Salaspils Memorial Ensemble II World War II

The construction of the Salaspils camp began in October 1941, when local construction workers, as well as Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners from Riga Central Prison, were involved in its construction. Starting in December, the camp's main labor force was about 1,500–1,800 Jews deported from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. From May 1942, Salaspils began operating as an expanded police prison with an attached labor education camp.

During its existence, the camp was visited by about 1,000–2,000 truants, who were sentenced to imprisonment for no longer than 56 days. The majority of those who were imprisoned in the expanded police prison were political prisoners, who were held there in security detention (Schutzhaft) until the end of the war, and their earlier release occurred only in isolated cases. A large number of them had been arrested for collaborating with the Soviet occupation regime in 1940–1941. Among the political prisoners were also more than 100 Latvian and Polish members of the national resistance movement, including members of the Latvian Central Council Konstantīns Čakste, Bruno Kalniņš, Ludvigs Sēja and others. The total number of political prisoners during the camp's existence could reach 5,000–6,000 people.

In February–April 1943, at least 4,500 people from Belarus who had been arrested during the anti-partisan campaign “Winter Magic” (Winterzauber) arrived in Salaspils. In August–September 1943, 3,284 people who had been arrested during the forced labor campaign “Summer Journey” (Sommerreise) in Latgale were brought to Salaspils. In both of these campaigns, able-bodied men and women brought to Salaspils were sent to work in Germany. At least 2,741 children were given to farmers in the parishes of the Riga region and to foster families. Some of the children ended up in the Riga Holy Trinity-Sergius Women's Monastery, as well as were sent to orphanages in Bulduri and Saulkrasti.

At the turn of 1942 and 1943, a "special department for Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who had been convicted by SS and police courts" was established in Salaspils, and starting in the spring of 1943, soldiers of Baltic and other nationalities from police battalions and legions who had been convicted of various offenses for a period longer than three months served their sentences in the camp. Lithuanian General Pāvils Plehavičs was briefly in Salaspils with his staff officers, totaling about 50 people. In the summer and autumn of 1944, about 2,000 of the military personnel imprisoned in Salaspils were involved in several army penal and construction battalions.

In May 1942, a double (2 meters behind each other) barbed wire fence was built around the camp. Along its outside, at a distance of 60-70 meters and at a height of 6-7 meters above the ground, the camp guard was on duty 24 hours a day in six watchtowers built above the barbed wire fences. The area around the fences was illuminated. It was not allowed to approach the fence closer than 20 meters. In the middle of the camp, between the barracks, there was a water tower. On top of it, searchlights and machine guns were installed, as well as a siren, which was turned on in case of escape. The prisoners' barracks were arranged in three rows in a horseshoe-shaped circle, and their numbering began from the right side of the commandant's office. By May 1943, about 30 residential and work barracks had been built in the camp. Of these, about 14-15 were prisoner barracks, which usually housed about 200 people, but there were also cases when there were fewer than 100 or more than 600 prisoners. The camp territory also included the commandant's office; the guard's residential and service barracks; the camp's senior office and residential barracks; a hospital and a barracks for medical needs; a kitchen; a post office; a cell where prisoners' clothes and documents were stored; carpentry, mechanical, straw shoe, shoemaker, tailor, artist, souvenir-making workshops; a laundry and disinfection room; and a solitary confinement cell.

Already at the end of 1943, the mass transfer of Salaspils camp prisoners to Stutthof, Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Mauthausen-Gusen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and other concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and Germany began. The last prisoners left Salaspils on September 29, 1944, when the camp was liquidated and most of the remaining buildings were burned. The exact number of prisoners and those who died in Salaspils camp cannot be determined due to the lack of a register of detainees, as their file was destroyed. It is only approximately possible to establish that around 17,000 to 18,000 people were imprisoned in Salaspils at various times, of which around 8,000–9,000 were persons transferred in special actions. By July–August 1942, about 1,000 foreign Jews had died in Salaspils due to the harsh living and working conditions, inhumane corporal punishment, and death sentences. According to the calculations of former Salaspils camp inmate Arturs Neparts, during the camp's existence, 100 political prisoners were shot on the night of May 5/6, 1943, after their transfer to Riga Central Prison, 400–500 died from disease, about 25 were shot while preparing to escape or during their escape, 100–150 people died from inhumane punishments, and several hundred emaciated children died of typhus, dysentery, and other epidemics and diseases that had spread to Salaspils. It can be very roughly assumed that the number of people who died in the Salaspils camp reached at least 2,000 people.