The Rumbula massacre:

a case study of a Holocaust atrocity

By Eugene Holman
(holman@elo.helsinki.fi)

Photos: Carlos Roso + archives

I. Preface

Killing one person is easy and is easily concealed. So is killing ten people. Killing a hundred or
a thousand people during the course of a single day takes planning and coordination, for which
reason it will necessarily have a public dimension. The degree to which it becomes public to
the degree of crossing the threshold of being international news reported in real time only
increases if a killing action involves tens of thousands of people. Such was the Rumbula
massacre, the first implementational phase of which took place on November 30, 1941.
The massacre in the Rumbula forest outside of Riga in German-occupied Latvia, resulted in
the shooting outdoors and in full public view of approximately 25,000 people on two days:
November 30th and December 8th, 1941. Although the actual killing was restricted to two
days, the prerequisites for this action began to be put into place in August, 1941 when
measures were taken to construct a ghetto in Riga and ghettoize the city's Jews, while the
clean-up afterwards, the first phase of which, sorting and converting the property confiscated
from the killed Jews into money, took more than a week, and the second phase of which,
exhuming the buried bodies and burning them, took place only during the summer of 1943.

In this essay I am going to focus on the different phases of the massacre, the type of evidence
they generated, and the signifigance of the Rumbula within the wider context of changing Nazi
policy towards the Jews of Eastern Europe in the light of changing circumstances and
opportunities. Readers of this essay who are seriously interested in the manner in which the
Holocaust unfolded in the Nazi-occupied parts of the USSR in general, and in Latvia in
particular, as well as in the various methodological problems involved in making a serious
historical study of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, are advised to read the introduction to
Andrew Ezergailis's book The Holocaust in Latvia: 1941-1944, available on the internet at
http://www.vip.lv/LPRA/EZERG_intr.html.

II. Evidence for the massacre

There are three primary sources of evidence concerning the Rumbula massacre:

1. The trial records of the various war crimes trials in Germany, the United States, and the
USSR.
2. Captured German documents, including the Stahlecker reports of October 15, 1941 and
January 31, 1942, and the Ereignismeldungen.
3. Records in Latvian archives. These records include:
a. German documents captured by the Soviets
b. the Reports of the Soviet extraordinary Commission
c. the archives of the Riga Municipal and District Police

Reference will be made here to all three of these types of evidence.

Additionally I have included a surreptitiously recorded statement from a German POW who
was at Rumbula as a perpetrator, as well as an account by a woman who miraculously survived
the massacre.
 III. The structure of the massacre

A series of events such as the Rumbula massacre has a complex structure. This structure is not
fortuitous, but rather the product of planning and intention. This structure exists in space as
the administrative premises in which the planning and necessary arrangements are made
according to orders, as the place where the people to be killed are gathered, at the killing site,
as well as to the various gathering points where the property taken from the people killed was
deposited, stored, classified, and disposed of. It exists in time as the time-frame which begins
with the setting up of the office for managing the killing and ends when the perpetrators are
satisfied that all that was to be done has been completed. As this structure interacts with its
various environments, it generates various kinds of evidence: orders for ammunition, orders to
the local police to supply manpower, piles of clothing, human remains in mass graves, and the
eyewitness accounts of perpetrators, witnesses, and survivors. Each of these in its own way
functions as evidence that enables us to reconstruct the historical event.

A. The orders

When the German's invaded Latvia in June, 1941, they hoped that the local population, after
having lived the past year under communism, which German propaganda equated with
Jewishness, would rise against the local Jews in "spontaneous" pogroms. Reinhard Heydrich,
who at this time was the Nazi official in charge of the killing of European Jews, had issued
orders on June 29, 1941 to Brigadeführer Walther Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, to
provoke the Latvians to kill Jews [Arâjs Trial Records, Landgericht Hamburg, 1975, pg. 57].

During the first few weeks of the German occupation there were some seemingly spontaneous
pogroms and other violence against Latvian Jews. These included shootings in the Bikemieku
forest, at the head Riga police station courtyard and basement, and in synagogues. The most
notorious incident of this kind was the burning of the Great Choral Synagogue, the main one
in Riga, on Gogol along with all the Jews, both Latvian and refugees from Lithuania, that had
sought refuge there. These outbreaks of violence were uncoordinated, being carried out by
local criminal gangs and individuals seeking revenge against the Jews collectively for recent
injustices suffered by Latvians under a year of communist rule, propagandized by the Nazis as
being a modality of Jewish ideology. These actions by Latvians were limited to a timeframe of a
few weeks, took place in a few random locations, and resulted in the death of no more a few
thousand Jews [http://www.vip.lv/LPRA/fg_stahlecker.htm]. The organized, coordinated, and
systematic liquidation of the Jews in Latvia was a job that was to be done by the Germans
themselves:

"From the very beginning it was to be expected that pogroms alone would not solve the Jewish problem
in the Ostland...the goal of the cleansing operation of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), in accordance with
the fundamental orders, was the most comprehensive elimination of the Jews as possible."
— Walther Stahlecker, Report 15 October 1941. Nuremberg Document L-180
Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, issued a declaration of policy on the Jewish
question in the Baltics on July 27, 1941. These guidelines contained specific instructions
concerning who was to be defined as a Jew. Overall, they followed the racially-based
Nuremberg Laws, but they contained a local addition according to which anyone married to a
Jew was also to be considered as a Jew. These guidelines stipulated that Jews were to be
registered, that they were to wear a six-pointed yellow Jewish star in public, and that they were
to be subject to numerous restrictions such as not being allowed to use the sidewalk, public
transport, or motorized vehicles. Being Jewish was made a criminal offense. All Jewish
property except household necessities was to be confiscated by the state. All Jews were to be
removed from their homes, which were also to be confiscated by the state, and they were to be
interned in ghettos or concentration camps where they were to be exploited as slave labor
[see S. Myllyniemi, "Die Neuordnung der baltischen Länder, 1941-1944", Helsinki, 1973, pg. 78].

Preparations for the establishment of the Riga ghetto began in

mid-August, 1941. The ghetto had been fenced in by October
10, and the deadline by which the approximately 25,000 Jews
of Riga were to have been transferred to it was October 25 [A.
Ezergailis, "The Holocaust in Latvia: 1941-1944", pg. 343].

According to Reichskommissar
Lohse, the purpose of ghetto-
ization was to remove the Jews
from the mainstream of life, to
expropriate their property, and
to exploit their labor. During
September and October this
was the overt German policy
towards Jews living in the
Riga's ghetto
largest Baltic cities.

Covertly, German policy was more sinister. In retrospect, the events that took place in Latvia
provide evidence that what was going on there — stripping Jews of their civil rights and pro-
perty, killing them in the countryside and ghettoizing them and exploiting their labor before
eventually killing them in mass-shooting operations in the cities, disposing of their immovable
property by auctioning it off, and of their movable property by shipping it to Germany as war
booty — was not being decided solely on the local level, but rather was part of a master plan,
one that was not fully set, but rather which was adapted to changing circumstances.
The Sicherheitsdienst (SD) followed procedures for dealing with Jews which had parallels in
Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich
Jeckeln, the Nazi mass-killing specialist who had coordinated many of the massacres of Jews in
the Ukraine, and who went on to coordinate many more in Lithuania, was assigned by Heinrich
Himmler to organize and oversee the killing of Riga's Jews on October 31, 1941. Himmler's
appointment of Jeckeln to deal with Riga's Jews, then, serves as evidence to show that policy
towards Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was not simply a matter being decided on the
local level, but rather was one being comprehensibly coordinated from Berlin in accordance
with orders being issued at the highest level. According to Andrew Ezergailis: "The deliberate
manner and the similarities of the killing procedures that were followed in Latvia and other
territories indicate that a common plan existed: not only a simple "wish," but a blueprint.
Despite the secrecy concerning the Führerbefehl, the accumulated references, no matter how
indirectly stated, in themselves testified that the EG [= Einsatzgruppen, EH] acted in
accordance with a Hitler order." [A. Ezergailis, op. cit., pg. 204].

