Riga Ghetto

Riga Ghetto
Riga ghetto
Also known as	Ghetto Riga, Maskavas Forštate, Moscow Forshtat
Location	Riga, Latvia and vicinity, including Rumbula and Biķernieki forests
Date	July 1941 to October 1943
Incident type	Imprisonment, mass shootings, forced labour, starvation, exile, mass death from epidemics of neglected infectious diseases, forced abortions and sterilization
Perpetrators	Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Franz Walter Stahlecker, Hinrich Lohse, Friedrich Jeckeln, Kurt Krause, Eduard Roschmann, Viktors Arājs, Herberts Cukurs
Organizations	Nazi SS, Arajs Kommando, Latvian Auxiliary Police
Camp	Kaiserwald
Victims	About 30,000 Latvian Jews and 20,000 German, Czech, and Austrian Jews
Survivors	About 1,000 people
Memorials	At ruins of Great Choral Synagogue in Riga and in Rumbula and Biķernieki forests

Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, where Nazis forced Jews from Latvia, and later from Germany, to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis relocated all Jews from Riga and its vicinity to the ghetto and its non-Jewish inhabitants were evicted. Most Latvian Jews (about 35,000) were killed on November 30 or 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.

While Riga Ghetto is commonly referred to as a single entity, in fact there were several "ghettos". The first was the large Latvian ghetto. After the Rumbula massacre, the surviving Latvian Jews were concentrated in a smaller area within the original ghetto, which became known as the "small ghetto". The small ghetto was divided into men's and women's sections. The area of the ghetto not allocated to the small ghetto was then reallocated to the Jews being deported from Germany, and became known as the German ghetto.^[1]