Die "Endlösung" in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944 (review)

Andrew Ezergailis's 1996 work The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center was a major step forward in the historiography of Nazi genocide in the Baltic. Ezergailis's language skills and the recent opening of the archives in Latvia facilitated a book that challenged prior scholarship and integrated for the first time the perspective of the Latvian population into a narrative that had been dominated by the experiences of Jewish survivors and the statements of Nazi perpetrators. Despite its weaknesses and criticism from various quarters, Ezergailis's monograph became the standard work.

Now Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein have produced a book that advances our understanding of events. Based on an even broader study of archival materials (from eleven countries), their book also synthesizes the conclusions of a secondary literature ranging from pioneering classics such as Max Kaufmann's Churbn Lettland (1947) to the oft-overlooked new research appearing in Latvia today. Die "Endlösung" in Riga in many ways resembles the authors' previous work on the Einsatzgruppen, particularly Angrick's sweeping Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord (2003). Here, too, we saw rich detail that might have been overwhelming had it not been presented so coherently (as opposed, for example, to the sometimes-fragmented structure in Ezergailis).

Angrick and Klein's ambitious book covers everything from the social context of interwar Latvia to postwar prosecutions of perpetrators and the strivings of victims for justice in independent Latvia today. The book concentrates on the Holocaust itself, from the chaotic regime change in July 1941 to the liquidation of the camps in Latvia in the face of the Soviet return in 1944. It describes in detail the mass violence of 1941, when the men of Einsatzgruppe A and local auxiliaries massacred most of the local Jewish population and then some of the first transports of German Jews. The Riga ghetto, the Salaspils camp complex, and the Kaiserwald concentration camp are all treated in detail.

The authors emphasize the drawn-out power struggle between the SS on one hand, and the civilian and military occupation authorities on the other, over Jewish labor. Himmler wished the Baltic region judenfrei as quickly as possible, yet was frustrated by others' arguments on behalf of forced labor for the time being. Playing as trump card the growing security threat posed by Soviet partisan activity, Himmler managed in 1943 to have the ghetto in Riga closed and the remaining Jews transferred to the newly-created Kaiserwald concentration camp in the suburb of Mežaparks. This excluded the civilian authorities from any say in the subsequent disposition of the Jews, now in the hands of the SS-Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt. Thus was the way opened for "extermination through labor" as foreseen at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

Die "Endlösung" in Riga focuses on the perpetrators, both institutional and individual. Indeed, the singling out of significant figures for deeper analysis takes the authors beyond Riga toward issues relevant for Holocaust studies generally. One of the two individuals receiving special attention is Rudolf Lange, who had represented the interests of the Reichssicherheitshautpamt "in the East" at Wannsee. As the authors point out, the choice was not self-evident. Yet this relatively minor figure's "hands-on" participation in the massacres of Latvian and German Jews at Rumbula in late 1941 put him into the category of "Praktiker des Massenmordes," a distinction significant in Reinhard Heydrich's choice of him to sit at the table with the senior civil servants discussing the "Final Solution" at Wannsee. Lange's presence connects the killing of Latvian and German Jews in Riga in 1941 to the escalation of mass murder towards systematic, continent-wide genocide in 1942.

The other personality the authors treat in detail is Fritz Scherwitz, commander of the Kaiserward sub-camp at the Lenta textile factory. Public interest in Scherwitz stems from Anita Kugler's biography, Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier (2004), which took up not only Scherwitz's...