Critical consideration of what was going

on in Latvia during the latter half of 1941
indicates that the events there reflect a
radical change in German policy towards
Jews in occupied territories on the
implementational level. This is most
clearly evidenced in administrative
reactions towards Hinrich Lohse's policy
on the Jewish question in the Baltics referred to above. Lohse wrote his guidelines when he was
preparing to assume the function of highest civilian administrator in the Baltics from the
military. Accordingly, the powers of Einsatzgruppe A were to pass over to the SD, from
Stahlecker to SS-Gruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann. Stahlecker objected to Lohse's
relatively benign policy towards the Jews in the Baltics, pointing out that it — loss of civil rights,
public humiliation, confiscation of property, ghettoization, and exploitation — was in conflict
with the more robust policy the SD had been
pursuing towards Jews since the German
attack on the USSR on June 22. Lohse's
guidelines mentioned nothing about « killing
» Jews, even though this had been reality in
the Baltic countryside and smaller cities since
the invasion of the USSR. In Stahlecker's
Memorandum of August 6, 1941, he
criticizes Lohse's guidelines:
Riga ghetto Kommandantur
"The projected measures concerning the settling of the Jewish
problem are not in harmony with those orders concerning Jews in
the Ostland given by Einsatzgruppe A of the Sicherheitspolizei
and the SD. Nor does the project take into consideration the new
possibilities of cleaning up the Jewish question in the eastern
regions [Ostraum]." [Source: Stahlecker's Answer to Lohse's Guidelines
on Treatment of Jews in Ostland, Latvian State Historical Archives, LVVA, P-
1026-1-3. pp. 237-239]

Stahlecker continues, criticizing Lohse for reintroducing

outdated principles, those used in Poland, to the new
situation in the East. The implication is that although the
Jewish problem in Poland « could » be settled by
separating the Jews from the Gentiles, the East
represented a fundamentally new situation in which more
radical measures were necessary. Stahlecker continues:

"The Reichskommissar appears to strive for a temporary

settlement of the Jewish question, one that applies to the
situation in the Generalgouvernment [occupied Poland].
On the one hand, he fails to consider the altered situation
that the war in the East introduced, and on the other hand, he fails to examine the unique
possibility of a radical treatment of the Jewish question in the Ostraum ... In the
Generalgouvernment there was no serious political danger in leaving the Jews in their living
quarters and work places. But in the Ostland, the resident Jews or those brought in by the Red
powers became the leading supporters of the Bolshevik idea ... Sabotage and acts of terror can
be expected not only from communists not caught in previous actions, but precisely from Jews
who will use every possibility to create disorder. The pressing need to pacify the East area
quickly makes it necessary to eliminate all likely sources of disorder ... Consider it desirable,
before issuing any basic statement, once more to discuss these questions by word of mouth,
especially since it is safer that way, and since it concerns fundamental orders from higher
authority to the Security Police, ones that should not be discussed in writing."

This difference of opinion between the conservative Reichskommissar Lohse and the more
radical Stahlecker and his SD eventually became known to Berlin, and the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) office. Brigadeführer Müller of the RSHA did his best to
resolve the conflict between them. Müller demoted Lohse to the status of Gebietskommissar
and ordered his men not to obey the orders he, Lohse, had given to stop the mass murders of
Jews and communists. On August 25, Müller wrote in a letter to Einsatzgruppen A and B:
"As it has been reported to me, the newly appointed Gebietskommissar in Ostland had
approached some Einsatzkommandos to stop the carrying out of communist and Jewish
actions. Upon the order of the Security Police and the SD commander, these approaches must
be denied and immediately reported to us." [Latvian State Historical Archives, LVVA, P-1026-1-3, pg.
302]

The killing of the Jews in the Latvian countryside and in smaller cities by the Einsatz-
kommandos continued without interruption. Lohse's policy of ghettoizing Jews in large cities,
although in conflict with that policy, saved, in the short term, the lives of several thousand Jews
that would have been annihilated by the Einsatzkommandos, while, in the longer term,
providing a concentrated group of more than 20,000 Jews, a prerequisite without which the
Rumbula massacre would not have been possible or necessary.

From the standpoint of the authorities in Berlin, Lohse's guidelines had contributed to the
tempo of killing of Jews in Latvia falling behind that in Ukraine and Byelorussia. By the end of
September the Einsatzkommandos had succeeded in killing approximately 30,000 Latvian
Jews in small towns, but the majority of Latvia's approximately 87,500 Jews lived in three
large cities: Riga, Daugavpils, and Liepaja. The failure to keep up with the robust pace of
Jewish annihilation in the South was blamed on SS-Gruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the
resident HSSPF commander [Höhere SS und Polizeifürer, see http://www.axishistory.com/ index.php?
id=3198] in the Ostland:

"In the South, Jeckeln, Rasch, Ohlendorf, and subordinates like Blobel had made great strides
towards resolving the Jewish question ... [in Ukraine] Jeckeln had managed to get the military
to cooperate, civil authorities were not yet a problem, and the execution totals far higher. So ...
Himmler decided to have Jeckeln replace Prützmann in the Ostland." [R. Breitman, "The Architect
of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution", New York, 1991, pg. 214.]
B. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln

SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the Nazis' specialist in

mass killing operations, is the key figure in the Rumbula
massacre. During the summer and autumn of 1941 Jeckeln had
commanded mobile killing units which were responsible for
some of the greatest mass-killing operations in the Ukraine,
including the reprisal killing of 300 Jewish men and 139 Jewish
women in Starokonstatinov, the shooting of 33,771 Jews at Babi
Yar outside of Kiev, of 23,600 Jews in Kamenets-Podolsky, of 1,303 Jews in Berdichev, of
15,000 Jews in Dnepropetrovsk, and of another 15,000 Jews in Rovno [R. Hilberg, "The
Destruction of the European Jews", New York and London, 1985, pg. 110 ff., see also http://www.ess.uwe.
ac.uk/genocide/ babi_yar.htm].During the course of his work, Jeckeln
had designed a highly efficient methodology for mass execution
called the 'Jeckeln method' or 'Sardinenpackung' - sardine-packing.
This involved marching the people to be killed to the killing site
where pre-dug grave pits awaited them. They were forced to undress
and lie face-down in the graves in layers, whereupon they were shot
in the back of the head. Then a new layer of victims was forced to lie
on top of the just killed lower layer and shot, with the process being
continued until the grave was full.

