Hinrich Lohse (1896–1964), third from the right, at the railway station in Riga, German-occupied Latvia. The date of the photograph is not known. In 1941, Lohse issued the infamous ‘Christmas Eve Decree’ in his function as Reichskommissar Ostland, whose headquarters were located in the former Latvian capital. In it, he determined that ‘the Gypsies wandering around the country’ should now be ‘treated as Jews’. This order led to numerous murders of Roma in the Baltic states.
After 1945, Lohse was initially held in British internment, sentenced to ten years in prison and deprivation of property in 1947, but was released at the beginning of 1951 as ‘permanently unfit for detention’. Four further investigations in the 1950s and 1960s were discontinued.
