogol Street, the largest in the city, was set on fire, followed by other synagogues, among them those on Stabu Street and in the old Jewish cemetery in the Moscow District. Only the Peitav Synagogue in Old Riga survived, because it stood too close to other houses and to a church. How many people died in the flames is disputed. Survivors’ accounts speak of people locked inside, including Jewish refugees from Lithuania, and according to them the synagogue on Stabu Street was set alight by Cukurs’s unit. The Latvian-American historian Andrew Ezergailis questioned some of these accounts and believed that the people who had been in the synagogue were killed beforehand. The figures given range from a few dozen to several hundred victims. The chief rabbi of Riga, Menachem Mendel Zak, was killed in the days of the pogrom. The Germans filmed the burning synagogue for the newsreels, with a commentary claiming that the synagogue, spared by the “GPU commissars”, had burnt down a few hours after their flight. Since Latvia regained independence, 4 July has been its day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

Executions followed the pogrom. Arrested men were taken by lorry from the central prison to the Biķernieki forest on the north-eastern edge of the city and shot there under the supervision of the German Security Police and SD; the executions were directed by, among others, Batz and Rudolf Lange, later head of the Security Police in Latvia. According to historians’ findings, the Arājs Kommando murdered some 2,300 Jews by the end of July; other studies speak of some 4,000 victims at Biķernieki in July alone. By the autumn more than 6,000 people had been killed in and around Riga. At the same time the Jews were subjected to one restriction after another: they had to wear a yellow star, were forbidden to walk on the pavements or ride the trams (from 16 July), received smaller food rations, and had their property plundered. On 21 July the German economic authorities decided to confine Jewish workers to a separate district and ordered a Jewish council to be formed.

July 1941 in the Baltic states

Under 28 July the chronologies record that the Germans were consolidating their hold on the Baltic states and that the Jewish population there was being murdered. This was not a single event on that day but a process that had been under way since the first hours of the war and was in full swing by the end of July. In Latvia the first six Jews, among them the local pharmacist, were shot by an SD unit as early as the night of 23–24 June in the cemetery at Grobiņa near Liepāja. In Liepāja itself the Germans and the Latvian “self-defence” shot some 400 people on 3 and 4 July and another 300 on 8 July. In Jelgava the Latvian auxiliary police, formed on 29 June under a member of Pērkonkrusts, murdered some 2,000 Jews from the town and its surroundings over the summer under German supervision. In Daugavpils Einsatzkommando 1b killed some 1,150 people by 11 July, and at the end of the month the Jews still alive were shut in a ghetto in the fortress on the left bank of the Daugava. It was the same in Rēzekne and in dozens of small towns. According to Stahlecker’s report, by mid-October 1941 a total of 30,000 Jews had been executed in Latvia.

In Lithuania, which the Germans had entered first, the annihilation proceeded even faster. After the Kaunas pogrom a Lithuanian auxiliary battalion under German command shot Jews at the Seventh Fort of the Kaunas fortress; according to the report of Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, 2,514 people were killed there on 6 July alone. In German-occupied Wilno (Vilnius) arrested men were taken to a forest outside the city to be executed. In October Stahlecker reported that more than 71,000 Jews had already been killed in Lithuania. In Estonia, which the Wehrmacht reached only in July and most of which it did not take until the end of August, the Jewish community was small and had for the most part managed to flee into the interior of the USSR. Of some 4,500 Estonian Jews, between 1,000 and 2,000 remained, according to various estimates. The men were shot in the autumn by members of the Estonian Omakaitse under the direction of the German Sonderkommando 1a, and at the beginning of 1942 the Germans declared Estonia “free of Jews”.

Several phenomena lay behind these figures at once. The orders and the organisation came from the Germans: the Einsatzgruppen, the German police and the SD, who chose the targets, designated the execution sites and counted the dead. The Wehrmacht, which held power in Riga until the end of August, recognised the local “self-defence” units, made use of their services and did nothing to hinder the killings. Yet the shooting was done to a very large extent by local volunteers: members of the Arājs Kommando, the Latvian auxiliary police and “self-defence”, Lithuanian battalions and the Estonian Omakaitse. The Germans deliberately exploited hatred of the Soviet occupier and the propaganda myth of “Jewish Bolshevism” (Żydokomuna), portraying the Jews as the perpetrators of the June 1941 deportations, even though Jews were among the deportees in greater numbers than their share of the population would suggest. Crowds were led to displays of the bodies of prisoners murdered by the NKVD, and the newspapers wrote of “Jewish executioners”. Not everyone was carried away. Žanis Lipke, a Riga dock worker, and his wife hid several dozen Jews during the occupation, and Israel’s Yad Vashem institute has honoured hundreds of Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians with the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Place in the war

The capture of Riga and of the Daugava line completed the first stage of Army Group North’s march on Leningrad. In nine days the Red Army had lost Lithuania and Latvia, although, unlike the Western Front at Białystok and Minsk, its armies in the Baltic states managed to avoid a great encirclement. Riga became the rear base of the German northern front and, from September, the capital of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. It was there too that decisions were taken on the fate of the population of the whole region.

For the Latvian Jews the worst was yet to come. In October 1941 all the Jews of Riga, some 30,000 people, were confined in a ghetto in the Moscow Suburb. At the end of November and the beginning of December, on Himmler’s orders passed to the new Higher SS and Police Leader, Friedrich Jeckeln, the Germans and their Latvian auxiliaries murdered most of the ghetto’s inhabitants, some 25,000 people, in the Rumbula forest near Riga, and Jews from the Reich, Austria and the Protectorate began to be brought in to take their place. Of the roughly 93,000 Jews counted in the country by the Latvian census of 1935, some 70,000 perished in 1941–1944, according to Latvian and Western historians, the overwhelming majority of them in 1941. In Lithuania the Holocaust claimed more than 90 per cent of the pre-war Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe.

The Latvians who in July 1941 had hoped for the restoration of their state got another occupation instead. From 1943 the Germans drafted thousands of them into the Latvian SS Legion, while others fought in Latvian divisions of the Red Army. The Red Army retook Riga on 13 October 1944, and the German and Latvian units trapped in the Courland Pocket did not surrender until 8 May 1945. Soviet rule returned, and with it new deportations, and lasted until 1991. After the war Viktors Arājs hid in West Germany under an assumed name; in 1979 a court in Hamburg sentenced him to life imprisonment for his part in the Rumbula massacre. He died in prison in 1988. Stahlecker was killed fighting partisans in March 1942, and Jeckeln was hanged in Riga in 1946 after a trial before a Soviet military court.