Execution of 1900 Nazis who Killed 9,000 Latvians: Hard to Watch

Execution of 1900 Nazis who Killed 9,000 Latvians: Hard to Watch

June 22nd, 1941.

Eastern Europe stands on the brink of unimaginable horror.

As dawn breaks across the eastern front, German forces unleash Operation Barbarosa, the invasion that will stretch from the frigid Baltic waters to the Black Sea shores.

Behind the advancing Vermacht, something far more sinister follows.

Einzot’s group of a mobile death squads with a singular chilling mission.

They’re not here to capture territory.

They’re here to exterminate.

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Now, let’s continue with what really happened in Latvia.

The Inzot Grupton sweep through the Baltic states with terrifying efficiency.

In Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, mass graves fill faster than anyone can count.

The Latvian coastal city of Lipa becomes ground zero for one of the Holocaust’s most documented and most horrifying chapters.

Lipaya wasn’t chosen by accident.

This strategic Baltic port gave Nazi Germany everything they needed.

a naval base, supply routes, and complete dominance over the eastern coast.

But the Germans didn’t just want control of the city.

They wanted to erase anyone they deemed undesirable from existence.

The killing starts before German troops even secure the city completely.

In nearby Groina, Sonder Commando 1A members execute six Jewish civilians in a church graveyard on the invasion’s first night, June 23rd to 24th, 1941.

Among [clears throat] the victims is the town chemist murdered in what should have been sacred ground.

Think about that.

A church graveyard.

The sacred ground meant for peaceful rest becomes an execution site.

Random murders explode across the region in the following days.

When German soldiers enter Lipa on June 29th, the hunt for Jews begins within the first hours of occupation.

At 5:00 p.

m.

that same day, arriving German forces seize seven Jews and 22 Latvians and shoot them at a bomb crater in the middle of Alicia Street.

On June 29th and 30th alone, approximately 100 Jews are killed in random shootings by German soldiers.

There’s no trial, no charges, no mercy, just bullets in unmarked graves.

Everything changes when German forces capture Lipaya on June 29th, 1941.

The Einats Commando specialized killing units established their headquarters in the Hotel St.

Petersburg.

From this base of operations, they transform the city into an open air death camp.

Approximately 5,700 Jews from Lipaya in the surrounding district fall into German hands.

The Germans discover something grimly convenient.

Soviet troops had dug defensive trenches in Rainis Park, right in the city center.

The Nazis repurposed these trenches into execution pits.

On July 3rd and 4th, 1941, hundreds of Jewish residents are rounded up.

At gunpoint, marched to these trenches and murdered.

Their bodies are covered with dirt, and the next group of victims is brought to fill the same pits.

Meanwhile, the city’s new German overlords impose regulations designed to dehumanize before they destroy.

The naval commonant issues a brutal decree.

For every act of sabotage, 10 civilian hostages will be executed.

Its collective punishment taken to its most savage extreme.

Then come the anti-Jewish laws.

Jews must wear yellow stars on both the front and back of their clothing, marked like cattle for slaughter.

They can only shop during a 2-hour window.

Public transportation forbidden.

Beach access forbidden.

Walking past a German soldier.

Jews must step off the sidewalk.

Their shops are branded with signs reading Jewishowned business.

[snorts] Radios, typewriters, vehicles, all confiscated.

The Nazis are systematically erasing Jewish existence before physically erasing Jewish people.

Hehard Growl and Enzando commander seizes control of the women’s prison and converts it into a detention center for anyone the regime labels an enemy.

He orders hostage executions, claiming their retaliation for supposed attacks on German patrols.

On July 7th, 1941, approximately 30 Jews and communists are executed on the beach near the lighthouse outside Lipaya.

Growl’s superior France Walter Staler, the head of Inzata A, actually criticizes him for not killing people fast enough.

Let that sink in.

His crime, according to the SS, was insufficient murder.

Wolf Gang Cougler replaces Growl and accelerates the killing.

By late July, the notorious Araj commando arrives.

a Latvian auxiliary unit trained specifically for mass executions.

Mass arrests of Jewish men continue through July 25th, 1941.

The Araj commando conducts shootings on July 24th and 25th, executing approximately 910 Jewish men.

In just 2 days, working alongside the SS, they murder hundreds from August through December 10th.

The killings continue on a somewhat reduced but still horrifying scale with about 600 Jews, 100 communists, and 100 Roma murdered.

What makes the Leapaya massacres particularly disturbing is how openly they were witnessed.

Unlike many Holocaust crimes conducted in secret, these executions became public spectacles.

Vermach soldiers, German naval personnel, and other military members were present during the shootings.

Some even became what historians call execution tourists, German military personnel who traveled to the killing sites specifically to watch the mass murders as spectators.

The largest single massacre in Liupaya occurs in mid December 1941 at Sheddi just north of the city.

SS officer Wolf Gang Kougler commands the operation with Latvian guards as accompllices.

On December 13th, a notice appears in the local newspaper ordering all Jewish residents to remain in their homes for two days.

That night, Latvian police begin mass arrests.

The sea prison courtyard overflows with terrified men, women, and children.

They’re marched to a disused Latvian army training ground in the dunes at approximately 15 km north of Liapaya, where workers have dug a trench approximately 100 m long and 3 m wide.

At dawn on December 15th, 1941, the systematic slaughter begins.

Victims are herded into a barn near the beach and ordered to strip naked.

Guards beat anyone who hesitates.

SS officers use whips to drive the prisoners forward.

