"With its ...[over thousand] detailed and expansive footnotes drawing
on twenty-four different archive collections in eight countries and
three continents and an enormous secondary literature, this is one of
the best researched regional studies of the Holocaust ever to appear. It
is helped by the fact that the authors are also always so cognizant of
what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time and thus
frequently draw out the relationship between seemingly haphazard local
decisions and trends across Europe...Indeed, the way in which the book
'makes sense' of complex institutional behavior is at times
breathtaking...The precision in the detail and the scope of the
contextualization make this one of the more important works to appear on
the Holocaust in recent years." - English Historical Review
"This very readable and well documented study fills an important gap in
the Holocaust literature: it offers insight into the microcosm
reflecting the entire terrifying and murderous scenario of the SS
State." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"[This] excellent study of the Riga ghetto, informed by Eastern
European sources and available now in English translation, provides a
precise and ghastly description of what [the liquidation] meant for
the local Jews. With laudable thoroughness, they describe the organized
shooting of Jews, the first form of industrial-scale mass murder." - The
New York Review of Books
Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of
the National Socialists' policies of annihilation were to be found in
Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of
Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation
policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of
sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar
criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and
the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors
have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses
sight of the Latvian capital's place within the overall design of Nazi
policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust.
Andrej Angrick, a native of Berlin, is a historian, consultant, and
researcher affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of
Science and Culture. He has published numerous articles about the
Holocaust in the Soviet Union and co-edited Der Dienstkalender Heinrich
Himmlers 1941/42 (1999) and Die Gestapo nach 1945: Karrieren,
Konflikte, Konstruktionen (with Klaus-Michael Mallmann, 2009), as well
as Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der
südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943 (2003).
Peter Klein, a Berlin-based historian, consultant, and researcher
affiliated with the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and
Culture, has published widely on the Holocaust and German occupation in
various parts of central and eastern Europe during the Second World War.
Klein was the editor of Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion
1941/1942 (1997) and a co-editor of Der Dienstkalender Heinrich
Himmlers 1941/42 (1999). He is the author of "Gettoverwaltung
Litzmannstadt" (2009).
Ray Brandon is a freelance translator, historian, and researcher based
in Berlin. A former editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
English Edition, he is co-editor, with Wendy Lower, of The Shoah in
Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization.
