The Holocaust in Estonia refers to the Nazi crimes during the 1941-1944 occupation of Estonia by Nazi Germany.
Prior to the war, there were approximately 4,300 Estonian Jews. During the 1940-1941 Soviet occupation of Estonia, about 10% of the Jewish population was deported to Siberia, along with other Estonians. Following the Axis invasion in 1941, approximately 75% of Estonian Jews, aware of the fate that awaited them from Nazi Germany, fled eastward into Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union. Virtually all of those Jews who remained (between 950 and 1,000 people) were murdered by German units such as Einsatzgruppe A and/or local collaborators before the end of 1941. The Romani people in Estonia were also murdered and enslaved by the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators.
The Nazi German occupation authorities also killed around 6,000 ethnic Estonians and 1,000 ethnic Russians in Estonia, either on the basis that they were communists or communist sympathizers. In addition around 15,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war and Jews from other parts of Europe were killed in Estonia during the German occupation.
Jewish life pre-Holocaust
Prior to World War II, Jewish life flourished in Estonia with the level of cultural autonomy accorded being the most extensive in all of Europe, giving full control of education and other aspects of cultural life to the local Jewish population. In 1936, the British-based Jewish newspaper The Jewish Chronicle reported that "Estonia is the only country in Eastern Europe where neither the Government nor the people practice any discrimination against Jews and where Jews are left in peace and are allowed to lead a free and unmolested life and fashion it in accord with their national and cultural principles."
Murder of Jewish population
Round-ups and murders of the remaining Jews began immediately as the first stage of Generalplan Ost which would require the "removal" of 50% of Estonians. Undertaken by the extermination squad Einsatzkommando (Sonderkommando) 1A under Martin Sandberger, part of Einsatzgruppe A led by Walter Stahlecker, who followed the arrival of the first German troops on July 7, 1941. Arrests and executions continued as the Germans, with the assistance of local collaborators, advanced through Estonia. Estonia became a part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. A Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) was established for internal security under the leadership of Ain-Ervin Mere in 1942. Estonia was declared Judenfrei quite early by the German occupation regime at the Wannsee Conference. The Jews who had remained in Estonia (929 according to the most recent calculation) were murdered. Fewer than a dozen Estonian Jews are known to have survived the war in Estonia.
German policy toward the Jews in Estonia
The Estonian state archives contain death certificates and lists of Jews shot dated July, August, and early September 1941. For example, the official death certificate of Rubin Teitelbaum, born in Tapa on January 17, 1907, states laconically in a form with item 7 already printed with only the date left blank: "7. By a decision of the Sicherheitspolizei on September 4, 1941, condemned to death, with the decision being carried out the same day in Tallinn." Teitelbaum's crime was "being a Jew" and thus constituting a "threat to the public order".
On September 11, 1941 an article entitled "Juuditäht seljal" – "A Jewish Star on the Back" appeared in the Estonian mass-circulation newspaper Postimees. It stated that Dr. Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, the High Commissioner of Ostland, had proclaimed ordinances in accordance with which all Jewish residents of Ostland from that day onward had to wear visible yellow six-pointed Star of David at least . in diameter on the left side of their chest and back.
On the same day regulations issued by the Sicherheitspolizei were delivered to all local police departments proclaiming that the Nuremberg Laws were in force in Ostland, defining who is a Jew, and what Jews could and could not do. Jews were prohibited from changing their place of residence, walking along the sidewalk, using any means of transportation, going to theatres, museums, cinema, or school. The professions of lawyer, physician, notary, banker, or real estate agent were declared closed to Jews, as was the occupation of street hawker. The regulations also declared that the property and homes of Jewish residents were to be confiscated. The regulations emphasized that work to this ends was to be begun as soon as possible, and that lists of Jews, their addresses, and their property were to be completed by the police by September 20, 1941.