Mrs. Marathon Pundit and Little Marathon Pundit traveled to
Latvia last month. Last week I wrote about their visit to a
German World War I cemetery in her hometown of Sece. Today we
move on to the Second World War. The largest civilian German
concentration camp in the Baltic States was Salaspils, although
Nazi officials classified it as a work camp. Estimates of the
number of people who died here vary widely--as few as 2,000 or
as high as 100,000. Since the retreating Germans felt compelled
to burn down the camp in 1944, I feel comfortable in dismissing
the lower figure. Adjacent to the concentration camp was a Nazi
prisoner of war camp where Soviet officials said 43,000 Red Army
soldiers died of disease or starvation. Salaspils was built by
Jewish slave laborers in 1941, but no Jews were held there. The
inmates consisted mostly of political prisoners from the Baltic
States. Some Soviet POWs also toiled in the construction of the
camp. At the entrance of the camp. The caption reads, "Behind
this gate the Eart