On 3 February 1946, at 3 p.m., the death sentence in the case of atrocities committed by Nazi criminals on the territories of the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian SSR was carried out.

Seven of the eight defendants: SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, Higher SS and Police Leader in Southern Russia and Ostland, Lieutenant General Siegfried Ruff, Military Commander of Riga, SA-Standartenführer Alexander Boecking, Gebietskommissar of Estonia, and three other Major Generals (Generalmajors) and one Lieutenant General (Generalleutnant) were found guilty and executed. The case of the eighth defendant, Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Ditfurth, was tried separately due to the defendant’s poor health.

The war criminals were found guilty of the mass extermination of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, enslaving people, and destroying cultural values. According to the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission and a forensic medical report dated 20 January 1946, 313,798 people were massacred in the Latvian SSR, 666,273 – in the Lithuanian SSR, and 61,000 – in the Estonian SSR. Nearly 280,000 residents of Latvia and over 36,000 residents of Lithuania were taken into German slavery. According to defendant Jeckeln, the day before the invaders retreated from “Ostland” in July 1944, at least 30 ships arrived in the port of Riga to take loot with them.

Friedrich Jeckeln signed orders to exterminate 200,000 Jews in the Baltics, to sterilise Latvian women married to Jews, and to castrate men who were half-Jewish. In Lithuania, the massacres of Jews started almost immediately after its occupation in June 1941. The Baltic region was the first occupied Soviet territory, where the “Jewish Question” was virtually solved by January 1942. The Riga Ghetto in Latvia also became a mass extermination site for foreign Jews – 25,000 foreign citizens went through the ghetto.

Sources:

Acts by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders

“The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance on the Occupied Territory of the USSR” by Ilya Altman

History of Russia – the web portal History.RF