On the morning of the 30th of November 1941, the dirt road leading to the outskirts of Ria was covered with thousands of people walking in silence. The air was so cold that their breath turned into white mist, but no one dared to stop. They were urged forward toward the Rumbula forest where huge pits had been dug just a few days earlier.
No one knew exactly what awaited there, only that those who had gone before had never returned. On the streets of Ria, guards sealed off the ghetto, blocking every route. German soldiers and local auxiliary forces were deployed throughout the city. Everything happened in a cold and orderly manner, as if a plan had been prepared long before.
In just 2 days, at the beginning of December, that forest would become one of the bloodiest places in Europe during the Second World War. But to understand why it could happen and why it was carried out with almost absolute precision, we must look back to the previous months when the Nazi killing machine began to operate in the Baltic region.
Before November 1941, in the summer of 1,941, Operation Barbarosa began. More than 3 million German soldiers crossed the Soviet border, marking the start of the largest invasion in modern European history. As German forces swept through the Baltic region, Latvia, a small country between two great powers, was quickly drawn into the turmoil.
Within a few weeks, the Soviet Red Army retreated from Ria, leaving behind a vast power vacuum. The Germans entered the city in early July 1941. At the same time, special SS units called Einats Group A followed behind the combat troops. Their official task was to ensure security in the rear, but in reality they carried a secret directive to eliminate populations.
The Nazis considered racial enemies in Latvia. This order was carried out by General France Walter Stalicker, commander of Enzat’s grouper A. Under his command were smaller units, Einat’s commando and order police supported by local collaborators. One of the first to cooperate was Victor Zaraj, a former law student appointed by Starleer to form an auxiliary Latvian unit.
This force quickly became known as the Arj Commando. Only a few days after Germany occupied Ria, Araj’s unit carried out one of its first actions. The burning of the Great Coral Synagogue on the 4th of July 1941. The fire spread through the entire neighborhood while hundreds of people remained trapped inside.
That event marked the beginning of a series of systematic atrocities that continued throughout the summer and autumn of 1,941. When August came, the Jews in Ria were forced to wear identifying badges, forbidden to leave their neighborhoods, and step by step deprived of their right to live. By October, the German occupation authorities established the Ria Ghetto, where about 30,000 people were confined in an area only a few streets wide.
Each apartment, once meant for a single family, now held four or five. Food was rationed, medicine was almost unavailable, and surprise inspections took place daily. But behind those measures was more than discrimination. At a higher level, a plan was being drawn up in Berlin. From the autumn of 1,941, the German authorities began organizing trains to deport Jews from Germany and Austria to the occupied territories in the east.
To make room for these transports, the SS leadership in Latvia, especially Friedrich Jackel, who had just been appointed as the highest commander of the SS and police in the Baltic region, decided to clear space in Ria by eliminating the entire local Jewish community. The orders were transmitted quickly. The plan was drafted in secret with detailed assignments for sealing the ghetto, organizing transport, and preparing the execution site.
The chosen location was the Rambula forest, 10 km southeast of Ria. It was a sparse forest with sandy ground, easy to dig, and close to a railway line. At the beginning of November, large pits had already been dug, each stretching dozens of meters in length. Everything was ready for a special operation, as the SS described it in their records.
By this time, most residents of Ria still did not understand what was coming. They heard rumors of resettlement or being sent to work in another area. In reality, everything had already been decided. All that remained was for the order to be given, and the wheel of death would begin to turn smoothly and precisely like a bureaucratic machine.
Decision and the goal of destruction. At the end of November 1,941, Friedrich Jackel summoned security officers in Ria to discuss a plan to clear the ghetto. In SS administrative records, this order is recorded in cold language. Free up space to resettle Jews from Germany. The target was about 25,000 people, mostly women, the elderly, and children.
Jackel had experience organizing mass executions in Ukraine earlier. He applied the same standard method that had been tested. Dig mass graves in advance, divide people into groups, march them along fixed routes, shoot at close range to save ammunition, and use local auxiliary forces to control the crowds. Every detail was calculated from the distance between groups to the time required to complete the burial.
Before November 30, German forces and Arash commando began sealing off the Ria Ghetto. Police units were posted at every intersection and streets were blocked with wooden barricades. Outside the city in the rumbula forest, the giant burial pits were excavated by excavators. Each pit more than 10 m long, nearly 3 m deep, and large enough to hold thousands of bodies.
Jackel assigned the units participating in the operation. German order police, members of Ara’s commando, and a group from Enzat’s commando too. Machine guns, ammunition, and transport vehicles were prepared in the forest area, all under the name of a security operation. 2 days of cold blood, 30 over 11 and the 12th of August, 1941.
Before dawn, a whistle sounded inside the ghetto. People were awakened and ordered to gather on the street with only limited belongings. Guards went from house to house, forcing them to leave within minutes. Those who resisted or could not move were executed on the spot. The columns of people began moving in single file through the frozen streets under the watch of German soldiers and Latvian police.
