Rumbula

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The Holocaust

Early elements
Racial policy • Nazi eugenics • Nuremberg Laws • Euthanasia • Concentration camps (list)
Jews
Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939
Pogroms: Kristallnacht • Iaşi • Jedwabne • Lwów • Bucharest
Ghettos: Warsaw • Łódź • Lwów • Kraków • Theresienstadt • Kovno
Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar • Rumbula • Paneriai • Odessa
"Final Solution": Wannsee • Aktion Reinhard
Death camps: Auschwitz • Belzec • Chełmno • Majdanek • Treblinka • Sobibór • Jasenovac • Warsaw
Resistance: Jewish partisans Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw)
End of World War II: Death marches • Berihah • Displaced persons
Other victims
East Slavs • Poles • Serbs • Roma • Homosexuals • Jehovah's Witnesses
Responsible parties
Nazi Germany: Hitler • Eichmann • Heydrich • Himmler • SS • Gestapo • SA Collaborators Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials • Denazification
Lists
Survivors • Victims • Rescuers
Resources
The Destruction of the European Jews Phases of the Holocaust Functionalism vs. intentionalism
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Rumbula Forest is a pine forest enclave in Riga, Latvia, in which Jews were massacred during the Holocaust.

On two days, November 30, 1941 and December 8, 1941, 25,000 Jews were murdered in Rumbula Forest. Of them, 24,000 were Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto and 1,000 were German Jews transported to the forest by freight train. The systematic mass murder was carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen with the help of Arājs commando, with support from other Latvian police units.

These tens of thousands of Jews were ordered to disrobe in freezing weather to be shot in the back of the head at close range in pits that were mass graves. Two women survived. One of them, Frida Michelson, took advantage of a distraction and fell into the pit, feigning death among the dead bodies. She survived the war to write the book I Survived Rumbula, later translated into English and published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

During the Holocaust, 90% of Latvia's Jews were murdered at Rumbula, Liepaja (Libau) and other locations. When the war turned against Germany, the bodies at the Rumbula Forest site were ordered dug up and burned. The site has been marked by a series of makeshift memorials over the years. A moving Rumbula memorial was dedicated in November 2002, 61 years after the killings.