Hugo Wittrock
Hugo Wittrock | |
|---|---|
| Mayor of Riga | |
| In office 1941 – September 1944 | |
| Preceded by | Arnolds Deglavs |
| Succeeded by | Arnolds Deglavs |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 7 July 1873 Laugu, Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire |
| Died | 25 August 1958 (aged 85) Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany |
Hugo Wittrock (7 July 1873 – 25 August 1958) was a
Baltic German merchant and political figure who served as Lord Mayor of Riga during the German occupation of Latvia
.
Biography
Wittrock was born in
Battle of Jugla in 1917, he took on an advisory role in urban affairs for the occupying authorities. After the war, he fled to Germany, but returned to Latvia to continue running his insurance company. He was president of the Riga Trade Association from 1931 to 1936, when he retired to Königsberg.[1]
In 1941, when the Germans invaded Latvia, he returned to Riga again and was appointed Mayor of the city at the behest of his son-in-law
NSDAP, thus making him the only area commissioner who was not a party member. During his tenure as mayor, Wittrock engaged in an aggressive Germanization campaign which included renaming streets and buildings after historical and contemporary German celebrities, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring. Under his direction, Riga became the center of the Nazi administration in the Baltic, and was characterized as an exclusively German city. Despite his status as mayor, however, he did not learn of the extermination of Jews within the city's ghetto until it had already taken place. He fled with the retreating German troops in September 1944 and returned to Germany, where he spent the remainder of his life.[2]
In 1950, Wittrock published a memoir, entitled An Eventful Life: Memoirs of a German Balt. He died following a traffic accident in Lübeck in August 1958.[3]
References
- ISBN 0547349629.
- ISBN 9780823226276.
- ISBN 978-0857456014.