They were forced to walk more than 10 km to the Rumbula forest. Many collapsed along the way. Anyone who could not get up was shot where they fell. By midday, the first group reached the forest. There a brutal process was organized like an assembly line. The victims were stripped of all possessions, forced to leave behind their clothes and personal papers.
Then they were led to the edge of the pits. The firing squads were divided into several groups, each with a supervisor to ensure efficiency. The shootings were carried out at close range, one after another, until each pit was full. When a pit was closed, another team continued digging or pressed a thin layer of soil before piling new bodies on top.
By evening, the light dimmed, but the work was not finished. As night fell, about 13,000 people had been killed in a single day. Those who remained alive in the ghetto heard the rumors and knew that their turn would come very soon. 8 days later, the same order was repeated. About 12,000 people still left in the ghetto were forced to march along the same road.
The scene unfolded almost identically, gathering, marching, and ending in the Rumbula forest. Among them were the sick, the elderly, and small children. Some were shot during the march because they could no longer walk. The rest were executed at the burial site. Witnesses recalled that gunfire lasted through the entire noon, mixed with the sound of wind passing through the forest.
On that same day, a well-known figure, Simon Dubnau, a Jewish historian and thinker from Latvia, was killed inside the ghetto before he could be deported. His last words were recorded by a witness concealing the crime and its aftermath. After the two waves of executions were completed, the Ria Ghetto was almost empty.
Only a small group, about 1,000 people with special skills, were kept to work for the German army. The rest of the city fell silent as if nothing had ever happened. A few days later, technical units were sent to level the ground and cover the traces. The Rumbula forest returned to its quiet appearance, but the people of Ria knew well what had taken place.
For many weeks afterward, they still saw faint smoke rising from the east, where the ground had not yet frozen solid. The operation was reported by Jackal to his superiors as a complete success. In the memorandum sent to Berlin, he described the elimination of more than 25,000 people in just 2 days without a single mention of its horror.
For the SS, it was proof of organizational efficiency. For humanity, it was one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, perpetrators, and coordination. Behind the massacre in the room forest was a complex chain of command where every order was passed down like a link in a massive system of execution.
At the highest level was the Reich Sishah Hoptempt RSHA the Reich main security office of Nazi Germany led by Reinhard Hydrich. It was the RSHA that issued directives on how to handle the Jewish question in Eastern Europe. from Berlin. The orders were transmitted through the SS and security police commands in the Baltic region.
At the scene, the highest authority was Friedrich Jackel, SS Oberenfura, and chief of police for the Osland region, which included Latvia, Estonia, and Bellarus. Jackel had previously organized large-scale executions in Ukraine. and he was the one who created what became known as the Jekal system, a standardized method of execution later adopted by the SS in many places.
According to this system, everything was planned like a military operation, selecting the site, digging the pits, assigning personnel, setting up outer security perimeters, and dividing victims into groups to be processed in sequence. This procedure was applied fully at Rumbula and documented in records recovered after the war.
Below Jackel was Rudolfph Lang, commander of the SD, the SS security service in Latvia, who directly coordinated operations in Ria. Lang oversaw the sealing of the ghetto, assigned officers in charge of transport and reported progress hour by hour. Under him were officers of the Ordnungs Politzi, the order police who managed the marching columns and firing squads.
Among them, Edward Stra, commander of Einats Commando 2, was responsible for supervising the execution of orders at the site. The coordination among these units ensured that no mistakes occurred. Every street, every column of people was calculated precisely. Everything operated under the direct orders of Jekal who observed the entire operation from a high vantage point in the forest like a commander directing a military exercise.
Execution forces. An important part of the Nazi mechanism of mass killing was the participation of local collaborationist forces in Latvia. The most effective tool was the Ara commando, a unit led by Victor Zaraz. Araj was a native Latvian who had studied law, served in the police force before the war, and was later recruited by Stallea for his organizational skills and pro-German attitude.
Araj’s unit numbered about 500 to 1,200 men, mostly young locals, many of whom had previous experience in the army or police. They received minimal training, were equipped with pistols, rifles, and makeshift uniforms. With the approval of the SS, this force became the main instrument in controlling the columns of people guarding the ghetto and directly taking part in the executions.
During the days of the Rumbula massacre, the Araj commando acted as the logistical backbone. They stood along the marching route, blocked every escape path, and forced the columns to move precisely toward the forest. At the site, they divided the groups, controlled the victim’s belongings, and ensured the pace for the German firing squads.
Some members of the Arash Commando were assigned to complete the task inside the pits, which made their unit one of the most infamous local forces in the Baltic region. By using local collaborators, the SS achieved two goals. Reducing the manpower burden on German soldiers and shifting part of the responsibility to the Latvians.
It was a strategy widely applied across the eastern front, turning collective crimes into shared acts and blurring the line between occupier and the occupied. Coordination and systemization. Rambula was not a spontaneous massacre. It was the result of an organized sequence of actions where everyone understood their role.
