Rumbula massacre

The Rumbula massacre is a collective term for incidents on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in which about 25,000 Jews were murdered in or on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during World War II. Except for the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, this was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity until the operation of the death camps. About 24,000 of the victims were Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto and approximately 1,000 were German Jews transported to the forest by train. The Rumbula massacre was carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe A with the help of local collaborators of the Arajs Kommando, with support from other such Latvian auxiliaries. In charge of the operation was Höherer SS und Polizeiführer Friedrich Jeckeln, who had previously overseen similar massacres in Ukraine. Rudolf Lange, who later participated in the Wannsee Conference, also took part in organizing the massacre. Some of the accusations against Latvian Herberts Cukurs are related to the clearing of the Riga Ghetto by the Arajs Kommando. The Rumbula killings, together with many others, formed the basis of the post-World War II Einsatzgruppen trial where a number of Einsatzgruppen commanders were found guilty of crimes against humanity. This massacre is known by different names, including "The Big Action", and the "Rumbula Action", but in Latvia it is just called "Rumbula" or "Rumbuli". It is sometimes called the Jeckeln Action after its commander Friedrich Jeckeln. The word "Aktion", which translates literally to action or operation in English, was used by the Nazis as a euphemism for murder. For Rumbula, the official euphemism was "shooting action" (Erschiessungsaktion). In the Einsatzgruppen trial before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, the event was not given a name but simply described as "the murder of 10,600 Jews" on 30 November 1941. Rumbula was a small railway station south of Riga, the capital and major city of Latvia, which was connected with Daugavpils, the second largest city in Latvia, by the rail line along the north side of the Daugava river.

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Related concepts (14)

Holocaust trains

Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps. The speed at which people targeted in the "Final Solution" could be exterminated was dependent on two factors: the capacity of the death camps to gas the victims and quickly dispose of their bodies, as well as the capacity of the railways to transport the victims from Nazi ghettos to extermination camps.

Riga Ghetto

The Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, designated by the Nazis where Jews from Latvia, and later from Germany, were forced to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis relocated all Jews from Riga and its vicinity to the ghetto while the non-Jewish inhabitants were evicted. Most of the Latvian Jews (about 35,000) were killed on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in the Rumbula massacre. The Nazis transported a large number of German Jews to the ghetto; most of them were later killed in massacres.

Einsatzkommando

During World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) – up to 3,000 men total – usually composed of 500–1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to exterminate Jews, Polish intellectuals, Romani, and communists in the captured territories often far behind the advancing German front. Einsatzkommandos, along with Sonderkommandos, were responsible for the systematic murder of Jews during the aftermath of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.