On October 31 Jeckeln was assigned to Riga by Himmler. On November 5th his staff of about
fifty men arrived in the city. Jeckeln himself had been called to Berlin where, on November
12th, he was given the command by Himmler to kill the inhabitants of the Riga ghetto
[Landgericht Hamburg: Urteil gegen Jahnke u. a. 1973, pg. 54, see also G. Fleming, "Hitler and the Final
Solution", Berkeley, 1982, chapters 7 and 8]. As a possible means for countermanding Lohse's more
benign policy towards the Jews under his control, Jeckeln was told by Himmler: "Tell Lohse
that it is my order, and that it is also the express wish of the Führer." [H. Krausnick & H-H.
Wilhelm, "Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD,
1938-1942", Stuttgart, 1981, pg. 567]. According to
Ezergailis, Jeckeln, who regarded exterminating Jews as a
top security issue, was eager to carry out the assignment.
He strenuously objected to the practice of employing
Jews as slave labor by the military, the Sicherheitsdienst,
and German civilians because he considered every
contact between Jews and non-Jews to offer increased
opportunities for sabotage [Ezergailis, op. cit., pg. 240].
The Jeckeln plan for killing the more than 20,000 Jews of the Riga ghetto is dissected in detail
and supported by the relevant documents presented at the 1973 Hamburg Landgericht trial of
Lt. Friedrich Jahnke.

Jeckeln's primary tasks included finding a suitable killing site, timing the transfer of the ghetto
inhabitants to the killing site so that the operation could be done by daylight, a scarce
commodity at these latitudes in late November, ordering and making facilities for storing the
requisite amount of ammunition, and drawing up timetables and defining the duties for the
approximately 1,700 German and Latvian soldiers, police officers, and civil guards that were
needed to secure order along the ten kilometer road from the ghetto to the killing site and
carry out the actual killings. Arrangements also had to be made for collecting, classifying,
storing, and disposing of the property and valuables left behind by the Jews. Instructions and
other information had to be translated into and out of German, Latvian, Russian, and Yiddish.

C. Organizing the mass-killing

¤ November 12. Jeckeln receives order from Himmler to kill the Jews in the Riga ghetto.

¤ November 14. Jeckeln arrives in Riga. He tells Lohse of the order from Himmler,
mentioning that this is Hitler's desire, thus making it impossible to countermand.
¤ November 18 or 19. Jeckeln has selected a suitable killing site in the woods near the
Rumbula train station. After this date he begins detailed planning and the assignment of men
to their specific functions: SS-Unterstormenführer Ernst Hemicker is assigned to organize the
digging of pits for 25,000 bodies [Hemicker's testimony: Landgericht Hamburg: indictment of
Oberwinder et at., pgs. 133-136].

¤ November 20 or 21. 300 Russian POWs, supervised by Germans or Latvians, dig six pits,
each 10 meters by 10 meters and 21/2 to 3 meters deep. The job was finished within three
days.

Jeckeln assigned men from his bodyguard who had previously participated in such actions to
do the killing. These included soldiers that are known only by their surnames: Endl, Lüschen,
and Wedekind. The leader of his driver's commando, Oberführer Johannes Zingler, was also
asked to participate [See Landgericht Hamburg: indictment of Oberwinder et at., pg. 61]. No
Latvians were entrusted with a shooting assignment.

Jeckeln also had to arrange for transportation. He himself had only a dozen passenger cars and
half a dozen motorcycles available. He ordered Sturmbannführer Zimmermann and Riga
Polizeihauptmeister Müller to find the trucks and buses that would be needed to transport the
more than 1,000 guards that were needed along the way to keep order and prevent any escapes
to their stations, and to pick up the bodies of anyone shot during the march to the killing site.

Within his first three days in Riga, Jeckeln had consultations with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)
and the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) commanders, including Rudolf Lange, the highest Gestapo
and SD officer in German-occupied Latvia and Arnold Kirste, Lange's link to the Arâjs
commando, a local fascist grouping. Lange was able to make the entire 300-man Arâjs
commando available to Jeckeln, as well as half of the fifty-man Latvian guard unit of the Reiersa
St. SD headquarters, as well as about fifty German SD men, the remnants of Einsatzkommando
2, in Riga. Lange was able to provide Jeckeln with about 400 men who had SD backgrounds
and thus had prior experience in killing civilians. These men were assigned to key positions
inside and around the Riga ghetto and near the killing pits at locations where the use of a
weapon against Jews who refused to allow themselves to be slaughtered was more likely to be
needed.

The Ordnungspolizei was organizationally autonomous, but functionally within the SD

network. Before the Arâjs commando had been trained, the 9th Battalion of the Orpo had
performed most of the killings of civilians for Stahlecker. Several hundred members of the
Orpo were posted to assure order, that is to say, "obtain and maintain a German character".
The Orpo had two basic functions:
1. to oversee Latvian precinct police
2. to oversee the ghettoization of Riga's Jews and, after October 25, 1941, to guard the
ghetto. This means that members of the Orpo were going to be involved in the liquidation
of the ghetto.

The 2nd Company of the 22nd Reserve Battalion of the Orpo, from Riga, supplied Jeckeln
with approx. 70 men, and the 3rd company of the same battalion, from Jelgava, supplied
another 70. The men of the 2nd company were assigned the tasks of overseeing the clearing of
Jewish apartments, organizing the Jews into marching columns, and accompanying the
columns to the killing site. The men of the 3rd company were assigned the task of guarding the
periphery at Rumbula. The chief Orpo activist was Major Karl Heise, and he was also evidently
the liaison person with the Latvian Schutzmannschaften [Landgericht Hamburg: Urteil gegen Jahnke
u. a., 1973, pg. 124]. According to Ezergailis, Jeckeln also had another five regiments of the
Orpo at his disposal, but it is not known which, if any, he actually used [Ezergailis, op. cit., pg. 244]
¤ November 27. Jeckeln called a meeting of the high Ordnungspolizei and SD commanders
at the headquarters of the Schutzpolizei. The purpose of this meeting was to coordinate the
activities of all of the participating units:
1. Jeckeln's staff
2. the SDS
3. the Orpo
4. the Latvian Schutzmannschaften

Altogether, between 20 and 25 people were present [Landgericht Hamburg: Urteil gegen Jahnke u. a.,
1973, pg. 61]. Among the Latvians present were Viktors Arâjs, Roberts Osis, and R. Sûtiglics.
The purpose of the meeting was to finalize the schedule for the operation, to ensure the timely
and precise organization of the columns of Jews leaving the ghetto, and to assign the tasks to
the men in the gauntlet at the killing site.

¤ November 28. A train carrying approximately 1,000 Berlin Jews left Berlin for Latvia. It
was parked at on a siding at the Skirotava station, a few hundred meters from the Rumbula
killing site, when it arrived late in the night of November 29th.

¤ November 29. Jeckeln convened a meeting at the Ritterhaus where he delivered a talk about
the upcoming liquidation of the Riga ghetto. In the talk, he stressed that the operation was a
patriotic obligation, and that refusal to participate was equal to refusal to participate in a war,
desertion. He ordered that the HSSPF staff members who did not have a specific assignment
were to be present at the pits as observers so that everybody would know and witness the event
("machte er zur Pflicht, den Exekutionen als Zuschauer beizuwohnen, um niemanden
Mitwisserschaft und Mitzeugenschaft zu ersparen"; Landgericht Hamburg: Urteil gegen
Jahnke u. a., 1973, pg. 67-68).)

