Absence & Presence at Jungfernhof, Video Intertext

Dr. Richards Plavnieks

1. Deportation from Germany and Austria

Holocaust denial first began while the Holocaust iself was taking place. This video is an artifact of such denial.

It was filmed by the Propaganda Office of the City of Stuttgart, one of four cities used as collection points for the people who were ultimately sent to Jungfernhof.

The resettlement process could then forever be shown as having been conducted in an orderly and humane manner, consistent with the traditions of the German civil service.

Deception pervaded every local aspect of the enterprise, in that an utterly deceitful decorum was observed by the authorities.

In part, this was to avoid creating any disturbing violent spectacles within sight of the German public at large. 

It was also perhaps to ease the consciences of the bureaucrats and police managing the considerable logistical challenges of the operation. The men examining the papers and property could consider their scrupulous, exacting procedure blameless. 

But the deception was primarily designed to solicit the demure cooperation of those slated to board the train cars. For their part, this day witnessed the last pretense of normalcy that most would ever experience.  

Each paid the ticket price for their transportation “to the East” in the third class coaches: elderly people, children – families – men and women. They went together.

They were urbanely dressed as they patiently waited in line first to register themselves and later for a share of food being provided from the steaming cauldrons. They carefully ensured that their personal baggage could be identified for retrieval upon their arrival. Finally, they boarded the train cars. 

The deportation of the Jews of cities, towns, and villages across Germany and Austria was organized in order not to give one hint about their destiny. Speculation about what awaited them was idle, since no one had any real information – only the expectations set by their persecutors.

Here, contemporary motion picture footage ends. The Nazis did not want evidence to exist of what later happened to these deportees and those sent from other points to Jungfernhof.

The illusion of belonging to a civilized society stopped at the border between Germany and the Occupied Eastern Territories, where the heating in the coaches was turned off en route. 

Though none knew the word, when these people stepped onto to the train, they entered the Holocaust.

2. Arriving at Šķirotava Train Station

When the deportees reached their destination two or three days later and clambered off the train – for they disembarked at a desolate freight station named Šķirotava that had no platforms – they were bewildered. Hungry and in freezing cold, they found themselves from the first instant of arrival shouted at by armed young men in a foreign language. Soon they recognized that their baggage had been plundered and that they were now stateless. They were prisoners who belonged to the SS. 

Leaders from the SS, including its Kommandant, were present at each train’s arrival. With them were men from the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police: a locally-recruited volunteer paramilitary unit usually called the Arajs Kommando. Members of the unit were detailed to guard the prisoners at Jungfernhof.

Hastened by the orders of the German officers in command – which they could understand – and the yells of the Latvian auxiliaries – which they could not – the newly arrived families were formed up and marched from the train to the camp. Everything was attended by violence. 

3. The Jungfernhof Concentration Camp

 Effaced by nature and time and by human hand, very little remains of the camp today.

There is nothing visible to indicate that men were separated from women and children in the camp upon arrival, or that deaths occurred here on the first night: one young man was shot and killed by a sentry for failing to observe an unannounced curfew while looking for a latrine, while others froze to death in the unheated farm buildings where snow drifted through gaps in the dilapidated roof. 

The camp as such would have to be constructed at the desolate site by the deportees themselves the following Spring, 1942. 

In the meantime, no kitchen or infirmary existed. The well-water froze, so river water was used, resulting in an outbreak of diarrhea and typhoid because there was inadequate firewood to boil it. 

Between 800 and 900 inmates died of exposure and disease during the icy winter of 1941-1942. The first organized work details at Jungfernhof were tasked with carrying dead bodies out of the barracks each morning. The ground was frozen, so these bodies could not be buried. Another 200 men were sent away to help construct the Salaspils concentration camp, most perishing.

In February 1942, dynamite arrived for the purpose of blasting out a depression to use as a mass grave. The grave was covered only in April 1942. Every day in between, more bodies were placed in the open pit.

Organized selections of those unable to work also occurred regularly that first winter. Becoming visibly sick meant death. After being personally indicated by the Kommandant, victims were seized, taken by truck, and shot in the Biķernieki Forest by the Arajs Kommando. The number of victims of these selections may have numbered about 500. 

In March 1942, the Nazis falsely appealed for volunteers for comparatively easy indoor labor at a fish cannery in a distant place called Dünamünde. Those who accepted this deceitful offer, and several hundred additional prisoners who were selected involuntarily besides, were the victims of a great culling. 1,800 Jungfernhof inmates were killed in a single day, March 26th 1942, as part of the Nazis’ Dünamünde Aktion. Instead of being taken somewhere else for a reprieve from Jungfernhof’s lethally miserable conditions, they were taken to the Biķernieki Forest and shot by the Arajs Kommando. 

The prisoner population thus reduced almost exclusively to able-bodied young people, Jungfernhof became a working farm by the Summer of 1942. Crops were sowed, animals shepherded. The food the prisoners produced was all given to the SS. A sewing shop was established to recondition clothing from the inmates’ luggage to send back to Germany.

