Asides

The website is based on the following sources:

Texts and illustrations of the open air exhibition of the Estonian History Museum The Klooga camp and the holocaust

Webpage of the Estonian History Museum https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/exhibitions-elsewhere/klooga-laager-ja-holokaust

Olev Liivik. “Establishment and Evolution of the Klooga Holocaust Memorial”  – Methodical Materials “Holocaust Commemoration in the Baltics”, Riga 2016 https://www.lu.lv/fileadmin/user_upload/lu_portal/projekti/jsc/publikacijas/METHODICAL_MATERIALS.pdf

OTHER LINKS

https://holocaustremembrance.com/news-archive/conference-estonia-beginning-end-massacre-klooga-75

The Holocaust memorial in Klooga underwent extensive restoration in 2013 before the Estonian History Museum outdoor exhibition The Klooga camp and the Holocaust was opened to visitors. The open air exhibition was prepared in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Estonia and the Jewish Community of Estonia. The exhibition provides an overview of the Holocaust in Estonia and elsewhere in Europe, as well as of the Klooga concentration camp, the mass murder of 19 September 1944 and the commemoration of the victims. The huge concrete blocks bearing the exhibition texts (in Estonian, English and Russian) symbolise the Klooga concentration camp – the prisoners manufactured, among other things, concrete elements for the military industry of Nazi-Germany. The authors of the architectural part of the exhibition areMari Rass and Diana Taalfeld. A number of concrete blocks, which are merged with the landscape, are tied into a whole by individual monuments erected at different times, creating a modern, architecturally diverse and visitor-friendly environment.

Curator: Olev Liivik
Consultants: Ruth Bettina Birn, Tõnis Liibek, Meelis Maripuu
Language editor: Hille Saluäär
Translation into English and Russian: Refiner Translations OÜ
English language editor: Ruth Bettina Birn
Russian language editor: Einar Värä
Architectural design: Mari Rass, Diana Taalfeld, Jüri Rass (EA Reng AS)
Graphic design: AKU
Construction works: KRTL OÜ / Lemminkäinen Eesti AS
Project managers: Sirje Karis, Heinu Klaas, Inge Laurik-Teder

The first memorial service for the victims of the Klooga massacre was held on 7 October 1944. The remains of the victims were buried in two mass graves in the vicinity of the pyres. The gravesite was surrounded by a stone wall and a tombstone with the epitaph “To the Everlasting Memory of the Victims of Fascism” was erected in 1951. The tombstone was fitted with commemorating plaques execrating the perpetrators, who were called ‘fascist murderers’ and ‘enemies of the Soviet people’, while the victims were referred to as ‘Soviet citizens’.

The Klooga monument was one of the first in Soviet Estonia commemorating the victims of fascism. Official memorial meetings were held at the site several times a year. The Holocaust was mentioned neither there nor elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The survivors and relatives of those who had perished in the Klooga camp were neither invited nor welcome to participate in those meetings. A group of former Klooga prisoners from Israel visited the site for the first time in May of 1989. Talk began of the need for a monument to the victims of the Holocaust, since the one erected in 1951 carried a message of Soviet ideology instead of commemorating the Holocaust victims. In 1994, shortly after the restoration of Estonia’s independence, the plaques on the monument were replaced at the request of the Jewish community in Estonia to restore the truth about the nationality of the victims. The Soviet red star at the top of the monument was removed in 1994 and replaced by the Star of David in 2013.  

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Klooga mass murder, a monument to all Jews murdered in Estonia in 1941–1944 was erected about a hundred meters from the existing tombstone. This was the first memorial in Estonia to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. A third monument was erected in Klooga in 2005 to commemorate all Jews who were killed or died in the Klooga concentration camp. The memorial is located approximately a couple of hundred of meters to the south of the prior monument to the victims of the Holocaust.

After killing the prisoners and burning the bodies, the camp leadership left Klooga for Paldiski harbour to be evacuated to Germany late on the night of 19 September 1944. The camp guards were removed on the night of 20 September and the Estonian guard company also left. Most of the Jews who had escaped the killing hid for days in the camp’s barracks, being too afraid to go outside during the day. The stench from the burning bodies spread far and this brought the first witnesses to the site. News of the mass murders spread among the local population and among war refugees fleeing to the west coast of Estonia ahead of the advancing front. Many refugees took this terrible memory with them to the free world.

The Red Army first arrived in Klooga on 22 September 1944. The Soviet authorities formed an extraordinary state commission of the Estonian SSR led by the People’s Commissar of Justice Aleksander Jõeäär to investigate the event. Already by the end of September, an inquiry into the Klooga mass murder had begun. The commission found much evidence. Some of the bodies had not completely burned on the pyres. The other murder site, the half-built building, had been razed to its foundations. A lot of bones and human remains were found there, but because of the fire it was impossible to determine the precise number of victims. The extraordinary commission was able to identify the remains of 491 bodies from all the execution sites. The inquiry established that the number of victims could have between 1,800 and 2,000.

Klooga concentration camp was among the first sites in the world where the horrors of the Holocaust were documented. The Soviet authorities brought a hand-picked group of selected foreign journalists to the site and as a result photographs of Klooga reached the Western world.

