Rumbula massacre
룸불라 학살
The murder of some 25,000 Jews in or on the way to the Rumbula forest south of Riga, Latvia, on 30 November and 8 December 1941: about 24,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto and about 1,000 Jews transported from Berlin. It was commanded by the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln.
In depth
To make room in the Riga ghetto for Jews deported from Germany and Austria, Heinrich Himmler brought Jeckeln, who had directed Babi Yar and other massacres in Ukraine, to Riga, and told him to inform Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse, who wanted to use the Jews as labour, that it was Himmler’s order and the Führer’s wish. Able-bodied men were separated into a “small ghetto”, while women, children and the elderly were marched ten kilometres to pits dug in advance. The shooting was done by 10 or 12 of Jeckeln’s German men; the Arajs Kommando and other Latvian auxiliaries drove and guarded the columns.
Except for Babi Yar, it was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity before the death camps began operating. Himmler telephoned an order that the 1,000 Berlin deportees, the first to be killed on the morning of 30 November, were not to be liquidated, but it came too late. The massacre formed part of the basis of the postwar Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg; Jeckeln was hanged in Riga in 1946, and Viktors Arājs was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court in 1979.