On that evening at 7 PM a coordinating session took place at the Riga headquarters of the
Schutzpolizei. Major Karl Heise gave orders to his men to be ready at 4.00 AM the next
morning in the ghetto for the resettlement of the Jews. He told them that the Jews were to be
taken over by others at the Rumbula train station. The members of the Schutzpolizei who were
in charge of Latvian police precincts were told to supervise the Latvians and ensure that the
Jews were out of their houses and organized in columns of 1,000. The action would take two
days and would begin in the westernmost part of the ghetto. Lieutenant Hesfer and 12
Schutzpolizei members assigned the task of organizing and supervising the clearing of Jews
from their homes. The Latvian and Jewish ghetto police were ordered to assist Hesfer and
assure that no panic arose. The Riga precinct police as well as the Riga district police under the
command of Jânis Veide were also ordered to participate in the "resettlement" of the Jews in
the ghetto to another camp [Osvalds Elîte, "Ênas purvâ", Riga 1989, pg. 27].

D. Implementing the massacre

Day 1: November 30, 1941

¤ 4:00 A.M. Precinct lieutenant Hesfer, a 12-man German Schutzpolizei team, an unknown
number of Arâjs men, and the 80-man internal Jewish guard started awakening Jews beginning
at the westernmost houses and along Lacplesa and Jekabpils St. The Jews were told to be ready
in half an hour on Sadovnikova St. A crew of workers began cutting exit holes in the fence to
shorten the way out of the ghetto to Maskavas St. and on to the road leading to Rumbula.

¤ 4:30 A.M. The wake-up gang went back to the first houses to make sure that no Jews
remained. Jews who refused or were unable to go were shot in their homes, in the stairwells,
and on the streets. Other Jews tried to run away or hide, many of them being shot. Organizing
them into columns was also difficult. According to contemporary sources, between 600 and
1,000 people lay dead in the ghetto by noon [I. Saburowa, Yad Vashem Archive: "Bericht über Rigaer
ghetto," deposition of Saburowa, October 1954, o2/371].

¤ 6:00 A.M. in the Riga ghetto. The first column, 1,000 people marching five abreast,
accompanied by 50 Latvian police officers and headed and tailed by two Germans, started the
ten kilometer march to the killing site at Rumbula.
"The control of the columns did not proceed as anticipated. With all the shouting and shooting the
pace could not be kept up. The columns stretched out. The Germans at the head and the tail of the
columns, not seeing what was happening, lost control of the situation. The body count along the road
multiplied.

In the stretch of road just past the Skirotava station lived the Garkalns family. Their daughter, seven
years old, remembered a column of Jews driven past her house, which was about one hundred feet off
the road. Pandemonium had broken out. Some Jews had refused to continue, there had been shouting,
shoving, and beatings. The column had started up again. A few paces down the road a disturbance had
broken out anew. There was shooting, and people were killed and left on the roadside. The people
panicked, wailing began. The girl's mother hung blankets before the window, and the youngster was
taken to the back room and forbidden to look out again.

As the march progressed, many women with children and old people could not keep up. Possessions
were thrown away, littering the road and the ditches. The strong and the healthy attempted to support
their exhausted relatives, who were falling by the wayside. They were picked up and thrown onto the
horse-drawn wagons following the columns. Many were shot and corpses fell on the road. The order
was to kill not only those who attempted to flee, but also those who left the column to rest at the
roadside. No doubt many of the people were killed by the column guards." [A. Ezergailis: "The Holocaust
in Latvia: 1941 - 1944", 1996, pg. 251.]

¤ 6:00 A.M. at Rumbula. The trainload of Berlin Jews that had arrived the previous night
were marched to the killing site at Rumbula and shot before the first column of ghetto Jews
arrived.
¤ 9:00 A.M. The first column of Jews reached the killing site. The column was led in groups
of fifty into a funnel-like gauntlet formed by a gang of SD men, Ordnungspolizei, and Arâjs
men. As the Jews, whipped, kicked, and beaten progressed into the gauntlet, they were forced
to leave valuables in boxes, and then to remove their outer garments, then to strip, some to the
skin, others to their underwear. Coats, clothing, and shoes went into separate piles, which
were loaded into trucks and taken to the city by Arâjs men. The Jews were led down a ramp into
the pit and made to lie face down on top of those who had already been shot. They were killed
with a single shot to the back of the head fired from a russian automatic weapon set to fire
single shots by a marksman standing about two meters away.

Jeckeln oversaw the action along with many high SS, SD, and police officials, including
Reichskommissar of Ostland Lohse, from the top of the embankment.

According to Ezergailis:

"Jeckeln ordered his own people to be at the shooting, to witness it, and to share in the crime.
He also called in police commanders from Pskov and other cities in the region to witness the
killings. Stahlecker was called in from the Leningrad front to be present, perhaps to point out
that he had not finished the job and to show how it must be done." [op. cit., pg. 254.]

¤ 12:00 noon. The last column of Jews is sent out of the ghetto.

¤ 1: 00 P.M. A final check is made of the western part of the ghetto. About twenty bedridden
Jews are taken to the ghetto hospital, from which they are removed and shot in the head in front
of the building later that day [Hamburg Landgericht: Urteil gegen Jahnke u.a., pp. 75-76].

¤ 2:00 P.M. Corpses along the street and in the ghetto are cleared and taken to the Jewish
cemetery by work Jews, where they are dumped into a common grave without rites or prayer.
Any Jews lying on the street who show signs of life are shot dead by members of the Arâjs
commando.

¤ 5:00 P.M. The systematic shooting stops, although sentries were posted at the pits. Not
everyone had been killed and the sentries were ordered to shoot anyone in the pits that showed
signs of life. A unit of the Latvian Schutzmannschaft was assigned to guard the general area.
Day 2: December 8, 1941

The events of December 8 do not differ much from those of November 30. Some deficiencies
in the system were tightened, otherwise, the same units that had participated in the first action
participated in this one as well. There was less disorder and only some 300 Jews were killed
within the ghetto. The marching was made easier by a deception: the Jews were told to leave
the 20 kilograms of possessions they would be allowed to take with them at the ghetto, they
would be sent later by truck to their destination.

At least three people survived the second day. This is part of the account of one of them, Frida
Michelson, a dressmaker. She had been driven out of the ghetto and was marching along
Maskavas Road towards the killing site:

