Its objective was to execute Jews who had recently been deported to Latvia from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia.

The victims were lured to their deaths by a false promise that they would receive easier work at a (non-existent) resettlement facility near a former neighbourhood in Latvia called Daugavgrīva (Dünamünde).

Rather than being transported to a new facility, they were trucked to woods north of Riga, shot, and buried in previously dug mass graves.

[2] In December 1941, Kurt Krause, whom the author Max Kauffman describes as the "man-eater", became the German commandant of the Riga ghettos.

They remained under the impression that deportation and forced labor were the worst things that were going to happen: Even from a historical perspective, the odds for the survivors did not seem too bad.

[2]In March 1942, the Nazi authorities in Riga decided the German ghetto was getting too crowded and organized a massacre which has come to be called the "Dünamünde Action".

(The word "action" was a euphemism employed by the Germans to describe mass shootings and later this was picked up by the ghetto inmates themselves.)

Despite the Germans only calling for 1,500 to be selected, Sunday March 15, 1942, saw about 1,900 Jews assembled in the streets of the ghetto, including, as with the Rumbula massacre, many parents with small children.

Instead the people were taken by motor transport to Biķernieki forest on the north side of Riga, where they were shot and buried in common unmarked graves.

The camp commander, Rudolf Seck, refused young people of working age permission to go with their parents.

[7] The method employed had been designed by the infamous mass murderer Friedrich Jeckeln and was called "sardine packing" (German: Sardinenpackung).

"[9]The killers forced the victims to lie face down on the trench floor, or more often, on the bodies of the people who had just been shot.