The Klooga massacre was the mass killing of prisoners at the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia in September 1944, carried out by camp guards with assistance from SS troops under Kleiber. The killings expose the violence concealed by the perpetrators’ ideology and the terror that follows when retreat makes accountability seem possible: even as the men try to reassure one another that no witness can identify them, the massacre travels with them as a haunting prospect of discovery.

The killings and the retreat

For three days, 20–22 September 1944, Kleiber’s men drank vodka from breakfast through bedtime while helping the Klooga guards murder prisoners. The novel gives an approximate scale of about 550 prisoners killed each day, including 400 attributed to the SS men’s part in the operation—1,200 in total. Jan Schmitt de Wandaleer stopped repeating that the victims were not human before every volley; Adrián Gallardo Ortega remained convinced they had never been anything else, but no longer cared. The contrast makes plain that recognition alone did not prevent participation.

On 23 September, the men withdrew from the Narva front with the remains of the German eastern army. Their retreat was orderly, but the Soviet pursuit and the recent killings gave the movement a different destination in their minds: Berlin. The exuberant embraces and laughter of the journey to and from the camp did not survive the border. The drunken celebration that had accompanied the killings dissolved as they left Estonia.

Fear, denial, and complicity

After the retreat, the men periodically asked whether the Russians had reached Klooga, found the bodies, or discovered any survivors. Some reassured themselves that Baltic Jewish prisoners would not have recognized German military insignia and therefore could not identify their killers. At first, that explanation quieted them for days; later it worked for only hours before the questions began again. Their recurring need for reassurance reveals the fragility of their attempted concealment: they could neither undo what they had done nor establish that the evidence and witnesses had disappeared.

Gallardo did not join these conversations. He understood that the others’ questions were driven by fear, which the prospect of Germany’s defeat intensified. He expected that someone would eventually uncover the pyres or that a prisoner would speak; someone, perhaps Kleiber himself, might recite names and numbers. As the only Spaniard in the group, Gallardo believed he would not be mistaken for anyone else. He thought he deserved death and fought through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany to postpone it, not to escape the guilt attached to Klooga.

Evidence, identification, and aftermath

The novel later recounts that Soviet soldiers found carefully arranged pyres in the nearby woods. Bodies had been laid face down in rows, interleaved with cut logs in alternating horizontal and vertical layers. The systematic arrangement, intended to reduce the dead to ash and bone, stands in stark contrast to the perpetrators’ hope that the forest would conceal the crime.

In a later search for the men involved, Kleiber was accused of recruiting a group that took part in the extermination of more than 2,000 Jewish prisoners at an Estonian camp and of killing a German soldier who refused his orders. Kleiber maintained that the men—including the executed dissenter—had volunteered, and offered to identify them. His account implicated a Spanish former professional boxer who had gone to the Russian front and was regularly accompanied by Jan Schmitt. The document left the Spanish man’s name uncertain, recording it as Adrian with a question mark; the novel’s narrator later identifies him as Adrián Gallardo Ortega. This uncertain spelling and punctuation make the search for a perpetrator a matter of documentary recovery as well as memory.

The crimes Aumeier committed at Auschwitz prevented him from being tried for the Klooga massacre. The distinction does not lessen the crime; it marks how one perpetrator’s larger record could displace judicial reckoning with another atrocity. At the former camp site, a monolith commemorates more than two thousand innocent people murdered for the simple fact of having been born. The memorial’s public certainty stands against the killers’ private cycle of speculation and denial.