"Our column started pouring into the forest. At the entrance stood a large wooden box.
An SS man armed with a club stood next to it and shouted over and over: "Drop all your
valuables and money in this box.... We were driven on. A bit further a Latvian policeman
ordered: "Take off your coat and throw it on top of the rest." There was already a
mountain of overcoats. My brain was working feverishly, the instinct for survival took
hold of me. No matter how small, how precarious the chance, I was prepared to take it. I
left my line and ran up to a policeman, "Look, I am a specialist dressmaker." I showed
him my document and various diplomas. "I can bring lots of benefits to people. Look at
my papers." "Go show your diplomas to Stalin!" the policeman shouted, and hit my
hand with his fist. My papers flew in all directions—my treasured documents—the
passport, diplomas, Ausweise.
I removed my overcoat and threw it on top of the rest. The policemen were driving still
harder. The shooting, the uninterrupted shooting, was becoming louder. We were
nearing the end. An indescribable fear took hold of me, a fear that bordered on loss of
mind. I started screaming hysterically, tearing my hair, to drown out the sound of the
shooting. "Atrak! Atrak!" "Take off your clothes! Just leave on the underclothes."
Another mountain of clothes. I had on a white nightshirt and three layers of
underclothes. I fell down on the heap of clothes and tried to hide in it. Right away I felt a
sharp pain of the whip on my back. "Get up immediately and take your clothes off." "I
am already undressed," I answered crying. "I have only a nightshirt on." "Then go and
no games!" I went.
Still screaming and tearing my hair. A policeman stopped me and shouted
obscenities—why was I not undressed yet? In the same moment another woman run up to
the policeman: "My husband is Latvian, see up there, that policeman knows my husband
well. I should not die with the rest of them." Using this moment while the attention of
 the policeman was distracted by the woman, I threw myself on the ground with my face in
the snow feigning death. People were passing me, some stepped on me—I did not move.
A little later I heard voices over me in Latvian: "Look, there is somebody here on the
ground." I lay there still as a rock. Then I heard the voices of the policemen: "Atrak!
Atrak!"...I was not fully conscious. A woman passing by me was lamenting, "Ai, ai,
ai..." Some object hit me on the back, then another. More objects were falling on me.
Finally I realized that these were shoes, because they fell in pairs. I was being covered
with shoes galoshes, felt boots. This load was heavy, but I did not move a muscle...More
and more shoes were falling on me. I could hear people crying bitterly, parting with each
other—and run, run, run...
Finally the cries and moaning ceased, the shooting stopped, I could hear the shovels
working not far away, probably to cover the bodies. I heard Russian spoken. A mountain
of footwear was pressing down on me. My body was numb from cold and immobility.
However, I was fully conscious now. The snow under me had melted from the heat of my
body. I was lying in a puddle of water, —cold water... Quiet for a while. Then, from the
direction of the trench a child's cry: "Mama! Mama! Mamaaa!" A few shots. Quiet.
Killed.
[F. Michelson, "I Survived Rumbuli", New York, 1979, pp. 88-93]

E. How public was the Rumbula massacre?

The Rumbula massacre took place in Riga, a major port city, in full public view over the course
of two days. The killings at the ghetto and its immediate surroundings, as well as the killing of
stragglers and would-be escapees along Maskavas Road were done in full view of any passers
by. The killing site at Rumbula was partially concealed by trees, but the noise and
pandemonium were audible from a considerable distance. The stationmaster at the Rumbula
station testified that he could hear the whole operation from his house [Alberts Baranovskis
testimony of November 18, 1944, in H. Krausnick & H-H. Wilhelm, "Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges:
Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und der SD, 1938-1942", Stuttgart, 1981, pg. 565].

The whole city of Riga knew of the massacre by the evening of November 30, and everyone was
talking about it. Radio broadcasts, one a German-language one from Moscow, the other a BBC
broadcast from London, announced the killings at Rumbula to the world at large.

The city of Riga was reminded of the Rumbula massacre in a most unpleasant manner during
the summer of 1943. Himmler issued a general order that the bodies of massacre victims
buried in mass graves were to be exhumed and burned. Even though the burning was done in
secrecy, with the participants killed after the job was completed, both the smoke and the stench
and the fact that the Rumbula pits are less than 100 meters from a major train line, made it
impossible to hide what was going on from the inhabitants of Riga or from travelers to or from
that city. At the Arâjs Trial, Leopold Schlesigner, leader of the SD Department III N, discusses
this operation in his deposition, pp. 1392-1407. He recalls that during the summer of 1943 a
westerly wind blew and "a horrible stench settled on the city." He asked his Latvian co-
workers the cause of the smell and they answered that he should know that it came from the
burning of Jewish corpses. Despite this attempt to destroy the evidence, burned bones and
other remains of the massacre are still to be found at the site [cf. Mordecai Lapid, "The
Memorial at Rumbuli: A First Hand Account", "Jewish Frontier", June 1971, pgs. 10-19].

F. The numbers at Rumbula

The factuality of the Rumbula massacre is beyond dispute, there are, however, differences of
opinions concerning the number of people killed in the operation. After the killings SS-
Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln told his assistant, Paul Degenhart, that 22,000 rounds
of ammunition had been used at Rumbula itself. At his trial in Riga in 1946 Friedrich Jeckeln
said that the number of victims was at least 20,000. On each of the two days more than 1,000
people were killed either in the ghetto or along the road to Rumbula. To this figure must be
added the 1,000 Berlin Jews who were the first to be shot at the Rumbula pits on the morning
of November 30, 1941. The entire operation can be estimated to have killed a total of
approximately 25,000 people.
 IV. The significance of the Rumbula massacre

A. General significance

The Rumbula massacre was one of the largest, most public, and best document massacres
carried out by the Germans in Eastern Europe. For this reason alone it serves as an excellent
case study demonstrating the degree to which German policy towards the Jews in Latvia and,
by analogy, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, was the product of a combination of a master plan
and local improvisation. It is certainly worthy of note that the operation was directed from
Berlin, that Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler himself assigned the task to SS-Ober-
gruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, his mass-killing specialist, after becoming aware of policy
differences concerning the fate of Jews in the Soviet-occupied Baltics. Equally important is the
fact that Jeckeln and his subordinates were convinced that they were acting on an orally given
command from Hitler himself, a command that originated in an understanding of the radically
changed relationship of Germany's policy towards Jews resulting from the attack on the USSR,
a country with a Jewish population of more than 5,000,000 and led by an ideology which Nazi
propaganda identified with Judaism: destroying communism and destroying Judaism were, in
the view of the Nazis, the same thing.

As far as Latvia's Jews were concerned, the Rumbula massacre was a major tragedy, but not the
beginning or end of their tragic ordeal. Several thousand Jews had been killed in Latvia by the
Einsatzkommandos and local operatives during the five months that preceded the Rumbula
massacre, and major massacres of Jews were carried out in other Latvian cities as well as in the
several dozen concentration camps operated by the Nazis in Latvia afterwards. All in all,
approximately 70,000 of the approximately 86,500 Latvian Jews — four out of every five —
were killed in the Holocaust. To this number must be added hundreds of Jewish refugees from
neighboring Lithuania killed by the Germans during the first weeks of the war, as well as the
tens of thousands of German,
Hungarian, Czech and other
Jews sent to Latvia as slave
laborers by the Nazis after most
Latvian Jews had been killed who
died there as a consequence of
abuse, starvation, disease, or
were shot in conjunction with
the liquidation of the concen-
tration camps when the Germans
withdrew from Latvia.
B. Methodological significance

As far as the evolution of killing methods is concerned, the second day of the Rumbula
massacre, December 8, 1941, coincides with the opening of the first extermination camp at
Chelmno near Lodz in Poland. The Chelmno camp used the techniques of deception that had
been developed within the T4 euthanasia program. It is interesting to consider the similarities
and differences between Riga, one of the last mass shootings, and Chelmno, the first site of
mass gassings.

