Salaspils concentration camp Salaspils concentration camp was established at the end of 1941 at a point 18 km southeast of Riga ( Latvia ) . The Nazi bureaucracy drew distinctions between different types of camps . Officially , Salaspils was a Police Prison and Work Education Camp ( " Polizeigegfängnis und Arbeitserziehungslager " ) . It was also known as camp Kurtenhof after the German name for the city of Salaspils . Planning for the development of the camp and its prisoner structure changed several times . In 1943 , Heinrich Himmler briefly considered converting the camp into an official concentration camp ( Konzentrationslager ) , which would have formally subordinated the camp to the National Security Main Office ( " Reichssicherheitshauptamt " or RSHA ) , but nothing came of this . Original plan . In October 1941 , SS - Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange began planning a detention camp to be built at Salaspils to confine people arrested in Latvia by the police and also to house Jewish people deported from Germany and other countries to Latvia . Lange , who originally was the coordinator of Special Assignment Group A ( " Einsatzgruppe A " ) , a mobile squad of killers , started a new job in December 1941 as commander of both the security police ( " Sicherheitspolizei " ) in Latvia and also of the Security Service ( " Sicherheitsdient " ) . The place selected , near the city of Salaspils , was readily accessible from the main railway connecting Riga and Daugavpils , the two largest cities in Latvia . The plan was to work the prisoners harvesting peat and also , as part of what soon became known as the Final Solution , to separate Jewish men from Jewish women to prevent them from having children . In February 1942 Lange , probably because of his deeds in Latvia , became a participant in the Wannsee Conference where the final plans for the murder of the Jews of Europe were established by the Nazi hierarchy . Camp construction and changes of plan . The first rail transport of German Jews arrived unexpectedly in Latvia in October 1941 before the Salaspils camp was complete . The train had been rerouted from its original destination of Minsk to Riga . The Jewish people on the train were housed temporarily in Jungfernhof concentration camp ( " KZ Jungfernhof " ) or a little later in a Nazi - delineated part of Riga which later became known as the Riga Ghetto . The camp site was prepared in October 1941 by Soviet prisoners of war from the Salaspils branch camp Stalag 350 / Z of the Riga of base camp 350 and by deported Czech Jews as well as few German Jews from KZ Jungfernhof . In the middle of January 1942 at least 1 , 000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto were forced to work building the camp . Insufficient accommodation and sanitary conditions , lack of nutrition and severe cold weather caused an extraordinarily high number of deaths . The Nazis had planned to deport the last remaining Jews from Germany by the end of the summer of 1942 . To support this , the plans for the Salaspils camp were revised in an effort to allow the camp to accommodate 15 , 000 Jews deported from Germany . The camp by then played three roles , general police prison , later the security police prisoner camp , and then a forced labor camp . However the last expansion plan was not carried out . In the autumn of 1942 the camp comprised 15 barracks of the 45 that were planned , housing 1 , 800 prisoners . Although a police prison and work education camp , Salaspils became comparable to a German concentration camp in the way the work was organized , the types of prisoners , as well as their treatment , as they recounted later . By the end of 1942 the Salaspils camp held mainly political prisoners ( who had originally been incarcerated at the Riga central prison without due process under " protective custody orders " ) and interned foreigners such as Latvian returnees from Russia , whom the Nazis considered politically suspect . Furthermore work education prisoners and recruits to local Latvian collaboration units ( " Schutzmannschaften " ) who had committed routine crimes . There were in the camp only twelve Jews ; many had died or been returned to Riga in weak condition . Children in Salaspils . Typhoid fever , measles and other diseases killed about half of the children at the camp . In one of the burial places by the camp , 632 corpses of children of ages 5 to 9 were revealed . Numbers of victims . About 12 , 000 prisoners went through the camp during its existence . In addition to the German Jews who perished during the construction phase about 2 , 000 to 3 , 000 people died here due to illness , heavy labour , inhuman treatment , epidemy , etc . Later history . Starting in 1949 legal proceedings were brought against some of the persons responsible for the Nazi crimes in Latvia , including the Riga Ghetto , and the Jungfernhof and Salaspils concentration camps . Some accused were condemned to life imprisonment . Gerhard Kurt Maywald is one such nazi , convicted of crimes committed in the camp . In 1967 a memorial was established in Salaspils , which included an exhibit room , several sculptures and a large marble block . During the time of the Soviet Union , the Russian group “ Singing Guitars ” ( ) had dedicated a song “ Salaspils ” to the children ' s camp .