Small Riga Ghetto

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Bloodsoaked Spilve, which had requisitioned thousands of people, also
claimed thousands of victims.
After I had finished writing this chapter I learned that "Iron Gustav" (the
commander of Spilve) had been sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor
by a Russian military court in the Sachsenhausen trial in the Russian zone of
Germany (the death penalty had been abolished under Russian law).
Among the many statements made by "Iron Gustav", the one that is perhaps
especially worth repeating is: "All the SS men were beasts, but I was the worst
one!"
f) A.B.A.
(Armeebekleidungsamt – Army Clothing Department)
About 2,000 Jews worked in this large satellite camp, which was located in the
Riga suburb of Mīlgrāvis. The main work was the transportation and sorting of
clothing. Teenagers and children had to help do this work; their job was to
push the clothing carts back and forth.
It was exclusively a Wehrmacht unit. The camp representative was the German
Jew Schultz, whom the reader already knows from the chapter on the
ghetto, where he headed the Labor Authority. The Latvian Jews were not very
satisfied with him; moreover, they still resented him for the way he had treated
them in the ghetto. The supervisors of the Wehrmacht work crew were the
non-commissioned officer Müller and Privates First Class Sass and Schwellenbach.
They made life extremely difficult for the Jews. The Riga Jews in this
work crew were the engineers Antikol and Saslawski, Dr. Tumarkin, Dr. Joseph
(from Berlin) and others.
Several extermination Aktionen were carried out here, as they were everywhere;
here they were implemented by the SS men Krebsbach and Wisner.
The children's Aktion cost nineteen children their lives. In the last and largest
Aktion, everyone had to take off his clothes and be inspected by the aforementioned
SS men. Those whom they didn't like or who had a physical handicap,
men and women, were ordered to step to the side. As they gave these orders,
the murderers added, laughing: "For a holiday!" Those killed in this Aktion
included the entire Pukin family, the lawyer Finkelstein, Herman Rosin, the
engineer Lubotzki and others. At that time, the three Galanter brothers were
also taken to the bunker. They had been caught as they tried to escape, but
they were lucky and survived.
On 6 August 1944 most of the people in this camp were taken to Stutthof.
They continued to work in the same unit in the concentration camp. The others