At Chelmno the first victims were mainly Jews from the Lodz ghetto who were told, like the
Jews of Riga, that they were to be resettled. They were transported to the camp, mostly in
railway freight cars, taken to a cellar changing room by guards posing as medical staff, told to
deposit their clothes for disinfection and their money and valuables for safekeeping, and sent
on in groups of fifty or sixty up an inclined ramp following signs "To the bath". At the end was
a large truck with steel sides and roof. As Adolf Eichmann related in his own papers
concerning his trip to Chelmno, they were packed inside, the doors were closed and locked,
after which they were driven off into the woods. There a group of work-Jews was waiting for
them beside a trench grave they had dug. The driver stopped at the edge of the grave and
pushed a button which diverted the exhaust gas from the truck's motor into the sealed body of
the truck. When the people inside the truck were dead, the doors were opened, the bodies
removed, checked for gold teeth and hidden valuables, and then thrown into the awaiting
graves.

At Chelmno we see a merger of the type of killing used in Riga - ghettoization, a cover story
that the ghetto inhabitants are going to be resettled, and their orderly transportation to a
killing site. But there, unlike the situation in Riga, the killing site is enclosed and thus not
dependent on weather and daylight, in addition to being closed, nor did what was going to
happen become apparent until it was too late to escape. The method, CO administered
stealthily in an enclosure that is functionally a gas chamber, is derived from the T4 euthanasia
program and requires a far smaller manpower-input than the individual shots in the head
administered at Riga. As we follow the Holocaust into 1942, we see a rapid decrease in Riga
type mass murders, and a corresponding increase and methodological evolution in the number
of facilities like Chelmno, where the killing can take place in a more orderly and industrial
fashion. The main improvements were:

a. omitting the trip from the camp to the mass graves by constructing stationary gas chambers
which fed into mass graves or crematory facilities in the immediate vicinity;
b. increasing the size of the functional gas chambers from facilities that could accommodate a
few dozen victims at a time to facilities that could accommodate hundreds or even a
thousand or more victims at a time;
c. improving the killing agent from CO to the cheaper and more lethal Zyklon-B.

The protocol to the Wannsee Conference refers explicitly to the practical experience gained
solving the Jewish problem during the time between the attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941
and the convening of the conference on January 20, 1942 as having a direct bearing on the
form the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe would assume, a question which, the
protocol notes, at that time encompassed the estimated more than 11,000,000 racial Jews still
living in Europe.

The logistical complexity of the Rumbula massacre, as well as the merger of the method of
using a cover story about resettlement with the ruse of concealed functional gas chambers
developed within the framework of the T4 program, provided the justification and
methodological framework for gradually abandoning mass shootings for extermination centers
like Chelmno, which had been functioning for more than a month when the conference was
convened. Riga and Chemno both serve as examples of the instructive practical experience
dealing with the Jewish Question which is referred to in the notorious protocol.

Regards,
Eugene Holman
 Excursus:
An eyewitness account of the events of November 30, 1941
Source: http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/documents/BrunsCSDICb.html#Bruns

Of interest here is the degree to which the ideas represented by the exploiters (Lohse and his
faction) and the exterminationists (Stahlecker and his faction) dominate the text. Note also that
Bruns talks of an order subsequent to the Riga massacre to carry out mass killings in a more
discrete fashion in the future.

***

GERMAN ARMY engineer-colonel Walter Bruns was stationed near Riga in November 1941, when he
witnessed a mass shooting of Jews, including a thousand just arrived from Berlin.

In British captivity in April 1945, Bruns, by then a Major-General, was overheard by hidden
microphones [the verbatim transcripts are accessible from our Index at right] whispering to fellow
prisoners what he had seen.

TOP SECRET

C. S. D. I. C. (U.K.)

G.G. REPORT

IF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS REQUIRED FOR FURTHER

DISTRIBUTION. IT SHOULD BE PARAPHRASED SO THAT NO MENTION IS MADE OF THE
PRISONERS' NAMES, NOR OF THE METHODS BY WHICH THE INFORMATION HAS BEEN
OBTAINED

S.R.G.G. 1158(C)

The following conversation took place between:

CS/1952 -- Generalmajor BRUNS (Heeres-Waffenmeisterschule I, BERLIN) Captd

GÖTTINGEN 8 Apr 45

and other Senior Officer PW whose voices could not be identified.

Information received: 25 Apr 45

GERMAN TEXT

BRUNS: Als ich davon hörte, dass am Freitag die Juden erschossen werden sollten, ging ich zu
dem 2l-jährigen Burschen und sagte, dass sie sich in meinem Dienstbereich sehr nutzbar gemacht
hatten, ausserdem: der Heereskraftfahrpark hatte 1500, dann hatte die Heeresgruppe etwa 800
Frauen eingesetzt, um Wäsche zu nahen von den Beständen, die wir in RIGA gefunden hatten,
dann nähten in der Nähe von RIGA etwa 1200 Frauen aus mehreren Millionen gefundener
Schafsfelle das, was uns dringend fehlte: Ohrenschützer, Pelzkappen, Pelzwesten usw. Es war
doch nichts vorgesehen, weil ja doch der Krieg in RUSSLAND schon siegreich beendet war
bekanntlich im Oktober 1941.

Kurz und gut, alles Frauen, die nutzbar eingesetzt waren. Habe ich versucht, die zu retten. Habe
zu diesem Burschen da, ALTENMEYER(?), den Namen vergesse ich nicht, der kommt auch auf
die Verbrecherliste, sage ich: "Hören Sie mal, das sind doch wertvolle Arbeitskräfte für uns!"
"Wollen Herr Oberst die Juden als wertvolle Menschen bezeichnen?" Ich sage: "Hören Sie mal, Sie
müssen zuhören, was ich sage, ich habe gesagt wertvolle Arbeitskräfte. Über ihren Menschenwert
habe ich ja gar nicht gesprochen." Sagt er: "Ja, die müssen erschossen werden, ist Führerbefehl!"
Ich sage: "FÜHRER-Befehl?" "Jawohl", und da zeigt er mir das. SKIOTAWA(?) war es, 8 km von
RIGA, zwischen SCHAULEN und MITAU sind ja auch die 5000 Berliner Juden - plötzlich aus dem
Zug raus - erschossen worden. Das habe ich zwar nicht gesehen, aber das bei SKIOTAWA(?); also
kurz und gut, es gab dann mit dem Kerl da noch eine Auseinandersetzung, ich habe dann
telephoniert mit dem General im Hauptquartier, mit JAKOBS und mit ABERGER(?) und mit
einem Dr. SCHULTZ, der da war beim General der Pioniere, wegen dieser Arbeitskräfte; ich sagte
ihm noch: "Ich will mich Ihrer Auffassung anschliessen, dass das Volk an den Völkern der Erde
gesündigt hat, dann lasst sie doch nutzbare Fron[t]arbeit leisten, stellt sie an die Strassen, lasst
die Strassen streuen, dass uns die Lastkraftwagen nicht in die Gräben schlittern." "Ja, die
Verpflegung!" Ich sage: "Das bisschen Fressen, was die kriegen, ich will mal 2 Millionen Juden
annehmen — 125 Gramm Brot kriegten sie per Tag — wenn wir das nicht mehr aufbringen, dann
wollen wir lieber heute als morgen Schluss machen." Dann habe ich telephoniert usw., und denke
doch nicht, dass das so schnell geht. Jedenfalls, Sonntag morgens höre ich, dass sie es schon
machen. Das Ghetto ist ausgeräumt worden, da ist ihnen gesagt worden: "Ihr werdet umgelagert,
nehmt die wichtigsten Sachen noch mit." Im übrigen war das eine Erlösung für die, denn wie sie
im Ghetto behandelt wurden, das war ein Martyrium. Ich wollte es nicht glauben, da bin ich
rausgefahren und habe mir den Laden angeguckt.

