CRIMINAL MINDS SERIES

Massimo Arico

.I.
MARTINS VAGULĀNS
AND THE END OF THE JEWS OF JELGAVA
JULY-AUGUST 1941

Jelgava, 1703

www.ordnungspolizei.org
 Though this be madness,
yet there is method in't

Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

_______________________________

Of course, the whole point of a “Doomsday Machine”

is lost,
if you keep it a secret!

Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrik, 1964

 INTRODUCTION

The destruction of the European Jews, perpetrated during the Second World War, through the
various “technical” steps in which – more or less in abstract terms – the “Final Solution” can be
subdivided, is well symbolized – obviously in addition to the extermination camps – even by the
large mass slaughters, during which, many tens of thousands of Jews of the Eastern territories,
were butchered by shootings and buried in mass graves, especially during the Summer/Autumn
1941: just to mention a few of this massacres, we remember Babi Yar (33.000 victims),
Rumbula (25.000), Kamenec Podolski 1 (23.600), and Rovno (15÷21.000).
However, it’s undeniable that, apart from those and other slaughters – apocalyptic
in terms of victims – an endless number of so-called “peripheral” executions were also
perpetrated, that had as a consequence, the total annihilation of many hundreds of
communities, often rather ancient and traditional, together with their cultural and economic
structure and with roots dating back to the late Middle Age. This happened for example in
Lithuania, where about 95% of the pre-war Judaism was annihilated 2, or in Belarus, in Ukraine
and in Galicia. Or even in Latvia, where about 65% of the Jewish population was exterminated,
almost entirely on the spot 3.
In this sense, if the vanishing of the large Jewish communities from the major
European towns, erased forever the Jewish cosmopolitism of merchant origin, and consequently
the most "impacting" and immediately perceivable – and in some way superficial – aspect of
the Eastern European Judaism, well, the annihilation of the small communities, scattered
throughout the territory, far from the great economic realities, irretrievably destroyed the
fragile but tenacious texture represented by the culture of the Shtetl, namely, the world of the
Ashkenazic speaking-Yiddish Jewry, that in some way represented the most mystic and
intimate vision of the European Judaism: that in which, principles, traditions and roots were still
able to prevail over the secularism and the materialism, clearly of Western origin, but already
widely spread also in the great urban centers in the East.
Therefore, if the large urbanized communities had represented – in a general sense
– the modernistic “reason” of the Eastern European Jewish world, the small centers were
fundamental in preserving the traditional “conscience”: that unavoidably would have been
destined to die away anyway, but to which the “Final Solution” dealt the fatal blow, in the most
traumatic way and with a brutality just comparable with its troglodytic rudeness.

Nevertheless, in spite of its devastating impact over the “vitality” and the “historical
spirit” of the European Jewry, the “Final Solution” in the periphery still remains to date a facet
only partially focused, and this is also due to a certain lack of precise data, useful to define its
real magnitude, in terms of modalities, times and numbers, insomuch as, single local events –
or circumscribed to communities more or less small and remote – ended by disappearing, as
immersed into a more general contextualization.
We can find an example of such a situation by the reading of the destructive events
that involved the Jewish community of Jelgava, on which we have to date, a rather partial and
fragmentary knowledge, and that within this article, we have tried to piece together, as far as it
has been possible.

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Text by Carnaro. Copyrighted material ©