The Holocaust in Estonia refers to Nazi crimes during the occupation of Estonia by Nazi Germany.
By the end of 1941 virtually all of the 950 to 1,000 Estonian Jews unable to escape Estonia before its Nazi occupation (25% of the total prewar Jewish population) were killed by German units such as Einsatzgruppe A and/or local collaborators. The Romani people in Estonia were also killed or enslaved by Nazi occupiers and their collaborators. [1]
The occupation authorities also killed around 6,000 ethnic Estonians and 1,000 ethnic Russians in Estonia, often claiming that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers, a categorization that also included relatives of alleged Communists. In addition around 15,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war and Jews from other parts of Europe were killed in Estonia during the German occupation. [2]
Prior to World War II, Jewish life flourished in Estonia with the more cultural autonomy than any other Jewish community in all of Europe.[ citation needed ] The local Jewish population had full control of education and other aspects of cultural life. [3] In 1936, the British-based Jewish newspaper The Jewish Chronicle reported that "Estonia is the only country in Eastern Europe where ... Jews are left in peace and are allowed to lead a free and unmolested life and fashion it in accord with their national and cultural principles." [4]
Round-ups and killings of the remaining Jews began immediately; the first stage of Generalplan Ost required the "removal" of 50% of Estonians. [5] : 54 The killings were undertaken by the extermination squad Einsatzkommando 1A ( Sonderkommando ) under Martin Sandberger, part of Einsatzgruppe A led by Walter Stahlecker, following the arrival of the first German troops on July 7, 1941. Arrests and executions continued as the Germans, with the assistance of local collaborators, advanced through Estonia, which became part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) was established for internal security under Ain-Ervin Mere in 1942. Estonia was declared Judenfrei quite early by the German occupation regime, at the Wannsee Conference. [6] The Jews who remained in Estonia (929 according to the most recent calculation [7] [ unreliable source? ]) were murdered. [8] Fewer than a dozen Estonian Jews are known to have survived the war in Estonia. [7]
The Estonian state archives contain death certificates and lists of Jews executed dated July, August, and early September 1941. For example, the official death certificate of Rubin Teitelbaum, born in Tapa on January 17, 1907, states laconically in a form with item 7 already printed with only the date left blank: "7. By a decision of the Sicherheitspolizei on September 4, 1941, condemned to death, with the decision being carried out the same day in Tallinn." Teitelbaum's crime was "being a Jew" and thus constituting a "threat to the public order".
On September 11, 1941 an article entitled "Juuditäht seljal" – "A Jewish Star on the Back" appeared in the Estonian mass-circulation newspaper Postimees . It stated that Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, the High Commissioner of Ostland, had issued ordinances requiring all Jewish residents of Ostland from that day on to wear a visible yellow six-pointed Star of David at least 10 cm (4 in). in diameter on the left side of their chest and back.
On the same day regulations [9] issued by the Sicherheitspolizei were delivered to all local police departments proclaiming that the Nuremberg Laws were in force in Ostland, defining who is a Jew, and what Jews could and could not do. Jews were prohibited from changing their place of residence, walking on the sidewalk, using any means of transportation, going to theatres, museums, cinema, or school. The professions of lawyer, physician, notary, banker, or real estate agent were declared closed to Jews, as was the occupation of street hawker. The regulations also declared that the property and homes of Jewish residents would be confiscated. The regulations emphasized that work to this end was to begin as soon as possible, and that police were to compiley lists of Jews, their addresses, and their property by September 20, 1941.
The regulations also provided for the establishment of a concentration camp near the south-eastern Estonian city of Tartu. A later decision provided for the construction of a Jewish ghetto near the town of Harku, but this was never built. A small concentration camp was built there instead. The national archives contain material pertinent to the cases of about 450 Estonian Jews. They were typically arrested at home or in the street, taken to the local police station, and charged with the 'crime' of being Jews. They were either shot outright or sent to concentration camps and shot later. An Estonian woman, described the arrest of her Jewish husband: [10]
... There were two men in our apartment from the Selbstschutz who said they were taking my husband to the police station. I ran after them and went to the chief officer and asked for permission to see my husband....On September 15 I went to the German Sicherheitspolizei on Tõnismägi in an attempt to get information about my husband. I was told he had been shot. I asked why, since he had not been a Communist but a businessman, The answer was: Aber er war doch ein Jude. ["But he was a Jew."].
