Klooga concentration camp


 * This article deals with the Klooga concentration camp. For other meanings of the word Klooga see Klooga (disambiguation).

Klooga was a Nazi labor subcamp of the Vaivara concentration camp complex established in September 1943, during World War II, in German-occupied Estonia near the northern Estonian village of the same name. The Vaivara camp complex was commanded by German officers (Hans Aumeier, Otto Brennais, and Franz von Bodman) and consisted of some 20 field camps, some of which existed only for short periods. During the German occupation, Estonia was part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, a German civilian administration that governed the Baltic states and western Belorussia. Klooga held up to 3,000 male and female prisoners at any given time during its operation; the overwhelming majority were Jews who were forcibly relocated in August and September 1943 from the ghettos of Kovno and Vilna in Lithuania and Salaspils in Latvia; smaller numbers were from Estonia, Russia and Romania. Small numbers of political prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, and Soviet POWs (about 100) were also imprisoned in the camp.

The entire camp was enclosed by barbed wire. The men's and women's camps, which were separated by some 600 yards, had large two-story buildings for housing the prisoners. German SS units and members of the 287th Estonian Police battalion served as guards. Prisoners were forced to work in peat harvesting as well as in the camp cement works, sawmills, brickworks, and factory, which manufactured clogs for camp prisoners.

Conditions were extremely harsh. In the early years of the camp's operation, a group of some 75 prisoners began to organize resistance within Klooga; however, the frequent transfer of prisoners from camp to camp—both within Estonia and throughout Nazi-occupied territories—stymied the underground movement's ability to mount effective resistance.

When the Soviet army began its advance through Nazi-occupied Estonia in July and August 1944, the SS started to evacuate the camp. Many prisoners were sent west by sea to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig and to Freiburg in Germany. From September 19 to 23, 1944, guards surrounded the camp and began systematically slaughtering the remaining prisoners in a nearby forest. Approximately 2,000 were shot, then their bodies were stacked onto wooden pyres and burned. On September 28, 1944, when Soviet troops reached the Klooga camp, only 85 of the 2,400 prisoners remaining post-evacuation had managed to survive by hiding inside the camp or escaping into the surrounding forests. The liberation forces found numerous pyres of stacked corpses left unburned by the camp's guards when they fled.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aumeier, a German, who was Lagerkommandant (camp commander) for all Estonia, as well as having served at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald, was subsequently arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death in Kraków, Poland, and executed on December 22, 1947.

In May 2005, Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip gave a speech while visiting Klooga in which he both condemned the Holocaust and expressed sorrow that some Estonian citizens were complicit in committing war crimes during WWII:

"Although these murderers must answer for their crimes as individuals, the Estonian Government continues to do everything possible to expose these crimes. "I apologise for the fact that Estonian citizens could be found among those who participated in the murdering of people or assisted in the perpetration of these crimes".

In July 2005, Estonian President Arnold Rüütel, Israeli Ambassador Shemi Zur, and Holocaust survivors took part in an unveiling ceremony for a large gray marble memorial stone at the site of the former concentration camp. Later in the year Israeli President Moshe Katsav laid a wreath at the site of the camp deep in the Estonian forest while on a diplomatic tour of the Baltic countries.