Representatives from more than 30 German cities attended a memorial ceremony in Latvia on Friday to commemorate the deportation and murder of European Jews 85 years ago.
Delegates from the German Riga Committee paid tribute to the victims of Nazi atrocities committed during World War II at the Bikernieki Cemetery and Memorial in Riga.
They also marked the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of the memorial site in a woodland in the Latvian capital and visited the remains of the Jungfernhof concentration camp.
From November 1941 until the end of 1942, more than 25,000 Jews from Germany and Austria were deported to Riga to be killed.
The ambassadors of the two countries, alongside the German guests, representatives of the Jewish community and Riga city officials, laid wreaths and flowers to honour the victims.
“The Bikernieki Forest was essentially the first place in Riga where mass murders of Jews took place. The first murders took place here exactly 85 years ago, on July 2 and 3, 1941,” said Ilya Lensky, director of the Museum of the Jews in Latvia, in his speech at the ceremony.
Almost all those deported were shot dead by the Nazis and Latvian collaborators. The dead were buried anonymously in the forest. Political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war were also executed and buried in mass graves there. Between 1941 and 1944, more than 35,000 people died in the area.