For the best part of three years, Friedrich Karl Vialon was one of the archetypal “writing-desk murderers” who kept the bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust ticking over.
Deployed to Nazi-occupied Riga in 1942, his job was to strip the Baltic states of every asset his staff could lay their hands on: jewellery, boots, winter coats, musical instruments, de facto slaves and gold fillings stripped from the mouths of executed Jews, one of which was reimplanted into the mouth of one of his secretaries.
Vialon performed this task with grim thoroughness, raising the number of Jewish forced labourers in the region from 6,000 to 13,800 and personally supervising the confiscation of belongings at house raids and the nearby SS concentration camp at Salaspils.
