July 1, 1941
"The mass deportations of June 13 and 14 broke the patience of the Latvian people. Latvian patriots went into hiding in the woods. They were supplied with weapons that had been hidden the previous summer by members of the paramilitary
Aizsargi (Home Guard), and so arose the first groups of national partisans, or guerrillas. The actual numbers of Latvians deported and shot by the Bolsheviks in their first year in power were still not known. The figures are 30,000 deported and 1,488 shot.
Early in the morning on Sunday, June 22, 1941, Hitler started Plan Barbarossa, and divisions of the Wehrmacht from the Baltic to the Black Sea crossed the Soviet Union' s new borders, which had been drawn in agreement with Hitler himself. As could have been expected, the Latvian national partisans came out of the forests and attacked the Bolshevik forces retreating from the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg operations.
Max Kaufmann, who suffered much during the Nazi occupation period, condemns the Latvians "for stabbing retreating Russian forces in the back," as cited in the introduction. I dare say quite openly: if I were a Latvian, and if at the end of June 1941 I had been not quite 13 but, say, 18, I would have "stabbed the retreating Russian forces in the back" without a moment's hesitation and with the greatest enthusiasm -- the same enthusiasm, for example, with which Czech patriots in the first days of May 1945 stabbed retreating German forces in the back. Essentially it was the same cause, and I say that as a Jew, to whom Stalin naturally was the lesser evil compared to Hitler.
On June 22 German troops crossed the "Molotov-Ribbentrop border," and by June 25, after the Wehrmacht had captured Kaunas (Kowno) and Vilnius (Wilna) and surrounded Liepaja (Libau), panic broke out in Riga. During the night of June 27-28, the puppet government of Soviet Latvia, with its cash safes, folders of documents, and bodyguards, moved to Valka, a city straddling the border between Latvia and Estonia. Riga was in a political vacuum. On June 27, on the eve of the government's flight, the commander of the Riga garrison, Lieutenant General Safronov, ordered Riga Radio to announce in Latvian: "Yesterday and today several people were arrested for counterrevolutionary activities -- sabotage, terror, signaling the enemy, etc. -- including Miervaldis Lukins, son of Janis; Nikolajs Rainics, son of Georgs; Heinrichs Neibergs, son of Janis; Matvejs Kuznecovs, son of Nikolajs; Jazeps Kagans, son of Abrams; Arnolds Cuibe, son of Janis; and others. All of them were sentenced to death by shooting, and the sentence has been carried out. Everyone who tries to help the enemy in any way will be treated the same."
Miervaldis Lukins, a colonel in the Latvian army, was President Ulmanis' adjutant; Matvej Kusnetsov was probably an ethnic Russian who disliked the Bolsheviks -- but how could Joseph Kagan, son of Abraham Kagan, support the Nazis?
On Saturday, June 28, my mother's 43rd birthday, we said goodbye to my grandfather, who was 85 years old. He said, "How long do I have to live? And it's hard to walk even with a cane, and today is the Sabbath, when it is forbidden to travel. You know that I am a religious person. Good luck, and may God protect you!" He stayed in Riga, as did three of my aunts with their husbands and children. They were all taken to the ghetto and later shot.
We made our way to Riga's main railway station, where a long passenger train stood ready. The Bolsheviks were moving all rolling stock to the rear, and refugees that crowded into the cars were not forced out, at least not in Riga. We had not yet managed to get into a wagon when someone started to machine-gun the train from the corner tower of the Hotel Bellevue. We lay down beneath the cars. A Soviet tank in the station square fired a shot at the hotel tower and silenced the machine-gun. The train stayed there the whole day and evening, but just after midnight a sharp order suddenly rang out -- everyone was to move to another train, in complete darkness. A pandemonium of pushing, shoving, and yelling broke out, children cried for their mothers, mothers tried to find their children. After an hour the first train was cleared, to carry wounded Russian soldiers. In the early morning of June 29, the second train, with us aboard, slowly started to roll towards the northeast. So we left the city where I was born and raised, where my father was born and raised.
Other Latvian Jews had it much worse. Many from Latgale headed east on foot, in horse-drawn carts, or on bicycles. When they reached the old Latvian-Soviet border, that no longer existed, their way was blocked by special NKVD troops, the
zagraditelniye otriady: "Stop! You are forbidden to go further! The road is closed. Go back, or we shoot!" The Kremlin had issued orders that no refugees were to be allowed to cross the old border, regardless of their ethnic background, because in their midst might be "doubtful elements" or even "German spies." The Jewish refugees were forced to turn back to certain death.
There were also cases where refugees in trains were not allowed through. In the book
I Survived Rumbuli, Frida Michelson tells how in the town of Varaklani, a young Jewish girl told her that she had been on a train and already quite close to the old border not far from Zilupe, but no one of the great mass of refugees was allowed to cross into Russia, and she had to return to Varaklani.
On Tuesday, July 1, the German army entered Riga. In the words of an observer from a neutral country, the Swedish journalist Arvid Fredborg (
Behind the Steel Wall, London 1944, p. 52):
Another advantage for Germany was the state of public feeling in the Baltic States. An overwhelming majority of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians -- perhaps more than 95 per cent -- looked upon the Germans as liberators. Such real sympathies as the Germans met in the Baltic countries immediately after their conquest had certainly not come their way since Hitler's assumption of power. No one could mistake the spontaneity of these heartfelt feelings.
I would like to advance a hypothesis. If everything had happened in reverse order, that is, if the German army had been the first to occupy independent Latvia, as it occupied Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, and the Germans had been later driven out by the Bolsheviks, perhaps in that case the Latvians would have welcomed the Russians, as did the Czechs in May 1945. The Czechs too were bitterly deluded in their hopes in the Russians.
