In Riga, the capital of Latvia which was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, there lived 43,600 Jews in 1935, which corresponded to 11.3 percent of the population. Excesses directed against the Jewish population followed immediately after the invasion by German troops on 1 July 1941. After the introduction of numerous discriminatory decrees, and after plunderings and massacres, the ghetto was installed and surrounded by a wall in September/Oktober 1941.

Between the end of November and the beginning of December 1941, more than 27,000 Jews, most of them from Latvia, but including about 400 elderly people from Vienna, were shot in Rumbula forest. In this way space was to be provided for fresh transports from Germany and Austria.

Transports with totally 4200 Jews departed from Austria for a journey to Riga lasting 8 days, on 3 December 1941 and on 11 and 26 January and 6 February 1942. The deportees were put into those areas of the ghetto which had been emptied by the murder program or else had to perform forced labor in the outpost of Salaspils. The mortality rate of those interned in the ghetto rose sharply because of the frightful living conditions, particularly among the weaker ones, but above all among the elderly and the children.

When in February 1942 the last transport from Vienna arrived in Riga, on arrival at Skrotave station those to whom the kilometre-long march on foot to the ghetto seemed too exhausting were offered lorries - which in fact were camouflaged gasvans - to travel to the ghetto. Of 1000 deportees from Vienna, only 300 reached the ghetto on foot.

Only about 800 of the 20,000 men, women and children deported to Riga survived the selection for forced labour, the ghetto and the various concentration camps, and among them were about 100 Austrian Jews.