The atrocity took place near a small village just around 40 kilometers west of Tallinn, where around 2,000 people, many of them women, were brutally murdered by Nazi forces in one of their last actions before fleeing the advancing Soviet army.

The event holds further significance as one of the first Nazi death camps to be photographed and documented, revealing the horrors of the Holocaust to the world.

Nazi occupation of Estonia starts

Estonia's prewar Jewish population was around 4,400. Although small, the Jewish community in Estonia experienced a relatively high level of tolerance and freedom to practice their religion during the First Republic, compared with many other European nations at that time.

However, the onset of World War Two dramatically changed the situation.

After an initial, brutal Soviet occupation, Estonia fell under Nazi German control in 1941, when it was incorporated into Reichskommissariat Ostland, along with Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Belarus.

By the end of 1941, approximately 3,000 Jews had fled Estonia, either because of Soviet deportations during the first Soviet occupation, or in fear of the German invasion before it started, and once it got underway.

This left about 1,000 Jews in Estonia, all of whom were arrested by the German occupation authorities.

In January 1942, Walter Stahlecker, the head of the Security Police and SD in Ostland, ordered their execution, declaring that Estonia should be "Judenrein" (free of Jews).

Despite this horrific goal, the Nazis later contradicted their own barren claims, as from September 1942 to 1944, an estimated 12,500 Jews were deported to Estonia from other Nazi-occupied territories.

Several concentration camps were established in Estonia to house these prisoners, most notably at Jägala and Kalevi-Liiva, just east of Tallinn, and the Vaivara concentration camp complex in Ida-Viru County.

Vaivara became the main hub, and many of its Jewish inmates, roughly 10,000 of them, were forced into slave labor in the region's shale oil industry.

Klooga concentration camp, located near the village of Klooga, was set up in September 1943 as a sub-camp of Vaivara and became the largest and longest-running camp in Estonia, lasting to the final days of the Nazi occupation.

The Klooga camp is established

Klooga camp housed around 2,000 inmates, while approximately 3,000 passed through its gates over time.

The camp mainly engaged in timber and concrete production.

The site had been turned into a sealed military area by the Soviets before 1941, with barbed wire fences and brick buildings where prisoners were housed.

The camp was commanded by Wilhelm Werle, an SS officer, while Hans Aumeier, previously in charge of Auschwitz, oversaw the Vaivara complex as a whole.

Though Klooga had a reputation for comparatively "better" conditions than other camps, life there remained brutal, with starvation rations – as outlined in Viktor Frankl's classic "Man's Search for Meaning" – were given to people expected to work 12 or more hours per day, year-round, outside and engaging in manual labor.

As Soviet forces drew closer to Estonia in the summer of 1944, things began to change as the Nazis began evacuating concentration camps in the region.

Over 3,000 Jews from Vaivara were sent to Stutthof concentration camp in present-day Poland.

However, at Klooga, the remaining prisoners faced a far worse fate. In September 1944, Nazi authorities decided to execute the remaining inmates rather than evacuate them.

The events of September 19, 1944

On September 17, 1944, Nazi personnel in Tallinn and Northwestern Estonia were given five days to leave, by their own authorities.

German armed forces fled south to Riga or west to the Estonian islands, while a special SS commando arrived in Klooga to carry out the executions. Estonian police battalions guarded the perimeter of the camp during the massacre, while SS personnel took up positions in a wider security cordon. On the morning of September 19, 1944, the prisoners were mustered as usual and told by Untersturmführer Wilhelm Werle that they would be evacuated – a complete falsehood since the decision had already been made to kill them.

By the afternoon, the mass execution began. Groups of 50 to 100 prisoners were marched to the forest clearings, where they were ordered to lie face down on the pyres before being executed, with a shot to the head.

In total, around 2,000 prisoners were killed during the massacre at Klooga. Only about 100 survived, mostly by hiding in attics or other concealed spaces.

The Soviet forces arrived at the camp just three days later, on September 22, 1944, but by then the massacre had already been carried out.

Klooga's legacy

Klooga was one of the first Holocaust sites to be documented in detail. Soviet authorities photographed the camp and brought foreign journalists to witness the atrocities. As a result, the horrors of the Holocaust in Estonia were quickly reported to the outside world.

In October 1944, a mass funeral for the victims was held, and in the late 1980s in the years leading up to Estonia becoming a free country again, Klooga survivors from Israel began visiting the site.

Only after Estonia regained independence in 1991 was the true history of the Klooga massacre fully acknowledged.

An estimated 7,000 to 8,000 Jews were killed in Estonia during the Nazi occupation, and over 4,600 others were sent to concentration camps in other countries, where most perished.

Of the Jews who had lived in Estonia before the war, only about 100 remained alive after the German retreat.

More information on the events of September 19, 1944, is available from the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory's site here.

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