The Nazis intended mass genocide after the German invasion of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Jews from countries outside the Baltics were deported there to be killed. [11] An estimated 10,000 Jews were killed in Estonia after having been deported to camps there from elsewhere in eastern Europe.[ citation needed ] The Nazi regime established 22 Nazi concentration camps in occupied Estonian territory for foreign Jews, where they were slave labor. The largest, Vaivara concentration camp, served as a transit camp and processed 20,000 Jews from Latvia and the Lithuanian ghettos.[ citation needed ] Usually able-bodied men were selected to work in the oil shale mines in northeastern Estonia. Women, children, and old people were killed on arrival.
At least two trainloads of Central European Jews were deported to Estonia and were killed on arrival at the Kalevi-Liiva site near Jägala concentration camp. [6]
According to testimony of the survivors, at least two transports with about 2,100–2,150 Central European Jews, [12] arrived at the railway station at Raasiku, one from Theresienstadt (Terezin) with Czechoslovakian Jews and one from Berlin with German citizens. Around 1,700–1,750 people were immediately taken to an execution site at the Kalevi-Liiva sand dunes and shot. [12] About 450 people were selected for work at the Jägala concentration camp. [12] [13]
Transport Be 1.9.1942 from Theresienstadt arrived at the Raasiku station on September 5, 1942, after a five-day trip. [14] [15] According to testimony given to Soviet authorities by Ralf Gerrets, one of the accused at the 1961 war crimes trials in USSR, eight busloads of Estonian auxiliary police had arrived from Tallinn. [15] The selection process was supervised by Ain-Ervin Mere, chief of Security Police in Estonia; those transportees not selected for slave labor were sent by bus to a killing site near the camp. Later the police, [15] in teams of 6 to 8 men, [12] killed the Jews by machine gun fire. During later investigations, however, some guards of camp denied the participation of police and said that executions were done by camp personnel. [12] On the first day, a total of 900 people were murdered in this way. [12] [15] Gerrets testifies that he had fired a pistol at a victim who was still making noises in the pile of bodies. [15] [16] The whole operation was directed by SS commanders Heinrich Bergmann and Julius Geese. [12] [15] Few witnesses pointed out Heinrich Bergmann as the key figure behind the extermination of Estonian gypsies. In the case of Be 1.9.1942, the only ones chosen for labor and to survive the war were a small group of young women who were taken through a series of concentration camps in Estonia, Poland and Germany to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated. [17] Camp commandant Laak used the women as sex slaves, killing many after they had outlived their usefulness. [13] [18]
A number of foreign witnesses were heard at the post-war trials in Soviet-occupied Estonia, including five women who had been transported on Be 1.9.1942 from Theresienstadt. [15]
According to witness testimony, the accused Mere, Gerrets and Viik actively participated in mass killings and other crimes that were perpetrated by the Nazi invaders in Estonia. In accordance with the Nazi racial theory, the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst were instructed to exterminate the Jews and Gypsies. To that end, during August and September of 1941, Mere and his collaborators set up a death camp at Jägala, 30 km (19 mi) from Tallinn. Mere put Aleksander Laak in charge of the camp; Ralf Gerrets was appointed his deputy. On 5 September 1942, a train with approximately 1,500 Czechoslovak citizens arrived at the Raasiku railway station. Mere, Laak and Gerrets personally selected who of them should be executed and who should be moved to the Jägala death camp. More than 1,000 people, mostly children, the old, and the infirm, were transported to a wasteland at Kalevi-Liiva, where they were executed in a special pit. In mid-September, the second troop train with 1,500 prisoners arrived at the railway station from Germany. Mere, Laak, and Gerrets selected another thousand victims, who were then condemned by them to extermination. This group of prisoners, which included nursing women and their newborn babies, were transported to Kalevi-Liiva where they were killed.
