Liquidation of the Ghettos of Ostland
Heinrich Himmler, Order for the Liquidation of the Ghettos of Ostland. June 21, 1943
Original Source: Prestupnye tseli-Prestupnye sredstva. Dokumenty ob okkupatsionnoi politike fashistskoi Germanii na territorii SSSR, 1941-1944 (Minsk: Gosizdat BSSR, 1963).
June 21, 1943
Field Command, June 21, 1943
Reichsfuhrer SS
Secret To:
The Higher SS and Police Leader (Hoherer SS- und Polizeifuhrer) Ostland
Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Chef des SS-Wirtsehafts Verwaltungshauptamtes)
1) I order that all Jews still remaining in ghettos in the Ostland area be collected in concentration camps.
2) I prohibit the withdrawal of Jews from concentration camp's for outside work from August 1, 1943.
3) A concentration camp is to be built near Riga to which will be transferred the entire manufacture of clothing and equipment now operated by the Wehrmacht outside. All private firms will he eliminated. The workshops are to be solely concentration camp workshops. The Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office is requested to see to it that there will be no shortfall in the production required by the Wehrmacht as the result of this reorganization.
4) Inmates of the Jewish ghettos who are not required are to be evacuated to the East.
5) As many male Jews as possible are -to be taken to the concentration camp in the oil-shale area for the mining of oil-shale.
6) The date set for the reorganization of the concentration camps is August 1, 1943.
Signed H. Himmler
Source: Yitzhak Arad, Yisroel Gutman, Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981), pp. 456-457.