Liepaja fell to German forces on June 29, 1941, and the Kriegsmarine immediately took control of this strategic naval base. Within days, restrictions on Jews appeared in the local newspaper: mandatory yellow stars, limited shopping hours, prohibition from sidewalks when encountering German uniforms. The first mass killings came in early July when Einsatzgruppe A commander Franz Walter Stahlecker accused local Nazi official Erhard Grauel of not executing people fast enough. On July 8, 9, and 10, German and Latvian squads shot 100 people each day, nearly all Jews, transported from the Women's Prison in groups of twenty. A boatswain's mate named Schulz later testified that on a day in August 1941, he heard continuous rifle fire from across the harbor. He rowed over with a colleague and watched from a bunker as trucks brought victims to a trench, where squads shot them in the head.

The killings at Liepaja were not hidden. Scholars who studied the perpetrators later concluded that the public executions became "in many ways a festival," with German soldiers traveling considerable distances to secure the best viewing positions. This grim spectacle produced something unprecedented: documentary evidence. Reinhard Wiener, a German naval sergeant on leave, brought his 8mm camera to a July or August execution and filmed what he saw, noting "German soldiers standing as spectators all around." This footage, the only known surviving film of Einsatzgruppen mass executions, is today housed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and appears in countless documentaries. In December 1941, SS photographer Karl-Emil Strott captured the shootings at Skede beach. These became the most widely recognized images of the murder of Latvian Jews, showing women forced to undress before execution on the winter sand.

The December photographs might have vanished with their photographer if not for David Zivcon. Working as an electrician at the SD office in Liepaja, Zivcon discovered four rolls of film while repairing wiring in a German officer's apartment. He stole the film, had prints made, returned the originals before anyone noticed their absence, placed the prints in a metal box, and buried them. After the Germans retreated from Latvia, Zivcon retrieved his buried evidence. Those photographs would later appear in war crimes trials and museums around the world, forcing future generations to confront what had been done. The images show only Latvian collaborators as executioners, but German records, testimony, and Wiener's film establish the full chain of command that organized and ordered the murders.

By June 1942, when the Nazis established the Liepaja ghetto, only 814 Jews remained alive in the city. The ghetto consisted of just eleven houses on four streets, guarded by Latvians in black uniforms. Food was scarce, conditions brutal. On October 8, 1943, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, the survivors were loaded into cattle cars and transported to Riga. Only three Jews remained in Liepaja, kept barely alive because their skills as shoemakers and goldsmiths still served the occupiers. Justice came slowly and incompletely. Some perpetrators, like Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker, died before trial. Others, like Arajs Kommando leader Viktors Arajs, evaded capture for decades before finally facing conviction. In 1971, a West German court convicted seven participants in the Liepaja massacres, with sentences ranging from eighteen months to eight years. Memorials now stand at Skede beach and at Liepaja Central Cemetery, marking ground where thousands met their end.