In March 1943, the personnel of the Kalevi-Liiva camp executed about fifty Romani people, half of whom were under 5 years of age. Also were executed 60 Roma children of school age... [19]
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A few witnesses pointed out Heinrich Bergmann as the key figure behind the extermination of Estonian Roma people. [17]
Units of the Eesti Omakaitse (Estonian Home Guard; approximately 1000 to 1200 men) were directly involved in criminal acts, taking part in the round-up of 200 Roma people and 950 Jews. [2]
The final acts of liquidating the camps, such as Klooga, which involved the mass-shooting of roughly 2,000 prisoners, was facilitated by members of the 287th Police Battalion. [2] Survivors report that, during these last days before liberation, when Jewish slave labourers were visible, the Estonian population in part attempted to help the Jews by providing food and other types of assistance. [2] [20]
Four Estonians deemed most responsible for the murders at Kalevi-Liiva were accused at the war crimes trials in 1961. Two were later executed, while the Soviet occupation authorities were unable to press charges against the other two due to the fact that they lived in exile. [21] There have been 7 known ethnic Estonians (Ralf Gerrets, Ain-Ervin Mere, Jaan Viik, Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas, Aleksander Laak and Ervin Viks) who have faced trials for crimes against humanity committed during the Nazi occupation in Estonia. The accused were charged with murdering up to 5,000 German and Czechoslovakian Jews and Romani people near the Kalevi-Liiva concentration camp in 1942–1943. Ain-Ervin Mere, commander of the Estonian Security Police (Group B of the Sicherheitspolizei) under the Estonian Self-Administration, was tried in absentia. Before the trial, Mere had been an active member of the Estonian community in England, contributing to Estonian-language publications. [22] At the time of the trial, however, he was being held in custody in England, having been accused of murder. He was never deported [23] and died a free man in England in 1969. Ralf Gerrets, the deputy commandant at the Jägala camp. Jaan Viik, (Jan Wijk, Ian Viik), a guard at the Jägala labor camp, out of the hundreds of Estonian camp guards and police, was singled out for prosecution due to his particular brutality. [19] Witnesses testified that he would throw small children into the air and shoot them. He did not deny the charge. [16] A fourth accused, camp commandant Aleksander Laak (Alexander Laak), was discovered living in Canada, but committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.
In January 1962, another trial was held in Tartu. Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas and Ervin Viks were accused of murdering 12,000 civilians in the Tartu concentration camp.
Soviet-Estonian era sources estimate the total number of Soviet citizens and foreigners to be murdered in Nazi-occupied Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic to be 125,000. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] The bulk of this number consists Jews from Central and Western Europe and Soviet prisoners-of-war killed or starved to death in prisoner-of-war camps on Estonian territory. [27] [28] The Estonian History Commission estimates the total number of victims to be roughly 35,000, consisting of the following groups: [2]
The number of Estonian Jews killed is less than 1,000; the German Holocaust perpetrators Martin Sandberger and Walter Stahlecker cite the numbers 921 and 963 respectively. In 1994 Evgenia Goorin-Loov calculated the exact number to be 929. [7]
Since the reestablishment of the Estonian independence, markers were put in place for the 60th anniversary of the mass executions that were carried out at the Lagedi, Vaivara and Klooga (Kalevi-Liiva) camps in September 1944. [29] On February 5, 1945 in Berlin, Ain Mere founded the Eesti Vabadusliit together with SS-Obersturmbannführer Harald Riipalu. [30] He was sentenced to the capital punishment during the Holocaust trials in Soviet Estonia but was not extradited by Great Britain and died there in peace. In 2002 the Government of the Republic of Estonia decided to officially commemorate the Holocaust. In the same year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center had provided the Estonian government with information on alleged Estonian war criminals, all former members of the 36th Estonian Police Battalion. In August 2018 it was reported that the memorial at Kalevi-Liiva was defaced. [31]
Klooga concentration camp was a Nazi forced labor subcamp of the Vaivara concentration camp complex established in September 1943 in Harju County, during World War II, in German-occupied Estonia near the village of Klooga. The Vaivara camp complex was commanded by German officers Hans Aumeier, Otto Brennais and Franz von Bodmann and consisted of 20 field camps, some of which existed only for short periods.
Klooga is a small borough in Lääne-Harju Parish in Harju County in northern Estonia. At the 2011 Census, the settlement's population was 1,203, of which the Estonians were 642 (53.4%).
The Kovno Ghetto was a ghetto established by Nazi Germany to hold the Lithuanian Jews of Kaunas (Kovno) during the Holocaust. At its peak, the ghetto held 29,000 people, most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps, or were shot at the Ninth Fort. About 500 Jews escaped from work details and directly from the ghetto, and joined Jewish and Soviet partisan forces in the distant forests of southeast Lithuania and Belarus.
