Small Riga Ghetto

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In the Riga ghetto a certain Zinn hanged himself. The prominent mill owner
Moritz Zinn from Liepāja, his wife, son and daughter were killed in Riga.
The doctors Plotkin and Baron were also taken from the Kaiserwald concentration
camp to Stuetzpunkt.
My other accounts of ghettos and concentration camps include the fate of the
Liepāja Jews.
b) Mitau (Jelgava)
Jelgava, once the capital of Duke Jacob and the province of Kurzeme, is about
50 kilometers distant from Riga. Here too, the Jews played a significant role in
building up a large trading center (L. Hoff, Jaffet and others). It was thanks to
them that after World War I the city once again flourished and large department
stores were established (Dsentschik, the Hirschmann brothers). Jelgava
was also famous for its old secondary school, which had educated many great
Jewish personages coming from all parts of Latvia. The leaders of the Zionist
movement in Latvia all came from Jelgava.
The splendid Jelgava Palace, built by the Italian architect Rastrelli, was destroyed
in World War I and subsequently restored by the Latvians. Here the
Gauleiter Freiherr von Medem established his residence. But after the final
struggles of World War II nothing remained of this work of art, or indeed of
Jelgava as a whole.
"Jelgava is judenrein (free of Jews)!" This was the sign one saw immediately
when driving into the city. The Germans and the Latvians had made sure of
this in the very first month after the German occupation, July 1941. The city's
Jews were killed in gruesome ways. Many of them were forced into the synagogue
and burned alive in it; others, such as Dr. Lewitas, were shot dead in
the cemetery. The Desentschik and Hirschmann families' end was especially
tragic: they were forced to dig their own graves beforehand (Berner). The Latvians
dragged the school director Bowschower and his child into the marketplace
for a public execution. According to reports, the local Latvians Veilands,
Pēteris Siliņš, Kauliņš, Dr. Sproğis and Leimanis, as well as the returned Baltic
Germans Colonel Schultz and Hollstein, took part in all of these atrocities
and murders.
c) Tukums, Auce (Autz), Ventspils (Windau), Sabile (Zabeln) etc.
In Tukums, the entire Jewish population, together with the small remainder of
surviving Jews from Kandava and other small towns, was driven into the large
synagogue. The synagogue was set afire and everyone in it died a horrible