Die "Endlösung" in Riga : Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944

Authors:Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein

Summary:Traces the history of the Holocaust in Riga: the pogroms and massacres at the start of the Nazi occupation in July 1941; the decision to stop these, in order to exploit the Jews, segregated in a ghetto, as forced laborers in war industries; the massacre in November-December 1941, at Himmler's orders, of most of the Jews of the ghetto except for a few thousand skilled workers, in order to make room for transports of Jews from Germany; the exploitation of these, in turn, for forced labor; the selection and murder of the elderly, the infirm, and the children; Himmler's directive in 1943 to convert ghetto and work places into concentration camps, thus placing them under the control of the SS; the atrocities at the Kaiserwald transit camp; the evacuation of Riga and the transport of the surviving Jews to Stutthof, where most of them died; and the postwar trials of the perpetrators. Analyzes both competition and cooperation between the civil authorities and the industries working for the Wehrmacht, who were in desperate need of manpower, and the SS, with its ideology of extermination. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism)