Klooga concentration camp and Holocaust memorial
Memorial site

This memorial to the victims of the Holocaust is situated not far from the small borough of Klooga.

The first monument was erected here in 1951, but it essentially praised the Soviet ideology and did little to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. In 1994, the plaques on the monument were replaced with new ones at the request of the Jewish community in Estonia so as to do justice to the victims' ethnic roots. On the 50th anniversary of the mass murder perpetrated in Klooga, a monument to the Jews killed in Estonia from 1941-1944 was unveiled 100 metres from the first monument. In 2005, a third monument was unveiled commemorating the Jews who died or were killed in the concentration camp in Klooga.

The memorial was renovated in 2013 to tie the three monuments together, with the Estonian History Museum opening an outdoor exhibition here entitled ‘Klooga camp and the Holocaust’.

Klooga concentration camp was established by the German regime in September 1943. It was a forced-labour sub-camp of the Vaivara concentration camp complex in Estonia. On 19 September 1944, one of the largest mass murders in German-occupied Estonia was committed: all of the Jews at the camp (around 2000 in total) were killed as the Red Army approached.