Ghetto Riga  

Mass murder by shooting and brutal terror started the Nazi extermination measures almost immediately after Hitler’s  assault on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Jewish population of the respective towns was jammed by excessive violence into certain residential districts - the GHETTO: A prison for thousands of people, a transit station on the way to death. For many of the inmates of the countless large and small ghettos this place was, due to the indescribable conditions, their final
station at the same time: Terribly cramped accommodations, lack of hygienic facilities, hunger, cold winter weather, diseases, epidemics as well as shootings and other forms of execution. At first those ghettoized people, who had been robbed of their last belongings, were still allowed to walk to their respective workplaces at the ”Aryan” part of town. However, one day the German occupying forces completely cordoned off the ghetto; any attempt to leave the ghetto without a permit was punished with death.
Orders to set up the Riga Ghetto were given on August 23, 1941. On October 25th the gates were closed behind approximately 30000 Jews from Riga; squeezed into a fenced in, and strictly guarded part of the former ”Moscow Suburb” they barely existed. This so called ”Large Ghetto” was being vacated on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in the course of which the majority of the residents were hauled off to a forest near Rumbula, and there they were mercilessly murdered. The entire
camp was shortened in easterly direction and subdivided by barbed wire into two ghettos on either side of the main road.  Prior to the massacre a large number of men had been selected for work; they had been driven together into the dwellings of the so called ”Small Ghetto”.
They started to put up the Jews from abroad at the larger part south of the main road (Leipziger Strasse); these were mainly Jews from Germany, hence the designation ”Reichsjudenghetto” ( ghetto for Jews from the ”Reich” ).  The streets were named after the places from where the transports originated. The Jews from Riga, who so far had survived the liquidation actions, mainly women and children, had been shot in cold blood just before the arrival of the transport from Kassel on December 12, 1941.