Klooga
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-Gutman-350x250.jpg)
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-YadVashem1-350x245.jpg)
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-YadVashem2-350x243.jpg)
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-YadVashem3-350x240.jpg)
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-KleeDressen-350x232.jpg)
![Klooga Camp, staged corpse-cremation pyre](https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Klooga-StGeorge-350x182.jpg)
The Klooga Labor Camp was a satellite camp of the Vaivara Camp in northern Estonia. It was set up in the summer of 1943, and at its peak housed up to 3,000 Jewish men and women, mainly from the Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos. Toward the end of the German rule in this area, most inmates were transferred to the Stutthof Camp near Danzig.
In late September 1944, the Soviets captured the camp. Interrogating 85 inmates who the Germans had left behind, they concluded that, during the last days of their reign, the Germans had shot some 2,400 inmates, most of them Jews, plus 100 Soviet PoWs. Not having enough time to bury the slain, the Germans presumably prepared large pyres to burn them, but for some reason did not find the time to light the pyres.
In order to document this atrocity, the Soviets took several photos showing piled-up tree trunks with people on and in between them. In total, these photos show maybe a few dozen people on pyres, but certainly nowhere near 2,400.
Note that none of these pyres had been lit, indeed. All people on them are perfectly dressed; they all lie straight and face down; many are wearing caps; and some have put their hats/caps between their faces and the log below, evidently as padding, so they would not get hurt by the rough wood underneath. Had these been massacred persons, their clothes would be ragged; they would lie randomly face up, face down, twisted and contorted; none of them would wear caps; and most certainly none of them would use their hats as padding to make themselves comfortable. Moreover, these victims are said to have been killed more than a week earlier. Had that been the case, they would by now be massively bloated due to decomposition gases forming subcutaneously.
In other words: these are staged images. The real reason why these pyres weren’t lit is because they are fake pyres with living people on them staging a scene. This proves incontrovertibly that the Germans did not commit any massacre at Klooga. Had they done it, the Soviets would have found traces of it: 2,400 bodies either lying around or buried, or dozens of partly or completely burned pyres with hundreds of partly burned corpses in each. None of this was found.
These fake propaganda images can be found in orthodox publications to this day as evidence for these mendacious Soviet propaganda claims. (See for example St. George 1967, pp. 64f.; Klee/Dressen 1988, p. 158; and Gutman’s 1990 Encyclopedia, p. 807.)
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