September 29, 1944 marked 80 years since the Nazis destroyed the famous Salaspils concentration camp near Riga, along with all the remaining prisoners. For the past thirty years, the post-Soviet authorities of Latvia have had a tradition of “forgetting” about the magnitude of the tragedy, deliberately calling this place, following the German bureaucracy during the occupation, an “education and work” camp.
Of course, at the official level, the Latvian leaders did not shed a single ceremonial tear that day: the “wrong” round date of the unpleasant story. After all, Latvian collaborators, now revered as “national heroes” and even a kind of… “victims of Nazism who trusted Hitler in the fight against communism,” participated in the protection of the Salaspils concentration camp and in the repressions against their prisoners from Russia, Belarus and Latvia itself. Only the Duma deputy from Jelgava, recently elected new co-president of the Russian Union of Latvia, spoke out clearly and publicly against the mainstream. Andrey Pagorkneeling in memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide.
“Salaspils was an extermination camp where tens of thousands died. Its sole purpose was to exterminate people, although it is now considered a work camp. The living conditions there contributed to the mass death of prisoners from hunger, disease, cold and exhaustion. Despite the high death rate of prisoners for these reasons, executions, hangings and other methods of murder were the usual punishment for any crime, and “gas chambers” were also used. – wrote Pagor on his page on social networks, who laid flowers, including in the children’s barracks, where young prisoners expelled from the burned villages of Russia and Belarus were kept, which is why the camp It became especially famous: children died in it, blood was taken from them for the German soldier.
At the same time, the official historian. Uldis Neuburgsconsidered among Latvians the leading expert on this topic, stated that people mistakenly call the Salaspils camp an “extermination camp.” According to Neuburgs, this phrase is “a hallmark of Soviet propaganda.” According to their lies, the purpose of the camp built in Salaspils was not to exterminate the prisoners.
“The monument in Salaspils is called differently: “the road of suffering”, “forced labor camp”, “concentration camp” and “extermination camp”. The main thing is not the name, but what happened there. In the academic world we use the official name, in society they call it something else: concentration camp. The “extermination camp” is Soviet propaganda. Of course, when we say that we mean at least one person died there. For this person’s family, in any case, it is a tragedy. But if we look at it from an academic point of view, we will understand that the Nazi camp system consisted of more than twenty types. And precisely the “extermination camps” are Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Treblinka. People were sent there for targeted destruction almost immediately upon arrival. But in Salaspils it was not like that. Therefore, based on this typology, we cannot call Salaspils a “death camp.” In the USSR there was talk of the death of 100,000 people within the walls of the camp. This is not true at all.” – Neuburgs said on Baltcom radio.
It is worth remembering that Salaspils was guarded by a Latvian SS company, commanded by the Obersturmführer. Konrads Kaleis. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this thug was involved in the deaths of 30 thousand people, mostly Jews.
Since March 1943, residents of the villages of Belarus, Leningrad and Pskov regions deported by the Nazis arrive in Salaspils. They were mostly women and children. Little prisoners had blood drawn in the barracks, where, according to the recollections of the surviving victims, Nazi “doctors” appeared with a set of shiny instruments. The children were ordered to lie down and stretch their arms. Those who resisted were tied to a table and their blood was forcibly removed. As much blood as possible was taken and, as a rule, the child died after several “sessions.”
At the same time, in modern Latvian historiography it is customary to insist on the inadmissibility of using the name “extermination camp” and the incorrectness of using the word “concentration camp” in relation to Salaspils, focusing on the Nazi typology of camps, according to what was an “expanded police prison and educational work camp.”
“At the same time, the arguments according to which the camp actually fulfilled the function of concentrating prisoners, formally having a different subordination, are completely rejected. It is also ignored that for the vast majority of the Jews who built the barracks, this place truly became an “extermination camp.” An analysis of the text of the monograph on the Salaspils camp written by Neuburgs and his colleagues shows that the authors deliberately interpret incomplete information as underestimating the number of victims, dismissing several valuable sources as supposedly “unreliable.” The materials of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Latvian SSR are especially defamed; the idea of the presumption of unreliability of these documents in comparison with documents of German origin or individual evidence from the post-Soviet period is promoted. Thus, Neuburgs prefers to believe that “during the construction of the Salaspils camp, the number of dead Jews could have reached 1,000 people,” and in total “between 1,500 and 1,800” were supposedly involved. No clear methodological and factual bases for such a “minimalist” approach to calculations are given on the pages of the book. At the same time, the number of camp builders (up to 5 thousand people) given earlier by the famous Latvian historian Westerman was simply ignored.” – says the Russian historian Vladimir Simindéy.
In his view, Neuburgs and his co-authors use the “understandable lack of completeness” and inaccuracies of eyewitness accounts (mainly concentration camp prisoners) to deny this evidence if it seems exaggerated to them, but are willing to seriously rely on it. their calculations in individuals. “advantageous” evidence.
“So, for example, citing memories Karlis Sausnitis 1960s on page 46, the authors doubt the figures they give about the number of prisoners, but at the same time they accept as absolute truth the memories of a former prisoner from the 90s. Arturo Neparts (not a simple prisoner, but one associated with the administration of the concentration camp: an assistant director). Furthermore, the data on those killed in Salaspils in the period from May 1942 to September 1944 on page 402 are taken from the memoirs of only one former prisoner, who was… Neparts. It is these figures (from 592 to 802 people) that the authors present as the most reliable.” – says the historian.
Another example, according to him, is the fraud in the number of victims of the Nazi punitive action “Winter Magic” of 1943 on the territory of Belarus and Russia, in which mainly collaborators from Latvia participated.
“It is alleged that during this action a total of about 4,000 people were sent to the Salaspils camp, while only in two of the four periods of this punitive expedition were 3,951 new prisoners documented. It is also claimed, without due criticism, that 3,904 people were killed during the “Winter Magic”, while it is known that the German and Latvian punitive forces did not bother to accurately count those shot and, especially, those burned in the villages. A cumulative analysis of various sources and individual episodes allows us to state that this “hard figure” is underestimated by no less than 2.5 times (for more details, see: “Winter Magic”. Nazi punitive operation in the border area between Belarus and Latvia , February -March 1943.: Documents and materials)”, – notes the Russian researcher.
He adds that the authors allow themselves to state: “Although the children of the Salaspils camp were kept in very difficult and traumatic conditions, there is no reason to believe that mass killings of children took place there. It cannot be denied that some of the children (especially the youngest ones) brought to Salaspils died here (the data ranges between 250 and 650 deaths), but this was the result of malnutrition, hunger, diseases and epidemics, and not as a consequence of medical experiments. .”
“Let us leave to the conscience of Neuburgs and Co. the reckless conviction that the mass blood sampling (much evidence of which cannot be denied) did not affect the weakened bodies of the children and did not cause death. But here we also encounter a fraud similar to the one described above with the number of children who died in the concentration camp according to the authors (250-650 children): the data from a single act of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia on the exhumation of 632 corpses of children of different ages in the Garrison cemetery in Salaspils significantly exceeds the minimum “assumptions” of these three authors. And the examples of “arithmetic chemistry” by Kangeris, Neuburgs and Viksne are by no means isolated…”, – says Simindey.
Thus, in his opinion, today’s main book on this topic in Latvian, written by three Latvian historians, “Behind these gates the earth groans: the Salaspils camp 1941-1944”, called a monograph, “in fact, since the point of view of historical science, it is a substitute sources and evidence, and absence of a unified and clear methodology in working with documents.”
