Kalevi-Liiva

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Coordinates: 59 ° 28 ′ 48 ″  N , 25 ° 15 ′ 0 ″  O Kalevi-Liiva is a sand and forest area in today's village of Jägala, Jõelähtme municipality, Harju county / Estonia . In 1942/1943, the German occupying forces murdered hundreds of Jews , Sinti and Roma in Kalevi-Liiva.

German occupation

Estonia was occupied by Germany from 1941 to 1944 . The Holocaust thus also reached the Baltic States . According to estimates, around three quarters of Estonian Jews were able to flee to Finland or the Soviet Union before the approaching German troops . Those who remained were probably murdered by the Germans by December 1941 at the latest.

Mass shootings

During the siege of Leningrad by the Wehrmacht , a labor shortage became noticeable in Estonia. There was a particularly shortage of workers for road and railroad construction and for the exploitation of oil shale in the northeast of the country. Since late summer 1942 at the latest, Jewish prisoners have been brought to Estonia as potential forced laborers in so-called “Jewish transports” .

On September 5, 1942, a forced transport of around 2,100 Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto reached the Raasiku train station after a five-day journey . The destination of the transport was actually Riga . Since the ghetto there was supposedly overcrowded, the train was diverted to Estonia. The selection took place at the train station . The men, women and children who were not eligible for work had to sit in buses and were driven to Kalevi-Liiva. There they were forced to undress and hand in all valuables. Up to 1,600 of them were on arrival in Kalevi-Liiva shot and previously excavated mass graves buried. The others had to set up the Jägala / Kalevi-Liiva camp nearby.

The same fate met a similar forced transport with around 1250 people, who arrived at the Jägala camp a few days later from Berlin . In the months that followed, sick and weak workers and other prisoners were shot dead in Kalevi-Liiva.

Probably between 2000 and 5000 people were murdered in Kalevi-Liiva from September 1942 to late summer 1943, although the exact number of victims can no longer be determined. Most of the murdered were probably Jews from Germany, Austria , Czechoslovakia and Poland . There were also Sinti, Roma and other people among the victims.

Closure of the warehouse

The Jägala camp was closed in September 1943. The prisoners were either transferred to Tallinn Central Prison or previously executed. Only a small group of women survived the war .

process

From March 6th to 11th, 1961, the trial of two Estonian collaborators who had participated in the shootings in Kalevi-Liiva took place before the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR : Ralf Gerretz had been the deputy commander of the Jägala concentration camp, Jaan , from the summer of 1942 (Johannes) Viik worked as a security guard in the Jägala concentration camp. Viik and Gerretz were sentenced to death and executed shortly after the trial.

Against Ain-Ervin Mere (1903-1969), the head of the security police in Estonia, the trial took place in absentia, since he had not been extradited from Great Britain to the Soviet Union . The fourth accused, Aleksander Laak (1907–1960), head of the Jägala concentration camp, was tracked down by journalists in Canada, but was found hanged in his garage.

memory

A memorial stone was erected in Kalevi-Liiva in 1961 to commemorate the mass murders . With a decree of the Estonian Minister of Culture of June 1, 1995, Kalevi-Liiva was placed under the special protection of the Estonian state as a place of killing and mass grave for the victims. In May 2002, the embassies of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, in cooperation with the Estonian Jewish community, erected a memorial and information board at the location of the shootings.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Raasika , short report of the portal Deportál, online at: shoah.deportal.cz / ...

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