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Estonia
Estonia is the northernmost and smallest of the Baltic states. Between 1940 and 1944, Estonia was occupied by the Soviets and then by the Germans. These occupations had a dramatic impact on Jews in Estonia.
Estonia is the northernmost and smallest of the Baltic states. Between the end of World War I and 1940, Estonia was an independent republic. In 1939, the Jewish population of Estonia numbered about 4,500, a tiny percentage of the country's population. Almost half the Estonian Jews lived in Tallinn, the capital city. The rest lived in other towns, such as Tartu, Valga, Parnu, Narva, Viljandi, Rakvere, Voru, and Nomme.
Soviet Occupation, 1940
The Soviet Union occupied Estonia in June 1940 and annexed the country in August of that year. Soviet authorities forced Jewish institutions to disband. At least half of Estonian Jewry left the country during this period.
German Occupation
In summer of 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis gradually occupied Estonia.
In summer of 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis gradually occupied Estonia. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and ethnic German collaborators played a significant role in killing Jews throughout eastern and southeastern Europe.
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: Mass execution site in Estonia, Mass execution site in Estonia, Deportation from the Kovno ghetto, Corpses of inmates at Klooga, Corpses of inmates from Klooga, Stacked corpses of victims at Klooga, Corpses of victims at the Klooga camp, Victims of the Klooga camp, Aron Tabrys
Site where members of Einsatzgruppe A and Estonian collaborators carried out a mass execution of Jews in September 1941. Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia, after September 1944.
Site where members of Einsatzgruppe A and Estonian collaborators carried out a mass execution of Jews in September 1941. Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia, after September 1944.
Corpses of inmates from the Klooga camp stacked for burning. Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp. Estonia, September 1944.
Corpses of inmates from the Klooga camp stacked for burning. Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp. Estonia, September 1944.
Soviet officials view stacked corpses of victims at the Klooga camp. Due to the rapid advance of Soviet forces, the Germans did not have time to burn the corpses. Klooga, Estonia, 1944.
Corpses of inmates discovered by Soviet troops at the Klooga forced-labor camp. Nazi guards and Estonian collaborators had executed the prisoners and then stacked the bodies for burning. Estonia, September 1944.
Aron was the second of six children born to Jewish parents in Vilna, a city known as a center of Jewish cultural life. He was called Arke by his friends and family. Aron's father supported his large family on the meager income of a chimney sweep.
1933-39: As a child Aron attended a Jewish day school, and then went on to attend a public secondary school. When he was 14 his father had an accident which rendered him blind, and Aron had to start working full-time to support the family. Aron belonged to an underground communist group because he saw communism as a way of combatting the antisemitism in Poland. Their life in Vilna was disrupted in fall 1939 when the Soviets occupied the city.
1940-45: The Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941. On September 6 that year Aron was forced into the Vilna ghetto for two years. Two weeks before the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, he was deported to a labor camp in Estonia. Over the next year he was transferred to six labor camps, and then for 9 months to the Dautmergen concentration camp in Bavaria. There were 1,000 people in a barn-like barracks. In the middle of the room was a pot-bellied stove where they would gather in the evening so that the lice which infested their bodies would die from the heat.
Aron survived life in the camps. He weighed 90 pounds when he was liberated in May 1945 on a transport from the Dachau concentration camp to the Alps. He emigrated to America in 1949.
During the German occupation, Estonia was included in the Reich Commissariat Ostland, a German civilian administration which included the Baltic states and western Belorussia. From early on, the Germans subjected Estonian Jews to harsh measures including confiscation of property and forcing them to wear yellow badges identifying them as Jews. These measures were only temporary as the Nazis prepared to murder all Estonian Jews. German SS and police units, together with Estonian auxiliaries, massacred the Jews of Estonia by the end of 1941. No ghettos were created in Estonia during the German occupation.
Starting in 1942, tens of thousands of Jews from other European countries were sent to forced-labor camps inside Estonia. The main camp was Vaivara. Jewish forced laborers built military defenses for the German army and mined shale oil. Thousands of foreign Jews were also murdered at Kalevi Liiva. With the advance of the Soviet army in the fall of 1944, the Nazis evacuated the Estonian camps, as well as other camps throughout the Baltics. Some Jews were transferred by sea to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Many thousands were forced on death marches along the Baltic coast.
Soviet Annexation, 1944
In September 1944 the Soviet Union once again annexed Estonia as one of its republics. Although Jews who had fled Estonia to relative safety within the Soviet Union returned after the war, virtually no Estonian Jews still in the country at the time of the German occupation had survived.
Estonian auxiliary forces assisted the German Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) in the mass killing of Jews and others during World War II. Ralf Gerrets and Jaan Viik were both members of the Estonian security police during the German occupation. This footage shows them during their trial, on charges of war crimes, in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Estonian Supreme Court found both guilty and sentenced them to death in 1961.
Credits:
US Holocaust Memorial Museum - Film & Video
Author(s):
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
Critical Thinking Questions
What pressures and motivations may have influenced officials and citizens to support measures to persecute and later deport some Jews in their country?
How did the events of World War II affect the fate of the Jews of Estonia?
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