At the trench’s edge, they’re shot in groups of 10 from the dunes into the trench near the sandy white beach.

The victims were mainly women and children.

After each volley, a German officer walks along the pit, firing finishing shots into anyone still moving.

Behind him comes the kicker.

Often a Latvian policeman whose job is to kick, roll, or push bodies into the mass grave.

Three firing squads, two Latvian and one German, rotate shifts over three days methodically, murdering victims.

This isn’t war.

This is industrialized murder.

The killing continues for 3 days straight.

By the evening of December 17th, 1941, 2,749 [clears throat] Jews and 23 communists have been executed.

Among the victims are grandparents, parents, teenagers, children, and infants.

Entire families are wiped from existence.

The mass grave eventually extends along the dunes until it reportedly reaches a length of 1 kilometer, longer than three soccer fields.

The SCADE massacre becomes one of the few Holocaust crimes in Latvia captured on camera.

A German soldier filmed the massacre contrary to orders.

To this day, it remains the only known surviving film footage of Einat’s Groen mass [clears throat] executions.

These images showing victims final moments on the frozen Baltic shore would later become crucial evidence in post-war trials.

Additionally, 12 photographs were taken during the massacre.

German photographer Carl Emil Strot, an SS member, took photographs during the executions.

These weren’t documentary photos meant to expose atrocities.

They were souvenirs, trophy pictures from mass murder.

The photographs show scenes so voyuristic, humiliating, and desperate that they’ve become emblematic of the Holocaust.

By June 1942, Lipa’s Jewish community has been virtually annihilated.

Of roughly 5,700 Jews living there before the German invasion, only about 814 remain alive.

These survivors are crammed into a tiny ghetto of just 11 houses and forced into brutal labor for the German Navy.

Hunger, cold, exhausting work, and disease claim many more lives.

On October 1943, during Yum Kapour, one of Judaism’s holiest days, the Nazis liquidate the ghetto.

The last remaining Jews are deported to Ria.

Only a handful survived the war.

By 1943, as World War II turns decisively against Nazi Germany, the perpetrators returned to their killing sites attempting to hide their crimes.

The grave at Skeg was opened and chlorine was cast over the bodies.

To accelerate decomposition, they burn bodies.

They scatter remains.

But the photographs, the film footage, and witness testimonies preserved by survivors like David Zivcon, a Jewish prisoner who discovered the 12 photographs ensure the massacre can never be completely erased.

Many perpetrators responsible for the Leipaya massacres eventually face justice, though for some it takes decades.

Fran Stalleer, the head of Einat’s group of A and one of the massacres chief architects, is killed by Soviet partisans in March 1942.

Some might call that poetic justice.

Fritz Dietrich, the police chief who helped organize the December 1941 massacre, is captured after the war and tried by an American military tribunal for ordering the execution of captured American airmen.

He’s hanged at Lansburg prison in 1948.

Wolf Gang Cougler, the SS officer who directed much of Leipi’s killing, initially receives only a fine and short prison sentence in an early postwar trial.

When additional evidence surfaces in 1959, he’s arrested again before facing a second trial.

He hangs himself in his cell.

Hans Balumgardner, responsible for mass deportations in shootings across Latvia, is arrested in East Germany in 1969.

His trial establishes his role in murdering more than 6,000 people.

He’s sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in Leipig in 1971.

Latvian collaborators also face reckoning.

Victor’s arise, commander of the arise commando, is finally tried in Hamburgg in 1979.

His central role in mass executions, including those in Lipaya, is fully proven.

He receives life imprisonment and dies in prison in 1988.

Soviet courts prosecute 30 members of his unit after the war, sentencing them to death for their roles in murdering civilians.

Carlile Strot, the SS photographer who took trophy pictures during the Shade executions, receives a 7-year prison sentence.

When the Red Army liberates Leapa on May 9th, 1945, they find approximately 20 Jews still alive in the city.

Some had fled and hidden.

Some found shelter with courageous Latvian neighbors who risked their own lives.

Some obtained forged Christian identification papers.

and 11 Jews hid in a basement in the ghetto area the night before its liquidation, remaining there for 18 months until liberation with help from Robert Sadul and his wife Johanna, later recognized as righteous among the nations.

After the war, the Soviet Union closes Leapa to outsiders, transforming it into a naval base and nuclear weapons storage facility.

For decades, memories of the massacres fade into enforced silence.

Only in the late 20th century do historians reconstruct the full sequence of events.

Today, memorials stand near the dunes where the largest shootings occurred and at Leapa Cemetery.

The photographs from December 1941, showing victims final moments on the cold Baltic shore serve as enduring symbols of a vibrant community destroyed by Nazi Germany’s brutal regime and its local collaborators.

In total, approximately 6,500 people were murdered during the killing spreees in Leaya with the December massacres at Skedi, accounting for a death toll of approximately 2,800.

Nearly 1,00 perpetrators and collaborators were eventually held accountable through death during the war, execution afterward, or prison sentences handed down by post-war courts.

But thousands more escape justice entirely, living out comfortable lives while their victims families mourn for generations.

The Leapaya massacres represent just one chapter in the Holocaust’s horrific story.

But it’s a chapter we must never forget.

These weren’t nameless victims.

They were teachers, shopkeepers, doctors, musicians, parents, and children with hopes, dreams, and futures stolen by hatred.

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The world must remember Lipa, not just as a city that suffered, but as proof of what happens when hatred goes unchecked and evil meets silence.

These 9,000 souls from Lipaja and across Latvia deserve to be remembered.

Their stories demand to be