Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

A week after the Estonian treaty, a similar pact was forced on Latvia, requiring the cession of bases at Liepāja, Pitrags, and Ventspils on the Baltic coast and the stationing of Red Army garrisons totaling 30,000 troops. Again, Latvian sovereignty was supposedly not affected by the agreement, and the government in Riga was left untouched for the time being. Yet, like their Estonian neighbors, the Latvians were under few illusions about their predicament and knew that little help would be forthcoming from Germany. Molotov would later boast that he “pursued a very hard line” with the Latvians, telling their minister for foreign affairs, Vilhelms Munters, that he “would not go home” until he had signed an agreement. Stalin was even blunter, informing the hapless minister “frankly” in early October 1939 that “a division of spheres of interest has already taken place. As far as Germany is concerned, we could occupy you.”

In Lithuania, Soviet advances received a slightly more positive response, if only because the October 10, 1939, mutual assistance pact had been sweetened by Moscow’s agreement to hand the disputed city of Vilnius (the former Polish Wilno) over to Lithuanian control. Nonetheless, the terms on offer were identical in their essentials to those presented to Estonia and Latvia: mutual aid in event of attack and the stationing of large numbers of Red Army troops. Moreover, Soviet methods, it seemed, were unchanged: as one of the Lithuanian delegation noted, arguing with Molotov was akin to “throwing peas against a wall.” The threat of violence, implicit or explicit, combined with the new strategic realities of war, had left Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia helplessly exposed to Moscow’s designs. Unable to resist sensibly, they had been forced to accommodate Soviet demands and now existed very much in the Soviet shadow. By mid-October 1939, barely six weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin had moved to exercise control of most of the territory promised him by Hitler, extending his reach to the Baltic coast and securing the stationing of around 70,000 Red Army troops in the three Baltic states, a larger force than the combined standing armies of the three countries.

While the Baltic politicians had wrestled, the Germans had merely squirmed. Right from the opening of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Baltic governments had telegraphed Berlin repeatedly, requesting that Germany explain its position, not least given the nonaggression pacts that she had signed with Latvia and Estonia only four months before. Berlin was well aware of the Baltic predicament; indeed, Stalin had informed Hitler of his intentions in late September, at which point German negotiations on a “defense treaty” with Lithuania had been halted, effectively abandoning that country to the Soviet sphere of influence. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, himself born in Tallinn, was clear on the potential consequences, confiding to his diary, “If the Russians now march into the Baltic States, then the Baltic Sea will be strategically lost to us. Moscow will be more powerful than ever.” Yet, in response to repeated requests for clarity, if not assistance, Ribbentrop was unyielding, finally replying, in a circular to all three German legations in the region, with an explanation of the new frontier arrangements agreed with Moscow and stating tersely that “Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland do not belong to the German sphere of interest.” He added that his representatives in the affected countries were to “refrain from any explanations on this subject.” The Baltic states were being abandoned to their fate.

As if to reinforce the sense of foreboding and isolation spreading in the Baltic states, Hitler chose that autumn to call all ethnic Germans Heim ins Reich (home to the Reich), thereby further signaling his abandonment of the region to Stalin. While Ribbentrop was in Moscow in late September, the possible “repatriation” of the Volksdeutsche in those areas was raised for discussion, ostensibly in response to Stalin’s intention to assert his influence in the Baltic. With agreement secretly reached with the Soviets, the Germans approached the still independent Estonians and Latvians to agree on procedures and compensation. In wooing the Volksdeutsche themselves, Berlin stressed primarily the supposed benefits of joining the German “national community,” but the secondary message was an implicit warning of the difficult times to come. Many Baltic Germans took a good deal of persuading, not least because some of them were leaving lands where they had lived for generations. Aside from their personal tribulations, some saw it as a betrayal not only of their own history and culture but of a civilization. “I found it very difficult,” one evacuee recalled after the war, “that an old culturally European land, a land in which the Germans had, for centuries been the leading stratum and that in many respects bore a German face, was simply relinquished with a few words and the stroke of a pen.” Even some staunch National Socialists were appalled. One noted in his diary the “terrible shock” that news of the resettlement brought. “Everything for which we had lived,” he wrote, “everything our ethnic group had established in the course of 700 years was to disappear, just like a melting snowman.”

Nonetheless, despite the profound upheaval involved in relocating to a country of which many of them had little knowledge, the Baltic Germans responded to Hitler’s call in large numbers. As soon as mid-October 1939, the first ship carrying ethnic Germans left Riga en route for Germany. Over the ensuing two months a further eighty-six vessels would depart from the region’s ports, carrying over 60,000 people “home” to the German Reich, or at least to the annexed region of the Warthegau. In fact, such was the growing anxiety about the future in the Baltic states that the operation even attracted some Jewish applicants. For the Baltic populations that remained, the departure of the Volksdeutsche was an ominous sign, an augury of an uncertain future. As one Estonian-German remembered, “They [the Estonians] saw the danger from the east [and] they understood how difficult it was for us to leave Estonia. And, as we boarded ship in Tallinn to leave our homeland and ‘Deutschland über Alles’ was played, followed by the Estonian national anthem, many broke into tears.”

Events in Finland that winter would spur the exodus. Like their Baltic neighbors, the Finns were invited to Moscow to discuss “political questions” in early October 1939. Like their neighbors, they attended, sending a delegation led by the veteran diplomat Juho Paasikivi to receive the Soviet proposals, which included a northward extension of the border in the Karelian Isthmus, close to Leningrad, and a thirty-year lease on the port of Hanko at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. For their part, the Soviets seem to have assumed that the Finns would be as cowed and helpless as the Baltic governments before them; as Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs, “All we had to do was raise our voice a little bit and the Finns would obey.” Certainly there would be no intervention from Berlin. As with the Baltic states, Ribbentrop refrained from any comment beyond a pious wish that Finland might “settle matters with Russia in a peaceful manner,” and he reacted with horror at the prospect of the former Finnish president coming to Berlin for talks. The German ambassador in Finland, meanwhile, was privately instructed to “avoid any commitments which would disturb German-Soviet relations.”

Despite their isolation, however, the Finns saw fit to resist Soviet threats. They tabled two counterproposals and sought to draw out negotiations for much of the following month, convinced that Moscow was bluffing and that right was on their side. Molotov, it seemed, had met his match in the wily Paasikivi and snapped ominously at the final meeting between the two men that “since we civilians don’t seem to be making any progress, perhaps it’s the soldiers’ turn to speak.”