Eduard Roschmann

Eduard Roschmann (25 November 1908 – 8 August 1977) was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmführer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943.

He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities.

As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".

Roschmann was born on 25 November 1908, in Graz-Eggenberg, in Austria.

He was the son of a brewery manager.

He was reputed to have come from the Styria region of Austria, from a good family.

From 1927 to 1934, Roschmann was a member of the Fatherland's Front, which in turn was part of the Austrian home guard ("Heimatschutz").

From 1927 to 1934, Roschmann was associated with an organization called the "Steyr Homeland Protection Force."

Roschmann spent six semesters at a university.

Contrary to a report that he was once a lawyer in Graz, Austria, he had studied to be a lawyer but failed.

By 1931, he was a brewery employee, joining the civil service in 1935.

In May 1938, he joined the Nazi Party NSDAP Number 6,276,402, and the SS the following year.

In January 1941, he was assigned to the Security Police.

Within the SS Roschmann was assigned to the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst), often referred to by its German initials SD.

Following the German occupation of Latvia in the Second World War, the SD established a presence in Latvia with the objective of killing all the Jews in the country.

To this end, the SD established the Riga ghetto.

The Riga ghetto did not exist prior to the occupation of Latvia by the German armed forces.

Jews in general lived throughout Riga before then.

The ghetto itself was a creation of the SD.

Surrounded by barbed wire fences, with armed guards, it was in effect a large and overcrowded prison.

Furthermore, while it is common to see the Riga ghetto referred to as a single location, in fact it was a unified prison for only a very short time in autumn of 1941.

After that it was split into three ghettos.

The first ghetto was the Latvian ghetto, sometimes called the "Big Ghetto", which was in existence for only 35 days, from late October to 30 November 1941.

Men, women and children were forced into the ghetto, where at least for a short time they lived as families.

On 30 November and on 8 December 1941, 24,000 Jews were force-marched out of the ghetto and shot at the nearby forest of Rumbula.

Except for Babi Yar, this was the biggest two-day massacre in the genocides until the construction of the death camps in 1942.

A few thousand Latvian Jews, mostly men, who were not murdered at Rumbula, were confined to a much smaller area of the former Latvia ghetto.

This became known as the men's ghetto; about 500 Latvian Jewish women, who were also not selected for murder, were similarly confined to an adjacent but separated smaller ghetto, known as the women's ghetto.

A few days after the 8 December massacre, train-loads of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia began to arrive in Riga, where, with some important exceptions, they were housed in a portion of the former Latvian ghetto, which then became known as the German ghetto.

In March 1942, the German authorities in charge of the Riga ghetto and the nearby Jungfernhof concentration camp murdered about 3,740 German, Austrian and Czech Jews who had been deported to Latvia.

The victims were mostly the elderly, the sick and infirm and children.

These people were tricked into believing they would be transported to a new and better camp facility at an area near Riga called Dünamünde.

In fact no such facility existed, and the intent was to transport the victims to mass graves in the woods north of Riga and shoot them.

According to a survivor, Edith Wolff, Roschmann was one of a group of SS men who selected the persons for "transport" to Dünamünde.

(Others in the selection group included Rudolf Lange, Kurt Krause, Max Gymnich, Kurt R. Migge, Richard Nickel and Rudolf Seck).

Wolff stated that only the "prominent people" made selections, and she was not sure whether Migge, Seck or Nickel had picked anyone.

Starting in January 1943, Roschmann became commandant of the Riga ghetto.

His immediate predecessor was Kurt Krause.

Survivors described Krause as "sadistic","bloody", "monster", and "psychopath".

Roschmann's methods differed from those of Krause.