The occupying German forces were initially well-received by many of the civilians in Riga. From June 1940 to June 1941, the Soviet regime in Latvia had carried out a reign of terror against "anti-Soviet" elements. In Riga alone, thousands of men, women and children were arrested, with a majority never to be seen alive again. Consequently, much of the population perceived German occupation as the lesser evil. Additionally, the Soviet regime's extensive list for purges included a disproportionate number of Jews in professions that are perceived as potentially "anti-Soviet" - rabbis, intellectuals, labor organizers and Zionist organizers, liberals and social democrats, and urban professionals and merchants. The June 1941 wave of deportations, which had been concluded only three weeks before the German invasion, sent approximately 5,000-6,000 Latvian Jews to Siberian gulags, including virtually the entire Jewish civic leadership. At the time of the German invasion, the surviving Jewish community in Latvia was in a state of shock and disarray; unlike many of the other Jewish communities that came under Nazi rule in WWII, there was no plan or systematic effort in Latvia to warn the population of the existentialist threat from the Nazis.