International conference marks 75th anniversary of Klooga massacre
Wednesday marked the 75th anniversary of the Klooga concentration camp massacre, part of the holocaust, in which around 2,000 Jewish people were killed. The event was marked by a conference at Patarei prison in Tallinn, with opening remarks by foreign minister Urmas Reinsalu.
Klooga was a sub-camp of Vaivara concentration camp complex, established Estonia in 1943 by occupying Nazi German forces, a force labor camp where inmates, predominantly Jews from the Vilna (Vilnius) and Kovno (Kaunas) ghettos in Lithuania and also from locations further afield in Europe, were sent.
Ahead of advancing Red Army troops, SS personnel massacred around 2,000 inmates in a single day, during the course of the evacuation of the camp during Sept. 19-22 1944.
Many other inmates were transported to concentration camps in present-day Poland.
A memorial dedicated to those who died was unveiled in 1994.
Speakers at Wednesday's conference also included Alla Jakobson, lawyer and chair of the Jewish Community of Estonia, and Michael Tal from the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Center in Israel, as well as Meelis Maripuu of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory and foreign minister Reinsalu.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