? : Das Ausland hat das doch alles gewusst, nur wir Deutsche haben es nicht gewusst.

BRUNS: Ich will Ihnen etwas sagen: es mag das eine oder andere gestimmt haben, es ist aber
auffallend, dass das Exekutionskommando, was an dem Morgen da erschoss, also an jeder Grube
sechs Maschinenpistolenschützen--die Gruben waren 24 m lang und ungefähr 3 m breit, mussten
sich hinlegen wie die Sardinen in einer Büchse, Kopfe nach der Mitte. Oben sechs
Maschinenpistolenschützen, die dann den Genickschuss beibrachten.

Wie ich kam, war sie schon so voll, da mussten die Lebenden also dann sich drauflegen und dann
kriegten sie den Schuss; damit nicht so viel Platz verloren ging, mussten sie sich schön schichten.

Vorher wurden sie aber ausgeplündert an der einen Station--hier war der Waldrand, hier drin
waren die drei Gruben an dem Sonntag und hier war noch eine 1 1/2 km lange Schlange und die
rückten schrittchenweise--es war ein Anstehen auf den Tod.

Wenn sie hier nun näher kamen, dann sahen sie, was drin vor sich ging. Ungefähr hier unten
mussten sie ihre Schmucksachen und ihre Koffer abgeben. Das gute kam in den Koffer und das
andere auf einen Haufen. Das war zur Bekleidung von unserem notleidenden Volk--und dann, ein
Stückchen weiter, mussten sie sich ausziehen und 500 m vor dem Wald vollkommen ausziehen,
durften nur Hemd oder Schlüpfer anbehalten. Das waren alles nur Frauen und kleine Kinder, so
2-jährige.

Dann diese zynische Bemerkungen! Wenn ich noch gesehen hätte, dass diese
Maschinenpistolenschützen, die wegen Überanstrengung alle Stunden abgelöst wurden, es
widerwillig gemacht hätten!

Nein, dreckige Bemerkungen: "Da kommt ja so eine jüdische Schönheit." Das sehe ich noch vor
meinem geistigen Auge. Ein hübsches Frauenzimmer in so einem feuerroten Hemd.
Und von wegen Rassereinheit: in RIGA haben sie sie zuerst rumgevögelt und dann totgeschossen,
dass sie nicht mehr reden konnten.

Dann habe ich zwei Offiziere rausgeschickt, von denen einer jetzt noch lebt, weil ich Zeugen haben
wollte. Ich habe ihnen nicht gesagt, was los ist. "Gehen Sie zum Wald von SKIOTAWA(?) raus,
gucken Sie sich an, was da los ist, und machen Sie einen Bericht darüber."

Dann habe ich zu dem Bericht noch ein Amtsschreiben dazugemacht, und habe ihm persönlich zu
JAKOBS hingebracht.

Der sagte: "Hier liegen schon zwei Beschwerden von Pionierbataillonen aus der UKRAINE vor."

Da hatten sie sie am Rande von den grossen Erdspalten totgeschossen und reinfallen lassen und
dann hat es beinahe Pest gegeben, also jedenfaIls pestilenzartige Düfte. Sie hatten sich
eingebildet, sie könnten mit der Kreishacke die Ränder dann abpickeln und dann würden die
begraben sein. Dieser Löss war so hart, dass zwei Pionierbataillone nachher die Ränder
absprengen mussten, da hatten sich die Bataillone darüber beschwert. Das lag auch bei JAKOBS.

Er sagte: "Wir wussten nicht recht, wie wir es dem FÜHRER zu Gehör bringen sollten. Machen wir
auf dem Wege über CANARIS."

Der hatte diese scheussliche Aufgabe, immer so die günstige Minute abzupassen und dem
FÜHRER so leise Andeutungen zu machen.

Vierzehn Tage später war ich mit einer anderen Angelegenheit bei dem Oberbürgermeister oder
wie damals die besondere Funktionsbezeichnung war, da zeigte mir der ALTENMEYER
triumphierend: "Hier ist eine Verfügung gekommen, dass derartige Massenerschiessungen in
Zukunft nicht mehr stattfinden dürften. Das soll vorsichtiger gemacht werden."

Ich weiss aber jetzt aus meinen letzten Warnungen, dass ich seit der Zeit noch verschärft
bespitzelt wurde.

? : Allerhand, dass Sie überhaupt noch leben.

BRUNS: Ich habe in Göttingen jeden Tag auf meine Verhaftung gewartet.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DISTRIBUTION

BY C.S.D.I.C. (U.K.)

M.I.19.a War Office (56 copies)

N.I.D. Admiralty ( 9 copies)
A.D.I.(K) Air Ministry (15 copies)

(29111) Wtr51755/3515 37,000 2/45

A. & E.W.Ltd GP.692 J.7303

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TRANSLATION

BRUNS 1: As soon as I heard those Jews were to be shot on Friday 2 I went to a 21-year
old boy and said that they had made themselves very useful in the area under my
command, besides which the Army MT park had employed 1500 and the 'Heeresgruppe'
800 women to make underclothes of the stores we captured in RIGA; besides which
about 1200 women in the neighbourhood of RIGA were turning millions of captured
sheepskins into articles we urgently required: ear-protectors, fur caps, fur waistcoats,
etc. Nothing had been provided, as of course the Russian campaign was known to have
come to a victorious end in October 1941!

In short, all those women were employed in a useful capacity. I tried to save them. I told
that fellow ALTENMEYER(?) 3 whose name I shall always remember and who will be
added to the list of war criminals: "Listen to me, they represent valuable manpower!" 'Do
you call Jews valuable human beings, sir?" I said: "Listen to me properly, I said valuable
manpower'. I didn't mention their value as human beings." He said: "Well, they're to be
shot in accordance with the FÜHRER's orders! 4 (*) I said: "FÜHRER's orders?" "Yes",
whereupon he showed me his orders. This happened at SKIOTAWA(?), 8 km. from
RIGA, between SIAULAI and JELGAVA, (**) where 5000 BERLIN Jews were suddenly
taken off the train and shot. I didn't see that myself, but what happened at
SKIOTAWA(?) - to cut a long story short, I argued with the fellow and telephoned to the
General at HQ, to JAKOBS 5 and ABERGER(?), 6 and to a Dr. SCHULTZ 7 who was
attached to the Engineer General, on behalf of these people; I told him: "Granting that
the Jews have committed a crime against the other peoples of the world, at least let
them do the drudgery; send them to throw earth on the roads to prevent our heavy
lorries skidding," "Then I'd have to feed them!" I said: "The little amount of food they
receive, let's assume 2 million Jews - they got 125 gr. of bread a day - if we can't even
manage that, the sooner we end the war the better." Then I telephoned, thinking it
would take some time. At any rate on Sunday morning 8 I heard that they had already
started on it. The Ghetto was cleared and they were told: "You're being transferred: take
along your essential things." Incidentally it was a happy release for those people, as
their life in the Ghetto was a martyrdom. I wouldn't believe it and drove there, to have a
look.

(unveiled): Everyone abroad knew about it; only we Germans were kept in ignorance.