In the course of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded Estonia in July–December 1941, and occupied the country until 1944. Estonia had gained independence in 1918 from the then-warring German and Russian Empires. However, in the wake of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union had invaded and occupied Estonia in June 1940, and the country was formally annexed into the USSR in August 1940.
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
The history of Jews in Estonia starts with reports of the presence of individual Jews in what is now Estonia from as early as the 14th century.
Ain Mere was an Estonian military officer in World War II. During the German occupation of Estonia, he served in the German-controlled Estonian Security Police and SD.
Vaivara was the largest of the 22 concentration and labor camps established in occupied Estonia by the Nazi regime during World War II. Some 20,000 Jewish prisoners passed through its gates, mostly from the Vilna and Kovno Ghettos, but also from Latvia, Poland, Hungary and the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Vaivara was one of the last camps established. It existed from August 1943 to February 1944.
A number of war crimes trials were held during the Soviet occupation of Estonia (1944–1991). The best-known trial was brought in 1961, by the Soviet authorities against local collaborators who had participated in the Holocaust during the German occupation (1941–1944). The accused were charged with murdering up to 5,000 German and Czechoslovakian Jews and Romani people near the Jägala concentration camp in 1942–1943. The public trial by the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR was held in the auditorium of the Navy Officers Club in Tallinn and attended by a mass audience. All three defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, one in absentia. The two defendants present for the trial were executed shortly after. The third defendant, Ain-Ervin Mere, was not available for execution.
Estonia declared neutrality at the outbreak of World War II (1939–1945), but the country was repeatedly contested, invaded and occupied, first by the Soviet Union in 1940, then by Nazi Germany in 1941, and ultimately reinvaded and reoccupied in 1944 by the Soviet Union.
Kalevi-Liiva are sand dunes in Jõelähtme Parish in Harju County, Estonia. The site is located near the Baltic coast, north of the Jägala village and the former Jägala concentration camp. It is best known as the execution site of at least 6,000 Jewish and Roma Holocaust victims.
Salaspils camp was established at the end of 1941 at a point 18 km (11 mi) southeast of Riga (Latvia), in Salaspils. The Nazi bureaucracy drew distinctions between different types of camps. Officially, it was the Salaspils Police Prison and Re-Education Through Labor Camp. It was also known as camp Kurtenhof after the German name for the city of Salaspils.
Herman Kruk was a Polish-Jewish librarian and Bundist activist who kept a diary recording his experiences in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II.
Jägala concentration camp was a labour camp of the Estonian Security Police and SD during the German occupation of Estonia during World War II. The camp was established in August 1942 on a former artillery range of the Estonian Army near the village of Jägala, Estonia. It existed from August 1942 to August 1943. Aleksander Laak, an Estonian, was appointed by SS-Sturmbannführer Ain-Ervin Mere of Group B of the Estonian Security Police to command the camp with Ralf Gerrets as assistant.
Aleksander (Alexander) Laak was a lieutenant and the commander of the Jägala concentration camp during the German occupation of Estonia.
Inge Sylten was a young Jewish girl from Czechoslovakia who was deported in a transport from Theresienstadt Ghetto to Estonia in September 1942. Heinz Drosihn was an SS-Unterscharführer and the commandant of Ereda concentration camp in Estonia. Their paths intersect in the camp, where they fell in love, were forced to flee, and subsequently were shot or committed suicide during their flight to Scandinavia. Their story was preserved mainly thanks to fellow inmates of Inge Sylten. The Czech filmmaker and researcher Lukáš Přibyl called their story "... Romeo and Juliet story in a concentration camp".
The massacre of Uus street was committed by German forces and local collaborators on 30 August 1941 in Tallinn, Estonia.
Patarei Prison, also known as Patarei Sea Fortress and Tallinn Central Prison, commonly known as The Battery (Patarei), is a building complex in Kalamaja district of Tallinn, Estonia. The premises cover approximately four hectares of a former sea fortress and prison, located on the shore of Tallinn Bay.
Jägala may refer to:
Wartime collaboration occurred in every country occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, including the Baltic states. The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were occupied by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, and were later occupied by Germany in the summer of 1941 and then incorporated, together with parts of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, into the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Collaborators with Germany participated in the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, as well as in the Holocaust, both in and outside of the Baltic states. This collaboration was done through formal Waffen-SS divisions and police battalions, as well as through spontaneous acts during the opening of the war.