Kaiserwald Concentration Camp Memorial

Piemineklis Mežaparka koncentrācijas nometnes

In the Riga suburb of Mežaparks a memorial remembers the former concentration camp Kaiserwald. Several thousands of Jews passed through it in 1943 and 1944. After the dissolution of the Riga ghetto Kaiserwald became the main site for the persecution of Jews in Latvia.

History

In 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the dissolution of the ghettos in the Baltic states and to either murder their residents or to gather them in concentration camps. The exploitation of Jewish forced labourers was to be concentrated solely in the hands of the SS. According to this policy the SS established – supposedly in March 1943 – the Kaiserwald concentration camp in the Riga garden suburb of Mežaparks, about 8 km northeast of the city centre. The first approximately 500 prisoners who had to build the camp were transferred to Riga from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, they were mainly political and criminal prisoners. A male and a female tract were erected, each consisting of four barracks. The first Jewish prisoners were transferred from the Riga ghetto to the camp beginning of July 1943, by the end of the month about 700 Jewish men and women were held captive there. At the same time various satellite camps of Kaiserwald were built where prisoners had to conduct forced labour. Kaiserwald became the most important collection and transit camp for Jewish forced labourers in the Baltic states.
Until summer 1944 several thousands of Jews were deported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp and its satellite camps from various occupied countries, mainly from Lithuania, Poland and Hungary. The conditions in the main camp as well as in the satellite camps were catastrophic, besides the hunger and the diseases the sadism of the guards claimed many lives.
In summer 1944 the SS tried to evacuate all prisoners to other concentration camps because of the approaching Red Army. The SS deported thousands of prisoners to the west, mainly via the arduous and dangerous sea route to Gdansk. Those unfit for work were shot. The women were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, the men to Buchenwald and other camps. Only a few hundred lived to see the end of war. On October 19 the Red Army reached the Kaiserwald camp which the Soviets subsequently used as a prisoner of war camp.

Riga, 1944, The Kaiserwald concentration camp following liberation, Yad Vashem

Riga, 2007, View of the memorial, Mark Hatlie

Victims

Already in 1941 the SS murdered most Latvian Jews held captive in the Riga ghetto. The now emptied ghetto was refilled with Jews from the German Reich, many of them from Austria or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Mainly the survivors from these groups were deported from the ghetto to the Kaiserwald camp from 1943 on. Kaiserwald was mainly a transition camp for prisoners who were put on forced labour in the satellite camps and other sites. Thus the occupancy never exceeded about 2.000 men and women, however more than 18.000 prisoners passed through the camp. Thousands of Jews were destined for extermination by selections and were shot nearby. In the beginning of 1944 the SS again and again assigned forced labourers to so-called Enterdungsaktionen ("exhumation actions") where the corpses of Jews who had been killed in mass shootings in 1941/42 were exhumed and burned. These prisoners were invariably killed after their assignments.
It is impossible to specify the exact number of victims of the Kaiserwald concentration camp but it can be assumed that the overwhelming majority of Jews who passed through the camp perished at the latest after their evacuation to the west.

Latvia, an independent state since 1918, was occupied by the Red Army in 1940 as the result of a German-Soviet agreement – the so-called Hitler-Stalin (or Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact. When German troops attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, there were still around 70,000 Jews in Latvia. Shortly before this, 23,000 Jews and hundreds and thousands of other Latvians had been deported to Siberia by the Soviet secret service NKWD or had managed to flee within the USSR. The Wehrmacht troops were followed by SS Einsatzgruppe A, which shot around 30,000 Jews between July and early December 1941 with the active participation of Latvian »self-defence« units. In the late summer of 1941, the headquarters of the Wehrmacht in Latvia established two ghettos: one in the capital Riga holding 30,000 Jewish prisoners and one in Daugavpils with 14,000 Jewish prisoners. Members of the German and Latvian special units carried out two mass shootings at the end of 1941 in the forest of Rumbula near Riga, killing 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto. From December 1941, the liquidated »Big Ghetto« in Riga became the destination for deportation trains carrying 25,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews. In early 1942 more mass shootings took place in the forest of Bikernieki near Riga, claiming thousands of Jewish lives. By the end of the war, 95 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of Latvia and around 120,000 civilans had met a violent death. After the Red Army had regained Latvia in 1944, the country once again became a Soviet republic. A large number of monuments were built to commemorate the »victory« in the »Great Patriotic War«. Only in 1990-91 did Latvia reclaim its independence from Moscow, following a struggle also against Soviet troops. Many Soviet monuments were subsequently dismantled and the decades of occupation and resistance became the main feature of national memory. The Soviet annexation of Latvia in 1940-41 and from 1944 to 1990 was viewed on the same footing as the German occupation. As in Lithuania and Estonia, occupation museums were established in Latvia focusing on the years of Soviet terror. During the Second World War around 160,000 Latvians either volunteered or were forced to serve in the Latvian legion of the Waffen SS. They were deployed to take part in mass shootings, to ransack towns and villages and to guard camps, but also to fight in the war and against partisans. During the Soviet regime, they were marginalised and persecuted but after 1990-91 these former »legionaries« were respected and celebrated by many as freedom fighters who had opposed the communist enemy. This one-sided perspective attracted criticism from abroad. At the end of 1998, an international committee of historians was founded by the President of the Republic to examine »Crimes against Humanity during the Two Occupations, 1940–1956«. Holocaust memorial sites were established most notably at the former Salaspils concentration camp in 1967 and in Bikernieki in 2001. As early as 1962, Jewish dissidents put up a Jewish star in the forest of Rumbula to remember the Jewish victims. It was removed by the Soviet authorities and replaced by a monument honouring the »victims of fascism«. A new monument was inaugurated there in November 2002. Already in 1989, a Jewish Museum was funded in Riga by Holocaust survivors. In 2005-06 a memorial site was opened among the foundations of the former Choral Synagogue in Riga to remember all victims of the Holocaust and all Jews murdered on Latvian soil. Since 2010 there is also a Museum of the Riga Ghetto.

Remembrance

Although the Kaiserwald concentration camp was a main site of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, it plays only a subordinated role in the memorial culture compared to sites of mass shootings like Biķernieki and Rumbula or the Riga ghetto. No remains of the camp itself still exist, at its former site is now a housing complex. The memorial near the former camp, inaugurated in June 2005, was designed by the artist Solveiga Vasiļjeva and erected by the city of Riga and the German Embassy.

Riga, 2007, Detailed view of the memorial, Mark Hatlie

Riga, 2007, Inscription on the memorial's base, Mark Hatlie

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times

Contact

32 Tilta iela
LV-1005 Riga

Riga, probably 1943, Prisoner of the Kaiserwald concentration camp Rivka Tellerman, Yad Vashem

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