Pogroms of this kind took place in many areas in the first few days of German occupation. Antisemitism in the Baltic states had been fuelled by the experience of Soviet occupation since the spring of 1940, under which native elites and nationalists had been persecuted, arrested, deported or killed. Stalin had encouraged the Russian and Jewish minorities to help build the new Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and two-thirds of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party were either Russian or Jewish in origin, though like all Communists, of course, they rejected their
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