The massacre in Rumbul - the execution of more than 25 thousand Jews in the Rumbul forest near Riga in Latvia on November 30 and December 8, 1941 . In two days, Einsatzgruppe A, with the help of local collaborators from the Arajs team [1] and Latvian nationalists, killed about 28 thousand Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto and one thousand Jews [2] who had been brought from Germany the day before by train. The operation was led by SS Obergruppenführer and Police General Friedrich Eckeln . According to the testimony of a number of witnesses, a Latvian pilot, member of the Arais team Herbert Tsukurs [3] [4] participated in the rally.
In the Rumbul forest in the suburbs of Riga, Soviet prisoners of war dug three huge moats (then all prisoners of war were killed). On November 29, 1941, Arais’s team drove the Jews from the Riga ghetto to the outskirts of the city, where they were shot at night. At the same time, hundreds of people were killed in the ghetto itself. After the execution in the Tevia newspaper in Riga on December 1, 1941, journalist Jānis Martinsons made an article entitled “Fight against Judaism”, noting: “Finally, the time has come when almost all European nations have learned to recognize their common enemy - the Jew. Almost all the peoples of Europe started a war against this enemy, both on the battlefields and in the matter of internal construction. And for us, Latvians, this moment has come ... ” [5]
For convenience, the method that Ekkeln called “packing sardines” was applied. Jews were forced to undress and lay down in the pit face down from the already dead, after which they were shot [6] .
As one of the witnesses showed: “Women with children were persecuted for execution, there were a lot of children, other mothers had 2-3 children. Many children marched in columns under heavy police guard. Around the end of December 1941, in the morning, at about 8 o’clock, German fascists drove to the extermination of 3 large parties of school-age children. Each party had at least 200 children. Children cried terribly, called their mothers, yelled for help. All these children were exterminated in the Rambul forest. They didn’t shoot the children, but killed them with blows of machine guns and pistol grip on the head and dumped them right into the pit.
When they buried them in the grave, not everyone was still dead, and the earth swayed from the bodies of buried children, women, and old people ” [7] . Among the dead was the Jewish historian Semyon Dubnov .
Notes
- ↑ Olga Sokolova. Bloody Legion . Rosbalt (March 15, 2009). Date of treatment May 9, 2017.
- ↑ Leo Simkin . “One bullet was assigned to each victim” , Gazeta.Ru (May 9, 2018). Date of treatment May 9, 2018.
- ↑ Latvia under the yoke of Nazism. - M .: Europe, 2006 .-- 339 p. - (Euro-East). - ISBN 9785973900779 .
- ↑ Kirill Reznik-Martov. Tsukurs personally participated in the massacres . The newspaper Telegraph (October 5, 2010). Date of treatment May 9, 2017.
- ↑ Karl Berezin, Axel Saar. Genocide in Latvian . Operation "Cottbus", or "Purification" of the Baltic states from the Jews . www.souz.co.il (2001). Date of treatment May 9, 2017.
- ↑ Altman, The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance, 2002 , p. 167.
- ↑ Kalganov A. Case No. 2783: War crimes are not forgotten . Independent Military Review . Independent newspaper (May 12, 2000). Date of treatment May 3, 2017.
Literature
- Altman I.A. Chapter 5. The extermination of the Jews of the USSR. § 2. The extermination of Jews in the Baltic // Holocaust and Jewish resistance in the occupied territory of the USSR / Ed. prof. A. G. Asmolova . - M .: The Holocaust Foundation , 2002. - S. 163-169. - 320 p. - ISBN 5-83636-007-7 .
- Frida Michelson. I Survived Rumbuli = Frida Michelson, “I Survived Rumbula” - memoirs of the prisoner of the Riga ghetto Riga dressmaker Frida Michelson, written by her in 1965-1967 / translated from Russian and edited by Wolf Goodman. - New York: The Holocaust Library, 1979. - ISBN 0-89604-030-5 .
- The extermination of Jews in Latvia: 1941-1945: lecture cycle / Ed. Menachem Barkagan. - Riga: Shamir, 2008 .-- 319 p. - ISBN 978-9984-9835-6-1 .
- Bob, Mendel. Jews in Latvia / Translation from Yiddish Leah German. - Riga: Shamir, 2006. - ISBN 9984-9835-3-6 .
- Zilberman, David. And you saw it. - Riga: "BOTA", 2006. - ISBN 9984-19-970-3 .