BRUNS:I'll tell you something: some of the details may have been correct, but it was
remarkable that the firing squad detailed that morning - six men with tommy-guns were
posted at each pit; the pits were 24 m in length and 3 m in breadth - they had to lie down
like sardines in a tin, with their heads in the centre. Above there were six men with
tommy-guns who gave them the coup de grâce. When I arrived 9 those pits were so full
that the living had to lie down on top of the dead; then they were shot and, in order to
save room, they had to lie down neatly in layers. Before this, however, they were
stripped of everything at one of the stations - here at the edge of the wood were the
three pits they used that Sunday and here they stood in a queue 1 1/2 km long which
approached step by step - a queueing up for death. As they drew nearer they saw what
was going on. About here they had to hand over their jewellery and suitcases. All good
stuff was put into the suit-cases and the remainder thrown on a heap. This was to serve
as clothing for our suffering population - and then a little further on they had to undress
and, 500 m in front of the wood, strip completely; they were only permitted to keep on a
chemise or knickers. They were all women and small two year-old children. Then all
those cynical remarks! If only I had seen those tommy-gunners, who were relieved
every hour - because of over-exertion, carry out their task with distaste, but no, nasty
remarks like: "Here comes a Jewish beauty!" I can still see it all in my memory: a pretty
woman in a flame-coloured chemise. Talk about keeping the race pure: at RIGA they
first slept with them and then shot them to prevent them from talking. Then I sent two
officers out there, one of whom is still alive, because I wanted eye-witnesses. " I didn't
tell them what was going on, but said: "Go out to the forest of SKIOTAWA(?), see what's
up there and send me a report." I added a memorandum to their report and took it to
JAKOBS myself. He said: "I have already two complaints sent me by Engineer
'Bataillone' from the UKRAINE." There they shot them on the brink of large crevices 10
and let them fall down into them; they nearly had an epidemic of plague, at any rate a
pestilential smell. They thought they could break off the edges with picks, thus burying
them. That loess there was so hard that two Engineer 'Bataillone' were required to
dynamite the edges; those 'Battaillone' complained. JAKOBS had received that
complaint. He said: "We didn't quite know how to tell the FÜHRER. We'd better do it
through CANARIS." 11 CANARIS had the unsavoury task of waiting for the favourable
moment to give the FÜHRER certain gentle hints. A fortnight later I visited the
Oberbürgermeister or whatever he was called then, concerning some other business.
ALTENMEYER(?) triumphantly showed me: "Here is an order, just issued, prohibiting
mass-shootings on that scale from taking place in future. They are to be carried out
more discreetly." From warnings given me recently I knew that I was receiving still
more attentions from spies.

(unveiled): A wonder you're still alive.

BRUNS: At GÖTTINGEN, I expected to be arrested every day.

Note: "Skiotawa" is Skirotava, the sorting station for Riga livestock and the disembarking point for
European Jews shipped to Latvia. Additional eyewitness testimony of the events surrounding this
operation indicates that the ghetto Jews did not march willingly to the killing site at Rumbula. (Eugene
Holman)

Notes in the translated text by its source, David Irving:

1 Generalmajor Walter Bruns was in 1941 an Oberst der Pioniere, Leiter des "Brückenstabs Bruns" bei Riga.
According to report 6824 DIC (MIS)/CI-24, dated April 29, 1945, Bruns "later heard . . . that a total of
42,000 Jewish women and children were killed in Skirotawa within three successive days." (NA: RG.332,
box 93).
2 Friday, November 28, 1941.
3 Werner Altemeyer, the 21-year-old Stabsleiter attached to the Bürgermeister von Riga, trained at the NS-
Ordensburg at Crössinsee/Pommern. Remarkable for the general reader, perhaps, the fact that a 21-year-old
should have had the Vollmacht to execute this crime in the name of the German people.
4 In this case however Hitler had demonstrably ordered the Jews were not to be killed. On November 30,
Himmler visited him at his bunker, the Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze). Himmler noted the same day a telephone
call at 13,30 hrs to SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich in Prague: "... Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine
Liquidierung." (Transport of Jews from Berlin. No liquidation.)
5 General Alfred Jacob, since 1938 Inspekteur der Pioniere und Festungen, who had his office at OKH
headquarters at that time at Angerburg, East Prussia (near Hitler's).
6 Oberst Erich Abberger Jacob's chief of staff.
7 Hptm. d. Res. Dipl. Ing. Dr Otto Schulz Du Bois; he later sent his wife a lengthy letter describing the
shootings (now in the archives of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich).
8 The Sunday was November 30, 1941. On November 27 the first trainload with 1,000 Berlin Jews had left the
city for Riga; at 9 a.m. on the 30th, as described, at zero degrees and with three inches of snow, these were
"suddenly" pulled out of the train and even before the four thousand Riga Jews who were due to be shot this
day they were shot into the mass graves, at the edge of a forest strip near Rumbuli, five miles outside Riga on
the highway to Dvinsk (Dünaburg) (Bericht Stahlecker vom 5. Januar 1942: ND, NO-3527).
9 His description provides convincing verisimilitude -- there is all the halting train of thought, the uncertainties,
the local-colour which makes for authenticity, but also the phrase which betrays instantly that Bruns was
certainly himself dabei. In seiner Aussage beim OKW-Prozess (Fall XII) drei Jahre später (18. Februar
1948), S.841ff, verschwieg er wohlweislich, daß er selber Augenzeuge war; er habe sich lediglich durch zwei
anonymen Offiziere [wohl Abberger und Schulz-Du Bois] Bericht erstatten lassen. Abberger lebt noch
(1992), der anderer starb noch Februar 1945.
10 Presumably Babi Yar. A "Rote Kapelle" soube deste massacre escassos dias depois, quando um vaidoso (e
indiscreto) oficial SS de engenharia contou o que presenciou a Leopold Trepper, que ele supunha simple
homem de negócios canadiano em França.
11 Remarkable, the moral cowardice of Bruns and his senior-officer colleagues, none of whom wished personally
to sign a report to the Führer's headquarters about the atrocity they had witnessed ("Wie bringen wir es dem
Führer zu Gehör?"; and the fact that Hitler -- far from having issued the order, as (allegedly) claimed by
Altemeyer -- seemingly intervened at once to order a halt to "diese Massenerschiessungen" as soon as a
report, signed by a junior officer, was forwarded to him.

Other notes in the translated text, by Carlos Roso:

(*) Moreover, it is said in a different document that one of the reasons for Himmler's strong reaction was the
presence, in that transportation, of people decorated with the Iron Cross in the war of 1914-1919 those
German Jews were exempted from summary execution. This exception was even written in the infamous
"Wannsee Protocol", a conference rather strangely called that same day (November, 30) by Heydrich to be
held in December, 9 but in the meantime postponed to January, 20 (to which SS-Sturmbannführer Dr.
Rudolf Lange, chief of Rigas's Einsatzkommando 2, was invited actually).
(**) There's something wrong here. Siauliai is in the centre of Lithuania and Jelgava in the west of Latvia, both
quite far away (80 and 31 miles) and south-west from Riga, whereas Skirotava, at the time the first village in
the main road to Moscow, is 6 miles east of Riga (2 miles ahead is Salaspils, location of a concentration camp
where mass killings also took place). The mistake is unbelievable since Brun was supposed to be "stationed
near Riga" and not a mere one-time visitor.