A funeral ceremony for the victims of the mass murder was held on 7 October 1944. German POWs were forced to dig two long, deep graves in the sandy hill near the burned pyres, and the bodies were gathered together and buried there. The site of the grave was surrounded by a stone wall, and in 1951, a memorial stone was erected there (architect: Ants Mellik).

The horror of what happened was described in detail in the Soviet media in late 1944 and early 1945, and on many occasions after the war. From the very beginning, for ideological reasons, it was not mentioned that the camp inmates were Jews. The victims were called anonymous “Soviet citizens”, but in fact, most of them had never been citizens of the Soviet Union.

On 17 September 1944, it became known that the departure of the German forces from mainland Estonia was imminent. The personnel working in the occupation administration in Tallinn and north-west Estonia were given five days to evacuate from Tallinn or Paldiski harbours. The armed forces were ordered to retreat marching south towards Riga or over the Moonsund straits to the western Estonian islands.

In Klooga, on 19 September 1944 at 5 am, the prisoners were assembled as usual outside the women’s barracks. The camp commandant SS-Untersturmführer Werle announced to the approximately 2,000 inmates that they were to be evacuated to Germany. But in fact the ships were already full and the decision to kill the Jews had been made. It is not known who decided the execution.

After a few hours, 300 of the strongest male prisoners were selected, supposedly to carry out the evacuation. They were forced to carry logs to a clearing in the forest roughly one kilometre from the camp, where four pyres, each measuring 6 x 6.5 metres, were prepared for burning the bodies.

To maintain a sense of calm, the daily routine was adhered to and at lunchtime the prisoners waiting in the assembly area were given soup. Meanwhile, camp security was strengthened. The gates were blocked with trucks and everywhere the movement of soldiers was apparent. After lunch six strong men were chosen to load two barrels of fuel onto the trucks. This was probably later poured over the dead bodies.

The mass execution of the Jews began at 5 pm. The victims were marched under guard in groups of 50 to 100. First the men, then the women were taken from the camp to the clearing and ordered to lie face down on the pyres. They were killed by a shot in the back of the head. Those who attempted to escape were shot and died in the forest. The bodies covered the length of the pyre tightly packed together. When the first level was filled with bodies, logs were laid over them forming the next layer. There were three to four layers altogether. Three of the prepared pyres were used, while the fourth remained unused. When it got dark the pyres were lit.

A small number of prisoners were killed only a few hundred metres from the centre of the concentration camp in a half-built wooden building. About 30 to 50 people were brought to the building, dragged inside one-by-one, forced to the floor and shot in the back of the head. Late that night the building, with the bodies inside, was burned to the ground.

Last of all, camp inmates who performed specific functions – hairdressers, cooks, shoemakers and others, a total of 79 people – were killed on the ground floor of the women’s barracks. It is believed that Estonian or Russian prisoners were among them, but conclusive information about this is unavailable. Several dozen prisoners managed to hide, mostly in the attic of the men’s block, and survived. According to Soviet sources of the time, a total of 108 prisoners survived the mass murder.

The killing of the Jews was organised and supervised by German senior camp personnel, but a special commando of German SS-members arrived from Tallinn to carry out the shooting itself. The 3rd Company of the 287th Police Battalion, formed of Estonians, guarded the perimeter of the camp during the mass murder. In addition, camp security was strengthened with the help of a few dozen men of the 20th Waffen-SS Estonian Reserve and Training Regiment, who were stationed nearby.

The first prisoners were brought to Klooga between September and November of 1943. The camp was originally intended for approximately 2,000 prisoners and throughout its operation the number of inmates remained relatively stable at 1,800 to 2,100. The relocation of prisoners from one camp to another within the Vaivara camp system was constant. In total close to 3,000 Jews may have passed through the Klooga camp. Most of them came from the ghettoes of Vilnius and Kaunas, and to a lesser extent from Latvia. More women than men passed through the camp.

Unlike other sub-camps in the Vaivara network, the Klooga camp had brick buildings with separate quarters for men and women, and there was running water. The inmates had their own hospital with doctors, who were themselves prisoners. This made living conditions, especially during the winter months, slightly better than in the other camps, where prisoners lived in temporary barracks. Therefore, word spread among the other camps, whose inmates worked in the oil shale mines and industry, that Klooga was a relatively “good” camp.

On the camp grounds was a sawmill, a concrete factory and a number of various workshops. About 200 metres from the workshops stood a separate barracks for POWs, surrounded by barbed wire. The inmates were under the command of the Organisation “Todt”. They worked in the sawmill and produced concrete submarine signal mines for the navy.

For prisoners, the day began at 5 am, when they lined up in the square outside the women’s block. The working day began at 6 am and lasted until 6 pm, with a one-hour lunch break. The Jews were formed into groups of 100. Each group was assigned a foreman by the Germans.

The supply of food was poor. Breakfast consisted of coffee; during the day they were allowed 350g of bread and German margarine; for lunch they had one litre of groat soup and once a week they were given 25g sugar or marmalade. The 12-hour workday was more than the under-nourished prisoners could bear. In some cases they worked alongside wage-earning Estonians, which provided contact with the local population. Due to this, it is known that on many occasions, according to their means and despite the difficult wartime conditions, locals tried to help the Jews with food and by making contact with friends and relatives of the prisoners who were in other camps