Rumbula

A.K.A. Bikernieki

Rumbula is a small railway station southeast of the capital of Latvia, Riga. A forest nearby is said to have been the location of the mass execution of mainly Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto by Einsatzgruppen and associated units (see that entry). Depending on the sources, somewhere between 4,000 to 38,000 Jews were executed on one or two distinct occasions (30 Nov. and 8 Dec. 1941). This is only one and perhaps the most prominent among several claimed mass-execution sites near Riga. Another major site east of Riga is located in the Bikernieki Forest (Latvian: Biķernieku). Death-toll claims for this location vary from a few thousand up to 46,500. Documental and anecdotal evidence on these cases is contradictory and inconsistent.

Soviet postwar investigative commissions claimed in reports to have located mass graves in the larger area of Riga containing a total of some 116,600 bodies, 38,000 of them at Rumbula. However, these reports are conspicuously devoid of any indication as to how the size and contents of the claimed graves were determined. There is also no mention of any excavations of the claimed graves or forensic examination of their alleged contents. There is also no photographic evidence included.

As in the case of other claimed mass graves of Einsatzgruppen shootings, the graves at Rumbula and Bikernieki Forest were presumably exhumed, and their bodies burned on pyres in 1944 within the framework of Aktion 1005 (see this entry for details). In the present case, this is mainly based on the discredited statement by Gerhard Adametz (see his entry). According to this, Adametz was involved in the excavation and pyre-cremation of between 32,000 and 52,000 bodies within some 4½ months (some 135 days), carried out by some 50 to 60 Jewish slave laborers.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 32,000 bodies thus requires some 8,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering some 18 hectares of land, or some 40 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated as being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within 135 days that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of about 94 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. For 52,000 bodies, this number would rise to 153 lumberjacks. However, Adametz claims only 50-60 inmates excavating corpses, building pyres and maintaining the fires. He said nothing about huge piles of firewood, and where it came from.

Interestingly, Latvian authorities discovered several mass graves in the Bikernieki Forest in August 1941, probably filled with victims of the Soviet occupation between June 1940 and July 1941.

(For details, see Kues 2012; Mattogno 2022c, pp. 225-235, 646-656.)