History of Germans in Russia and The Soviet Union - Germans in The Baltics

Germans in The Baltics

The German presence on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea dates back to the Middle Ages when traders and missionaries started arriving from central Europe. The German-speaking Livonian Brothers of the Sword conquered most of what is now Estonia and Latvia (the former Livonia) in the early 13th century. In 1237, the Brothers of the Sword were incorporated into the Teutonic Knights.

Over the course of the next several centuries, the Teutonic Order solidified into a regime of mostly German-speaking nobility ruling over indigenous peasants. The religious and economic institutions in late medieval Livonia were mostly controlled by locally born German-speakers and new immigrants from central Europe. Several cities in the area joined the Hanseatic League, dominated by German-speaking merchants. This German presence brought Christianity to Estonia and Latvia - one of the last parts of Europe Christianity reached. These areas later adopted Lutheranism.

The Teutonic Order progressively lost territory during the 15th century and had practically disappeared as a political force by the middle of the 16th. Although the Baltics passed into the hands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the south and Swedish rule in the north, the privileged status of the local German-speaking aristocracy remained largely unchanged. Baltic Germans are estimated to have represented no more than 6% of the population of Estonia and Latvia at the end of the 17th century but their dominant position in society remained relatively unchallenged.

During Peter the Great's rule Russia gained control over much of the Baltics from Sweden in the Great Northern War at the beginning of the 18th century, but left the German nobility in control. Until the Russification policies of the 1880s, the German community and its institutions were intact and protected under the Russian Empire. The Baltic German nobility were very influential in the Russian Tsar's army and administration.

The reforms of Alexander III replaced many of the traditional privileges of the German nobility with elected local governments and more uniform tax codes. Schools were required to teach Russian, and the Russian nationalist press began targeting segregated Germans as unpatriotic and insufficiently Russian. Baltic Germans were also the target of Estonian and Latvian nationalist movements.

When Estonia and Latvia became independent nations after World War I a degree of autonomy was granted to ethnic German institutions, and German schools and newspapers expanded somewhat during that period. However all of the nobility's traditional privileges were abolished and most of their agricultural land holdings were redistributed to local farmers. At that point, ethnic Germans represented no more than 1.5% of the Estonian population and roughly 3% of the Latvian population, many having left for Germany during the chaos of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Independent Latvia pursued an open policy of "Latvianisation" in the 1930s which, encouraged by ethnic nationalists in Nazi Germany, induced many Latvian Germans to move to Germany.

In late 1939 (after the start of the Second World War), the entire remaining Baltic German community was repatriated by Adolf Hitler to areas Nazi Germany had invaded in western Poland (especially in the Warthegau). The "legal" basis for this was agreed in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent Nazi-Soviet population transfers which had given the Soviet Union a green light to invade and annex Latvia and Estonia in 1940.

Only a handful of Baltic Germans remained under Soviet rule after 1945 mainly among those few who refused Germany's call to leave the Baltics.