Jackal’s team was responsible for the overall plan. German police units handled logistics. The Araj commando ensured control of the population and military engineers managed the covering of the pits. In postwar documents, Soviet investigators described the level of detail in the operation. A single pit could hold an average of 1,000 people, and each execution phase took about 15 minutes.
Each group was assigned specific times for marching, shooting, and covering like an industrial assembly line. This efficiency did not come from fanaticism but from administrative habit. Those directly involved did not need to know the deeper reason. They only had to perform their assigned tasks. That is what made Rumbula a prime example of how a system could turn mass destruction into a task executed precisely.
When the war ended, many key figures of Rumbula were captured or brought to trial. Friedrich Jackel was arrested by the Soviets at the end of 1,945, tried in Ria and publicly executed in February 1946. Edoard Stra was convicted at the Einats Groupen trial in Nuremberg, but died in prison before his sentence was carried out.
Rudolfph Lang was believed to have died in the final days of the war in Germany. For the Latvian collaborators, prosecution came much later. Victor Zaraj lived under a false identity in West Germany for many years before being arrested in 1979. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 1988. Another figure, Herbert Cuckers, who was believed to have taken part in several operations with the Araj commando, fled to South America after the war and was tracked down and eliminated by Israeli agents in 1965.
Those trials could not erase the crimes, but they exposed the entire mechanism of a system that turned the deaths of thousands into numbers in reports. Rumbula was not caused by a single individual. It was the result of hundreds of people from senior officers to guards all following orders without anyone stopping to ask why. [Music] Ria memory beneath the snow.
When the last shots rang out on the afternoon of the 8th of December, 1941, the Ria Ghetto was almost wiped out. In less than 10 days, more than 25,000 people, nearly the entire local Jewish community had been killed. From a once crowded neighborhood, Ria was left with empty houses and snowcovered, desolate streets.
The survivors, mainly craftsmen, mechanics, or people with specialized skills, were kept in what was called the small ghetto in the remaining part of the city. They were forced to work in German factories and supply warehouses. Many of them were later killed in subsequent operations or transferred to concentration camps in Poland.
Shortly after the massacre, the Ria Ghetto was reused for a new purpose. From December 1,941, the first trains carrying Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia began arriving in Ria. They were placed in the empty houses of the ghetto, where just weeks earlier, the bodies of local Latvian Jews had filled the streets. It was the clearest example of the replacement policy pursued by the Nazis, destroying one community to make room for another, people who would eventually be killed as well.
After the war, what remained of Rumbula were faint traces beneath the ground. The mass graves had been leveled and much of the evidence destroyed when the Germans tried to conceal their crimes in 1943 under the order known as Sonderection 1005. Prisoners were forced to exume the bodies of victims and burn them to erase all traces.
However, what they could not erase was the memory of the people of Ria. Some witnesses survived by escaping from the marching columns. In their testimonies were details that could never be forgotten. The sound of footsteps on snow, the smell of smoke drifting from the forest, and the absolute silence that covered the city afterward.
Many local residents also saw the columns pass by, but no one dared to speak. One witness recalled, “We heard gunfire all morning. Each shot sounded like a full stop for hundreds of lives. Those accounts along with SS documents captured after the war helped historians reconstruct the full picture. Room became one of the most striking examples of the Holocaust by bullets when hundreds of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe were killed on the spot before the gas extermination camps were built.
In Latvia alone, more than 70,000 Jews were killed within 6 months of the German occupation. Today, Rumbula still warns us. Today, the Rumbula forest no longer bears traces of the massacre, but it has become one of the most important memorial sites in Latvia. In 2002, a monument of stone and metal was inaugurated with the Star of David at its center, surrounded by the names of thousands of victims.
Each year at the end of November, the people of Ria, representatives of the Latvian government, and the international Jewish community gather there to light candles and read the names of those who were lost. Rumbula is not only the memory of a nation, but a lesson for the entire world. It reminds us that evil can occur not only because of hatred, but also because of silence, obedience, and the fear of the crowd.
When a society stops asking questions, when people begin to see cruelty as part of the order, tragedy can return anywhere. More than 80 years have passed, yet the Rumbula forest remains silent. Beneath that soil lie tens of thousands of lives and also a warning to humanity that destruction does not begin with gunfire, but with orders signed on paper.
When I look back at Rumbula, what troubles me most is not only the scale of the crime, but the ease with which it was carried out. A society can descend so far that violence becomes a daily routine, and that does not happen overnight, but begins with small compromises, with silence, and with the acceptance that orders cannot be questioned.
As a historian, I believe that memory is not only for remembrance, but for prevention. There is no lesson from the past if we stop at compassion. A lesson exists only when it becomes a warning. The world today may be different, but human nature has not changed. When lies are repeated long enough, when a group of people is stripped of dignity through words alone, history begins to crack open from those very fractures.
Education, empathy, and the courage to speak the truth are the only shields that protect humanity from returning to darkness. Rambula does not ask for our pity. It asks us to stay alert, to face the truth, and to make sure that such a thing will never be allowed to happen again.