The Kommandant swaggered; spoke of “his Jews;” held perverse, compulsory festivities; drank alcohol to excess; and remained a mortal threat to every prisoner he encountered. 

Here stood the barracks, constructed after the Dünamünde Aktion to house some of the 450 inmates who remained alive four and a half months after they and their families had arrived at Jungfernhof.

Almost 4,000 people of all ages were sent here to be slaves and to die. Fewer than 150 of them survived the Holocaust. 

Now, emptiness is all that is visible.

4. Nazi Officers and Latvian Auxiliary Security Police

Deciding questions of life and death for the deportees was the elaborate hierarchy of the ideologically committed Nazis of the SS Security Police and Security Service detailed to German-occupied Latvia. 

At the apex was Higher SS and Police Leader Lieutenant General (SS-Obergruppenführer) Friedrich Jeckeln, architect of the Babyn Yar massacre near Kyiv in September 1941 and recently transferred to his new headquarters in Rīga at the time the Jungfernhof camp was established. His first task was to orchestrate the Rumbula massacre in November and December 1941.

Colonel (SS-Standartenführer) Rudolf Lange was a member of Einsatzkommando 2 and later commanded the Security Service in Latvia and controlled the Latvian Arajs Kommando auxiliaries.

Biķernieki Forest became a killing site as soon as the Germans took Rīga.

No footage exists of any of the shooting Aktions in Biķernieki. 

When the Germans of Einsatzkommando 2 arrived in Latvia in the Summer of 1941, they immediately organized mass shootings. This video shows Jews in Liepāja, a coastal city in western Latvia, being driven to their deaths amid the dunes of the beach at Šķēde. 

These images suggest what the Biķernieki Forest killings might have been like.

Detachments of the Arajs Kommando conducted the shootings under German orders and with German oversight. Graves were pre-dug and victims were brought by truck and by bus in groups ranging from dozens to hundreds in a day. 

Lieutenant Colonel (SS-Obersturmbannführer) Gerhard Maywald was the hand of Rudolf Lange. 

Sergeant (SS-Oberscharführer) Rudolf Seck was Jungfernhof’s first and only Kommandant.

When the Nazis evacuated before the Soviet advances of 1944, they undertook to deliberately conceal their crimes, including sometimes by planting young trees atop the disturbed soil and the ghastly evidence it held.

5. Scientific Explorations

In 1941, the area was nearly uninhabited, but today, only four miles distant from the center of Rīga, Šķirotava station is in the middle of a lively neighborhood. Mazjumpravas muiža is now a recreational park, dedicated to leisure and relaxation. 

But the invisible history belies today’s apparent idyll.

While many sites of Nazi atrocities were heavily investigated during and after the war by Soviet authories, Jungfernhof, while known to the Soviets, was not. Neither was there much meaningful investigation or recognition of the site in the three decades following the restoration of Latvian national independence.

In July 2021, at the invitation of the Lock(er) of Memory Project, a group of scientists and students, led by acclaimed Holocaust archaeologist Professor Richard Freund, undertook to search for the mass grave attested to by numerous survivors of Jungfernhof: the dynamite-blasted pit of February 1942. 

This effort was the first of its kind at Jungfernhof.

The investigation of the site was undertaken with non-invasive methods: aerial drone surveys to study and map the local topography, and ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography to study and map what lay beneath.

Project historians connected their study of the existing geography of today to their interpretations of the testimony to successfully guide the science team directly to the location of, in fact, two mass graves adjacent to one another, possibly containing between 800 and 900 bodies. 

The painstaking, systematic, and precise labors of the science team have laid the foundations for further exploration, including plans for the use of a specialized drill to collect a sample of the buried material for forensic confirmation. 

6. Educational Seminars

The site of the former concentration camp at Jungfernhof has recently not only drawn academic interest from the sciences, but from the arts and humanities as well.

Between April and June 2021, students from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences of Vienna (BOKU Wien) made Jungfernhof a major focus of a months-long seminar course dedicated to exploring different approaches to the commemoration of the Holocaust. They were in continuous dialogue with participating Latvian university students and Latvian professors. 

After learning about Jungfernhof’s history, the students spent three days in contemplative exploration of the site.

Before the conclusion of this academic program, the students developed drafts for their own imagined memorials that could be placed at Mazjumpravas muiža to the victims of the Jungfernhof camp.

7. Closing

Jungfernhof is a painful piece of history that connects Germans, Austrians, Latvians, and Jews. 

It reminds all who look upon it that there are no limits to the cruelty that human beings can inflict on one another.  

As we make our way into the future together, we should be mindful of that fact: we should mark Jungfernhof solemnly; pledge to remember; and, because ultimately lives depend upon it, we should resolve to despise and repudiate bigotry, ideological fantasies, dictatorship, and state violence. 

For our own sake as moral beings, for all humanity, and for the memory of all who died here.