О ЗЛОДЕЯНИЯХ НЕМЕЦКО-ФАШИСТСКИХ ЗАХВАТЧИКОВ В ЭСТОНСКОЙ ССР – “On the Crimes of the Nazi-German Occupiers in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.” The official report of the State Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Estonia, including a shocking documentation of the extermination of Estonian Jewry. Published by ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА (“Political Literature”). Tallinn (capital of Estonia), 1945. In Russian. Extremely rare.
The report of the State Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Estonia, detailing crimes committed over more than three years during which the Nazis implemented their plan for the complete destruction of the Estonian state, the total eradication of Estonian national culture, the physical annihilation and partial enslavement of the Estonian people, and the extermination of Estonian Jewry, as part of the German campaign for domination of the Baltic Sea. The commission was established with the liberation of Estonia and was composed of members of the Supreme Council and official representatives of the Estonian state. Before submitting the detailed report before us, the commission toured all the areas of destruction in Estonia and examined hundreds of documents left behind by the Nazis in order to obtain a clear picture of the atrocities. Among other things, it uncovered the secret annual report for 1941–1942 of the German police and the SD, which detailed instructions regarding the subjugation of the economy and political order to the German Economic Commission for Estonia.
According to the commission’s findings presented here, from the very first day of the occupation, the Nazis turned Estonia into a German colony. They completely abolished its autonomy and independence and stripped the Estonian people of all political and economic rights. German was declared the official state language. Bonfires burned in the streets of Estonian cities, where executioners incinerated literature written in Estonian. Theaters were closed and destroyed. The historic university of Tartu was desecrated. Estonian writers, artists, and actors were sent to prisons and concentration camps. Many were shot, others tortured… Estonian culture and the Estonian intelligentsia were systematically destroyed, with the aim of quickly erasing all traces of Estonian history and leaving no sign that the Estonian people had ever lived and created their national life and culture in these places.
In addition, the report describes how the Nazis took control of Estonian industry — factories were deliberately and systematically destroyed. The Estonian people were forbidden from maintaining their own industry and were condemned to lives of slavery. Under German rule, Estonians could not create their own national cadres of an industrial working class, technicians, engineers, and scientists. Estonian farmers were robbed and plunged into poverty. The land that had been transferred to poor farmers by the Soviet government in 1940 was seized by the Germans. The occupiers restored the power of the landowners and introduced the most brutal regulations of slave ownership. Agricultural workers and farmers were beaten with sticks. Estonian forests were mercilessly and barbarically cut down. Livestock was partially destroyed. Starvation became the inevitable fate of the entire population. The occupiers deliberately eliminated all sanitary and medical assistance to the population with the aim of killing them through epidemics — the report describes how the Nazis turned Estonia into a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Typhus, dysentery, diphtheria, and other illnesses spread among the population on an unprecedented scale, and the Nazis deliberately refrained from hospitalizing contagious patients or providing medical treatment to the population. And as everywhere else in the occupied territories, the Nazi invaders physically destroyed the population.
The Nazis did not stop there; systematically, they destroyed every trace of Estonian culture — almost no paintings or sculptures created by national artists and sculptors were left in Estonia. The Germans looted and transferred to Germany more than 10,000 works of art. They burned the Estonian National Museum. In the Estonia Theatre, the Germans allowed only operas and operettas in the German language to be performed, and well-known Estonian artists such as Mork, Reining, Hull, and others were imprisoned in concentration camps and prisons. The Germans also set fire to theaters one after another and blew up sacred historic buildings.
The report also details the Nazi crimes committed in the concentration camps they established within Estonian territory. The commission found that by February 1944, more than 20 concentration camps were operating in Estonia, with several thousand prisoners held in each camp, forced to work 18 hours a day. It also lists the names of well-known Jews who were held in these death camps and brutally executed. In the death camp at Klooga, which was referred to as the “Estonian Majdanek, ” systematic massacres of civilians, women, and children were carried out daily as part of the mass extermination plan targeting Estonians loyal to their country and their people. About 3,000 Jewish men and women brought from the ghettos of Vilna and Kovno in Lithuania were imprisoned at Klooga. The Nazis at Klooga also burned infants alive, and heaps of charred corpses were found there. The report further describes the actions of local collaborators, who were placed in charge of the “local self-government, ” but in reality served as an arm of the Nazis in carrying out the extermination plan. The report concludes with a detailed account of the horrifying event that occurred during the Nazis’ retreat in September 1944 in the face of the advancing Red Army — the Nazis hastily liquidated the concentration camps, leading thousands of prisoners from Klooga and other camps into a forest clearing, where they were brutally executed by gunfire, their bodies falling onto the burning corpses of their fellow prisoners who had been shot moments earlier, and more.
Extremely rare. Only one copy listed in the WorldCat global library catalog.
23 [1] pages. Repaired tear at the upper part of the cover and the first two pages, without affecting the text. Other than that, very good condition.
