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Revision as of 01:33, 30 October 2005 by ExRat (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)This article deals with the Klooga concentration camp. For other meanings of the word Klooga see Klooga (disambiguation).
Klooga was a Nazi concentration labor subcamp of the Vaivara concentration camp established durng World War II in the summer of 1943 in the northern Estonian village of the same name.
Klooga held approximately 3,000 male and female prisoners at any given time during its operation; the overwhelming majority of which were Jews who were forcibly relocated in August and September of 1943 from the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos in Lithuania, Salaspils in Latvia, and smaller numbers from Russia and Romania. There were also smaller numbers of political prisoners, criminals, homosexuals, and approximately 100 Soviet POW's imprisoned in the camp.
The entire camp was enclosed by barbed wire, as was each large two-story buildings approximately 600 yards apart from one another that housed the male and female prisoners. Prisoners in Klooga were guarded by both the German SS and the Estonian SS, as well as the 287th Estonian police battalion. Prisoners in the camp were forced to work peat harvesting as well as in the camp cement works, sawmills, brickworks and in the camp factory that manufactured clogs for inmates of the camp.
Conditions in the camp were extremely harsh and in the early years of the camp a small group of approxiamtely 75 inmates began to mount a pisoner resistance movement from within Klooga. However, the underground movement but was unable to mount a fully effective resistance due to the frequency of transfers of the prisoners from camp to camp, both withing Estonia and throughout German occupied territories.
When the Soviet army began its advancement through Nazi occupied Estonia in July and August of 1944, many prisoners from Klooga were quickly transferred to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland and Freiburg in Germany. On September 19, 1944 German and Estonian SS soldiers surrounded the camp and began systematically slaughtering the remaining prisoners in a nearby forest. The prisoners were first shot and then laid onto wooden pyres and burned. On September 28, 1944 when Soviet troops liberated Klooga, only 85 of the 2,400 prisoners remaining at the camp had managed to survive by hiding within the camp or escaping into the surrounding forests.
In July of 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 former concentration camp and later in 2005 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.
Other Nazi concentration camps in Estonia
- Auvere
- Aseri
- Ereda
- Goldfields
- Idu-Virumaa
- Illinurme
- Jägala
- Jõhvi
- Kalevi-Liiva
- Kiviõli
- Kukruse
- Kunda
- Kuremäe
- Lagedi
- Narve
- Narva-Jõesuu
- Putki
- Saka
- Sonda
- Soski
- Vaivara
- Viivikonna
References
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust by Israel Gutman. Macmillan Publishing Group, 1990. ISBN 0-02-896090-4