On this day in 1941, the second day of mass murder, carried out by the Nazi German Einsatzgruppe A (SS death squads) and local Latvian collaborators, befell the Jews stuck in Riga, Latvia. In two separate incidents, one on November 30 and the second on December 8, about 25,000 Jews were massacred in and around the Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia. By mid-November 1941, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler ordered the total liquidation of the Riga Ghetto, aside from men who could help the German war effort as slave laborers. On November 29, 1941, the Nazi Protective Police told the Latvian police that the Jews in the Riga Ghetto would be resettled and thus would need to be moved to the Rumbula station. The Aktion (activity) began on November 30, 1941, with the marching of all of the Jews. Able-bodied Jewish men had already been separated from the women, children, and elderly who were left in the main ghetto. Germans and Latvians began pulling people into the march towards Rumbula. Between 600 and 1,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto streets in the process of forcing them out. People were forced to remove their clothing and leave their valuables in one location. They were then forced to the pits organized in single file lines and forced to lay down on top of the previously shot victims. By the end of the day, about 13,000 Jews had been shot but not all had been killed; some survived the shootings and managed to crawl out of the pit at night. Hundreds of others who were wounded died under the weight of other bodies in the pits. Orders were given that any survivors needed to be immediately shot. Since not all of Riga’s Jews had been killed on November 29 and 30, December 8 was chosen as the day that the job would be finished. Nearly all of the 12,000 who marched out on that cold December day were murdered in the same brutal way and in the same place as those on November 30.The following day, on December 9, the Nazis went to the small ghetto to search for any Jews that were not in the group of able-bodied men working as slaves. About 500 Jews were found, taken to the Bikernieki forest, and murdered in the mass graves. All in all, about 30,000 Jews were massacred in those four days of 1941.