Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 13:01, 10 June 2007

An Estonian war crimes trial was held in 1961 by Soviet authorities in the Soviet-occupied Estonia for Estonians who had collaborated in the execution of the Holocaust in Estonia. The accused were charged with murdering up to 5000 German Jews near the Kalevi-Liiva concentration camp in 1942. The public show trial by the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR was held in the Estonia Theatre and attended by a mass audience. All three defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, two of them were executed shortly after.

The accused

• Ain-Ervin Mere, commander of the Nazi occupation era Estonian Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei), was tried in absentia. Before the trial he was an active member of the Estonian community in England, contributing to Estonian language publications. At the time of the trial he was however held in captivity, accused of murder. He was never deported and died a free man in England in 1969.
• Ralf Gerrets, the deputy commandant at the Jagala/Kalevi-Liiva camp
• Jaan Viik, (Jan Wijk) was singled out for prosecution out of the hundreds of Estonian police for his particular brutality. He was testified as throwing small children into the air and shooting them. He did not deny the charge.
• A fourth accused, camp commandant, Alexander Laak was discovered in Canada but committed suicide in his garage.

The executions

The Jews from Theresienstadt and Berlin arrived at the railway station at Raasiku after a five day trip. According to testimony by one of the accussed, Gerretts, eight busloads of Estonian auxiliary police had arrived from Tallinn. A selection process was supervised by Ain Mere, chief of Sicherheitspolizei in Estonia; able bodied men were sent to work on the oil shale mines at Kalevi-Liiva. Women, children, and old people were sent by bus to an execution site near the camp. Later the police would execute the Jews by machine gun fire. On the first day a total of 900 people were murdered in this way. Gerrets told that he had fired a pistol at a victim who was still making noises in the pile of bodies.

The whole operation was carried out by Estonians. The only German present was Obersturmführer H. Bergmann.

References

• De dödsdömda vittnar Template:Sv icon
• Estonian policemen stand trial for war crimes - Video footage at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Extermination of the Gypsies in Estonia during World War II: Popular Images and Official Policies
• Jägala laager ja juutide hukkamine Kalevi-Liival - Eesti Päevaleht March 30, 2006 Template:Et icon
• Omakaitse omakohus - JERUUSALEMMA SÕNUMID Template:Et icon

External links

• The Holocaust and the concentration camps in Estonia Template:De icon English translation

This Estonia-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

This article related to Nazi Germany is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Estonia stubs
• Nazi Germany stubs
• Holocaust in Estonia
• Nazi concentration camp major trials