Why go
This account follows the painful shift from rumor to knowledge inside the ghetto. It helps explain why luggage, clothing and forced work details in survivor testimony were evidence of killings beyond the ghetto walls, not ordinary details of wartime life.
The full story
In April and May 1942, transports of Jewish men were sent from Riga’s German ghetto to Salaspils for forced labor. Some returned in August, many in such poor health that they died soon afterward. Inside the ghetto, prisoners increasingly suspected that deportation to Riga had been part of a plan to murder them. The knowledge came unevenly, because the authorities concealed killings and controlled movement and communication. Some forced labor exposed prisoners directly to the evidence. A group assigned to sort clothing and jewelry taken from murder victims saw names and addresses on luggage arriving from across Latvia. The local SS selected valuables before belongings were sent to Germany. Another detail, known as Kommando Krause 2, was made to dig graves and ordered to keep the killings secret. Men who survived long enough to return to the ghetto told others what had happened in forests around Riga. These details place the German ghetto within the wider geography of Nazi mass murder in Latvia.