The Latvian publisher Helmars Rudzitis gives the following testimony in his memoirs
Manas dzives dekas (My life's adventures, New York, Gramatu Draugs, 1984, pp. 181-183):
Then on July 1, a bright Sunday morning, our national anthem "Dievs, sveti Latviju" resounded from an open window on Martas Street. It was being broadcast by Riga Radio.
It is hard to express the joy we felt on hearing these sounds. The anthem had never sounded so magnificent, so inspiring. Only those who experienced this moment can understand this feeling. We immediately went out into the street. People were streaming in from all sides. The streets filled with joyful people, with smiles on their faces, which had not been seen for a long time. Strangers embraced each other. Latvian national flags appeared in front of some houses.... If German soldiers appeared, the crowd welcomed them with applause and cheers.
It is hard to describe the elation that reigned in Riga's streets that day. It was extraordinary, something that could never happen again. This day can be understood only by those who were there. The terrible nightmare year was over. That day no one thought about what was to come. The joy at being liberated -- and this time the word so abused by the Bolsheviks can perhaps be used in its true meaning -- overshadowed any thought of the future. Even the Social Democrat Cielens writes in his memoirs that this time the Germans were truly "liberators." The barbaric deportations had raised hatred of Stalin's empire to its highest level.
Mountains of flowers were laid at the foot of the Freedom Monument. Everyone wanted to place at least one flower by the symbol of Latvia's freedom. Several German armored cars were parked in the square by the National Opera. Slender, blond, athletic, smiling youths stood by the cars.... Perhaps it was an ephemeral elation that reigned that first day of July, but it was everywhere. That day no one realized that we had gone from one occupation to another. That day no one realized that the Latvian people would not regain even partial freedom, that the Latvian people would have to go through new, difficult trials. That day we still did not know that Hitler, so close to victory, instead of giving nations freedom and gaining their friendship, in his senseless intoxication and hunger for power would lose everything and destroy his own country. We understood the reality later, not on that first day of July.
When I pointed out to Rudzitis in a letter that July 1, 1941, was not a Sunday but a Tuesday he wrote back:
It has really always seemed to me that July 1 was a Sunday! Maybe because it was one of the happiest days, perhaps the happiest day of my life. What came after doesn't matter. But that day I felt like a man condemned to death who had suddenly been freed. How much longer could I have stayed in hiding before some Chekist dragged me to Siberia or picked me off right there in the Central Prison.
"What came after doesn't matter." And what did come after? Latvia's independence was not restored. The German occupiers incorporated this land, called
Generalbezirk Lettland, in a completely new administrative unit,
Reichskommissariat Ostland. This was essentially a German colony, with even less rights than
Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren, the former heartland of Czechoslovakia. On September 17-18,1941, in one of his confidential conversations (
Tischgespraeche), Hitler declared: "But now we have no interest in maintaining the Baltic States" (
Hitler's Secret Conversations, New York, Signet Books, 1961, p. 61).
The Germans called the Latvians, as well as the Lithuanians and Estonians,
Einheimische, which sounded just like the word "natives" in, say, British Rhodesia.
Der Reichskommissar fuer das Ostland Hinrich Lohse governed his territory from Riga. Under him was
der Generalkommissar fuer Lettland Otto-Heinnch Drechsler. His superior was
der Minister fur die besetzten Ostgebiete (minister for the occupied Eastern territories) Alfred Rosenberg, in Berlin. One could say Lohse was the viceroy, and Rosenberg -- colonial minister in London.
No time was wasted in renaming Riga's streets. Brivibas (Liberty) Street became Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Another was named for Walter von Plettenberg, grand master of the Livonian knights. Completely obscure Germans such as Carl Schirren, Karl Ernst von Baer. and Victor Hehn got their own streets, while the Latvian epic hero Lacplesis, eminent poet Janis Rainis, and national awakening era leader Krisjanis Valdemars lost theirs.
All signs and notices had to be first in German (above), and only then in Latvian (below). Germans were allocated larger food rations than Latvians, who were restricted to 700 calories a day. Lucky were those who had relatives in the country. The University of Latvia was renamed the University of Riga. The Latvian Institute of History was closed. Corporal punishment (lashing) was introduced for the
Einheimische in the railroad administration for Ostland.
In August 1942 a frightening article appeared in Himmler's official newspaper
Das Schwarze Korps. Titled "Germanisieren?" it stated that after all only persons with German blood could be allowed to live in the vast Eastern areas and implied that racially "inferior" local inhabitants, who were not even worth "Germanizing," would have to leave.
During the years of German occupation, 1941 -1945, approximately 10,000 Latvians were shot, about 3,000 of them from Riga. Approximately 50,000 Latvians were arrested and incarcerated in prisons or concentration camps such as Salaspils. About half were released after lengthy, debilitating incarceration; others were sent to the Stutthof, Neuengamme, and Mauthausen concentration camps in 1943 and especially 1944. Most of them perished there in the first months of 1945 (see Bruno Kalnins,
Fifty Years of the Latvian Social Democratic Party, in Latvian, Stockholm 1956, pp. 288-290).
And what happened to the 10,000 Latvian men, many rounded up on the streets, without notification to their families, that the German
Feldgendarmerie (military police) herded into the Riga circus arena on October 5, 1944, and transported to Germany for forced labor? The fate of many is still unknown.
All this happened. But it came later. On July 1, 1941, the Latvians had no premonitions. That day there were no clouds in the sky."
July 1, 1941
Latvia 1941
