Eduard Roschmann (25 November 1908 – 10 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 1972 novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its 1974 film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".
Early life and career 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.The Odessa File 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.
War crimes in Latvia
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. To this end, the SD established the Riga Ghetto.
Structure of 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.
Participation in Dünamünde Action
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. Wolff stated that only the "prominent people" made selections, and she was not sure whether others in the selection group like Kurt Migge, Richard Nickel, or Rudolf Joachim Seck had picked anyone.
Appointment as ghetto commandant 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. Unlike Krause, Roschmann did not execute offenders on the spot, but, in most cases, sent them to Riga's Central Prison. Whether this was a matter of having qualms about murder is not certain. However, being sent to the prison was likely to be, at best, only a brief reprieve, as conditions there were brutal.
At that time, Roschmann held the relatively low rank of Unterscharführer. Differing ranks are supplied for Roschmann. According to Ezergailis and Kaufmann, Roschmann held the rank of SS-Unterscharführer. According to Gertrude Schneider, a historian and a survivor of the Riga Ghetto, Roschmann was an SS-Obersturmführer, a higher rank. Schneider mentions no promotion for Roschmann.
Murders and other crimes Historians Angrick and Klein state that in addition to the mass killings, the Holocaust in Latvia also consisted of a great number of individual murders.
Angrick and Klein name Roschmann among others as responsible for these individual murders. Historian Schneider, a survivor of the German ghetto, has stated that it is certain that Roschmann was a murderer, otherwise he never would have risen as high as he did in the SS. One documented murder committed by Roschmann, with his subordinates assisted by Scharführer Max Gymnich and Kurt Migge, was that of Arthur Kaufmann, the 17-year-old son of Max Kaufmann, who later came to write one of the first histories of the Holocaust in Latvia. Roschmann personally issued the order for this particular murder. Kaufmann himself described the murder, which occurred when both of them were housed outside the ghetto at the Sloka work camp, where among other things they were tasked with peat cutting:
Food for ghetto occupants was strictly rationed and generally inadequate. It was common for Jews assigned to work details to obtain and attempt to smuggle extra food into the ghetto. For this and other reasons, all returning work details were subject to search, although this was actually carried out only on a sporadic basis. When searches did occur, those smuggling food were forced to abandon it before it could be found on their person, which was a serious offence. Roschmann and his aide, Max Gymnich, accompanied by a trained attack dog, involved themselves in the details of the searches for contraband food, which included inspections of kitchens in the ghetto, again forcing people to discard food they had smuggled in, even when they were about to eat it. Survivor Nina Ungar related a similar incident at the Olaine peat bog work camp, where Roschmann found three eggs on one of the Latvian Jews and had him shot immediately. Kaufmann describes an incident, possibly the same one referred to by Ungar, where Roschmann, during a visit to the Olaine work camp with Gymnich in 1943, found a singer named Karp with five eggs and had him shot immediately.
Roschmann, together with Krause, who, although no longer ghetto commandant, was close at hand as the commandant of the Salaspils concentration camp, investigated a resistance plot among the Jews to store weapons at an old powder magazine in Riga known as the Pulverturm. As a result, several hundred inmates were executed, whom Kaufmann described as "our best young people."
While ghetto commandant, Roschmann became involved with the work detail known as the Army Motor Park (Heereskraftpark). This was considered a favourable work assignment for Jews, as it involved skilled labour (vehicle mechanics) necessary for the German army, thus providing some protection from liquidation, and it also gave a number of opportunities to "organise" (that is, to buy, barter for or steal) contraband food and other items. The Jews on the work detail benefited from the fact that the German in charge, Private First Class (Obergefreiter) Walter Eggers, was corrupt and wanted to use the Jews under his command to become rich. Consequently, better treatment could be had, at least for a time, by paying Eggers bribes. Roschmann heard rumours about the "good life", and attempted to prevent it by putting some of the workers into one of the prisons or transferring them to Kaiserwald concentration camp.
Roschmann himself was not above accepting bribes, or at least pretending to accept bribes. In one instance, a shoemaker whose two children had been incarcerated in the Riga prisons as a result of Roschmann's investigation, attempted to secure their release by paying Roschmann a large number of gold coins. Roschmann took the coins, but did not release the children.
Actions outside of the ghetto Roschmann was later transferred to the Lenta work camp, a forced-labour facility in the Riga area where Jews were housed at the workplace. Originally this facility had been located on Washington (Ludendorff) Square in Riga and had been known as the "Gestapo" work detail. Lenta was considered a favoured work assignment. The original German commandant, Fritz Scherwitz, had determined to make a lot of money involving the work of highly skilled Jews in the tailoring trade. Scherwitz made efforts to protect Jews in the Lenta work detail. This changed when Roschmann became the Lenta commandant. According to Kaufmann:
Roschmann participated in the efforts of Sonderkommando 1005 to conceal the evidence of the Nazi crimes in Latvia by exhuming and burning the bodies of the victims of the numerous mass shootings in the Riga area. In the fall of 1943, Roschmann was made the chief of Kommando Stützpunkt, a work detail of prisoners which was given the task of digging up and burning the bodies of the tens of thousands of people whom the Nazis had shot and buried in the forests of Latvia. About every two weeks the men on the work detail were shot and replaced with a new set of inmates. Men for this commando were selected both from Kaiserwald concentration camp and from the few remaining people in the Riga Ghetto.
Historian Ezergailis states that one Hasselbach, an SS officer, was the commander of the Stützpunkt commando, and does not mention Roschmann. As his source, Ezergailis cites a witness, Franz Leopold Schlesinger, who testified in the trial in West Germany of Viktors Arajs in the late 1970s, almost 35 years later. Schlesinger in turn appears to have only "thought" Hasselbach was the commander.
Roschmann is sometimes described as the commandant of the Kaiserwald concentration camp, which was located on the north side of Riga. Kaufmann however gives the Kaiserwald commandant as an SS man named Sauer who held the rank of Obersturmbannführer.
Jack Ratz, a Latvian Jewish survivor, came face to face with Roschmann in Lenta at the age of 17. According to Jack:
Character According to Schneider, Roschmann was a murderer, but was not uniformly cruel. She records an instance where Krause, Roschmann's predecessor as commandant, had executed Johann Weiss, a lawyer from Vienna, and a First World War veteran, for having hidden money in his glove. A year later, when Roschmann was commandant, his widow and daughter requested of him that he allow them the Jewish custom of visiting the grave. Roschmann allowed the request.