Klooga Concentration Camp - Klooga KZ

Klooga KZ

During the German occupation, Estonia was part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, a German civilian administration that governed the Baltic states and western Belorussia. Over time of its operation, at any moment Klooga held between about 1,500 and 2,500 male and female prisoners. Prisoners included Soviet POW, Estonian political prisoners and Jews. Jews constituted a vast majority after large numbers of them 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. Some numbers of criminals and homosexuals 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.