Salaspils concentration camp

Salaspils concentration camp
Nazi propaganda photograph of Salaspils concentration camp in 1941
Also known as	Kurtenhof
Location	Salaspils, near Riga, Latvia
Incident type	Imprisonment without trial, forced labor, starvation
Perpetrators	Rudolf Lange, Otto Teckemeier
Organizations	Nazi SS, Latvian Auxiliary Police
Victims	2,000
Memorials	At site

Salaspils concentration camp was established at the end of 1941 at a point 18 km (11 mi) southeast of Riga (Latvia). The Nazi bureaucracy drew distinctions between different types of camps. Officially, Salaspils was a Police Prison and Work Education Camp (Polizeigegfängnis und Arbeitserziehungslager). It was also known as camp Kurtenhof after the German name for the city of Salaspils. Planning for the development of the camp and its prisoner structure changed several times. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler briefly considered converting the camp into an official concentration camp (Konzentrationslager), which would have formally subordinated the camp to the National Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), but nothing came of this.

In October 1941, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange began planning a detention camp to be built at Salaspils to confine people arrested in Latvia by the police and also to house Jewish people deported from Germany and other countries to Latvia. Lange, who originally was the coordinator of Special Assignment Group A (Einsatzgruppe A), a mobile squad of killers, started a new job in December 1941 as commander of both the security police (Sicherheitspolizei) in Latvia and also of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdient). The place selected, near the city of Salaspils, was readily accessible from the main railway connecting Riga and Daugavpils, the two largest cities in Latvia. The plan was to work the prisoners harvesting peat and also, as part of what soon became known as the Final Solution, to separate Jewish men from Jewish women to prevent them from having children. In February 1942 Lange, probably because of his deeds in Latvia, became a participant in the Wannsee Conference where the final plans for the murder of the Jews of Europe were established by the Nazi hierarchy.

The first rail transport of German Jews arrived unexpectedly in Latvia in October 1941 before the Salaspils camp was complete. The train had been rerouted from its original destination of Minsk to Riga. The Jewish people on the train were housed temporarily in Jungfernhof concentration camp ("KZ Jungfernhof") or a little later in a Nazi-delineated part of Riga which later became known as the Riga Ghetto.