The capture of Klaipėda

On 28 January 1945 troops of the Soviet 1st Baltic Front entered Klaipėda (German: Memel), the port where the Curonian Lagoon opens into the Baltic. Cut off by land since October 1944, the city had held out for more than three months; during the night of 27–28 January the last German units withdrew from it onto the Curonian Spit, and a few hours later Soviet soldiers occupied the deserted, wrecked port. It was the last scrap of Lithuanian territory still in German hands.

It is often said that on this date the Red Army ended the occupation of Lithuania. The date is right, but the statement needs two qualifications. First, Soviet troops had taken almost all of Lithuania in the summer and autumn of 1944 – Wilno (Vilnius) in July, Kaunas on 1 August, Samogitia and the coast in October – and by January 1945 only the Klaipėda bridgehead remained. Second, the very word “occupation” is disputed. Soviet and present-day Russian historiography speaks of Lithuania’s “liberation” from German occupation and the restoration of Soviet power. Lithuanian historiography, and also the view of the Western states, which never legally recognised the annexation of 1940, regards it as the beginning of a second Soviet occupation, lasting until 1990. Both terms describe the same fact from two perspectives: for Lithuanians the end of German occupation did not mean the recovery of independence.

A city on the borderland

For centuries Klaipėda was the northernmost town of Prussia. Under the Treaty of Versailles the Klaipėda Region (Memel Territory) – a strip of land north of the Neman with the town and port – was detached from Germany and placed under the administration of the Entente powers, exercised on the spot by a French administration. In January 1923 Lithuania organised an armed “uprising” there and took over the region, which the Klaipėda Convention of 1924 sanctioned, granting it broad autonomy. The population was mixed: according to the Lithuanian census of 1925, of about 141,000 inhabitants some 43 per cent declared German as their language, some 28 per cent Lithuanian, and about 25 per cent described themselves as “Memellanders”; in the town itself Germans predominated. Throughout the interwar period the autonomy was an arena of disputes between Kaunas and the region’s German parties, and in the 1930s the Nazis, who were influential there.

On 20 March 1939, a few days after the occupation of the Czech lands, Germany presented Lithuania with an ultimatum demanding the return of the region. The government in Kaunas gave way; on 22 March the Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbšys, and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed an agreement handing the Klaipėda Region over to the Reich, and on 23 March Germany occupied Klaipėda; Adolf Hitler, who arrived by warship, addressed the inhabitants from the balcony of the municipal theatre. The port became a Kriegsmarine base, and Memel a town of the province of East Prussia.

The siege

In the autumn of 1944, in the course of the Baltic offensive, Soviet troops approached the coast. On 5 October General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front struck westwards from Šiauliai and within a few days reached the Baltic north and south of Klaipėda, cutting off Army Group North in Courland from East Prussia. Klaipėda, which had been strengthened for several months with successive lines of trenches, was surrounded on the landward side. It was defended by General of Infantry Hans Gollnick’s XXVIII Army Corps, initially with the Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division, the 7th Panzer Division and the 58th Infantry Division. The Soviet 43rd Army’s attempt to take the city on the move was repulsed in mid-October with fire support from the heavy cruisers Prinz Eugen and Lützow, which shelled Soviet positions from the sea.

The front at Klaipėda then went quiet. Through November, December and January the garrison held the bridgehead, linked to the rest of East Prussia only by the narrow Curonian Spit and by sea. At the end of November the Grossdeutschland Division and the 7th Panzer Division, worn out by the fighting, were replaced by the 95th Infantry Division, brought in by sea. On land the city was blockaded by troops of the 1st Baltic Front, in January 1945 chiefly by Lieutenant General Pyotr Malyshev’s 4th Shock Army.

The evacuation of the population

The Klaipėda Region emptied earlier than the rest of East Prussia. When the front approached the border at the beginning of October 1944, the region’s inhabitants – Germans as well as Prussian Lithuanians, citizens of the Reich since 1939 – had to decide whether to stay or flee. Almost all of them left, some at the last moment, ahead of the advancing tanks. Many refugees from the surrounding area also took shelter in the besieged city. Throughout the siege the Kriegsmarine shipped wounded and civilians out of the port, while others went south along the Curonian Spit. By January 1945, when the great flight from East Prussia began, practically no one but soldiers remained in Klaipėda.

The abandonment of the city

On 13 January 1945 the Soviet East Prussian offensive began. Within a week troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front had broken through the defences in the east of the province, and during the night of 19–20 January they took Tilsit on the Neman, only a few dozen kilometres south of Klaipėda. The bridgehead was losing its purpose: it now lay far behind the front line, and the divisions defending it were urgently needed for the defence of the Samland Peninsula and Königsberg. The German command decided to evacuate Klaipėda.

The withdrawal was carried out in the last days of January. The headquarters of XXVIII Corps and part of its troops were moved to Samland, where they took part in the fighting for access to Königsberg. The remaining units of the 95th and 58th Infantry Divisions withdrew south along the spit, with the 58th Division covering the retreat as rearguard. According to German studies, the last organised units left the city at about 4 a.m. on 28 January, blowing up port installations, factories and bridges behind them. A few hours later Soviet troops entered the city.

Soviet and Russian sources present the event as an assault: according to them, Klaipėda was “taken by storm” by units of the 4th Shock Army in an operation conducted from 25 January, and a Soviet communiqué of 28 January announced the capture of the city and port. The 16th Lithuanian Rifle Division also took part in occupying the city – formed in the USSR from Lithuanians who had found themselves in the Soviet interior in 1941, including many Lithuanian Jews – which had fought at Klaipėda as early as the autumn of 1944 and had since borne the honorific “Klaipėda”. Soviet propaganda stressed the participation of Lithuanian soldiers as proof that Lithuanians were “liberating” their own land; in reality there was little fighting for the city on the last day, because the Germans had already left it.

Klaipėda was badly damaged – according to Russian studies about 60 per cent of its buildings suffered in the siege and the bombing – and almost deserted. According to some accounts, the Soviet troops found only a handful of civilians in the city.

Lithuania under Soviet rule for the second time

With Klaipėda, the whole territory of Lithuania – within its 1939–1940 borders, enlarged by the Klaipėda Region – came under Soviet control. Power was exercised by the organs of the Lithuanian SSR, re-established after the Germans had been driven out of Wilno; the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Sniečkus, came to Klaipėda before the end of January. The Klaipėda Region, incorporated into the Reich in 1939, did not return to Germany: it was absorbed into the Lithuanian SSR, although no post-war treaty settled this explicitly, and in 1948 a decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR granted Soviet citizenship to former Lithuanian citizens from the region. The city was resettled by newcomers from the Lithuanian interior and from other Soviet republics, and in the 1950s Klaipėda became one of the USSR’s main ports and shipbuilding centres on the Baltic.

Few of the former inhabitants returned. By estimates, some 35,000 local people, Germans and Prussian Lithuanians, were living in the region in 1945–1946; the Soviet authorities treated them with suspicion, some were deported deep into the USSR, and in 1951 about 3,500 people were resettled in East Germany. After 1958, when departures became possible, most of the remainder emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany.

For Lithuanians the return of Soviet rule meant the renewal of the repression that had begun after the annexation of 1940 and the June deportations of 1941. As early as the summer of 1944 arrests and conscription into the Red Army began; in response thousands of men took to the forests. The armed resistance of the Forest Brothers lasted until the early 1950s; its leaders, among them Jonas Žemaitis and Adolfas Ramanauskas, were executed in 1954 and 1957. According to Lithuanian historians, some 20,000 partisans were killed in the fighting, and in 1944–1953 more than 100,000 people were deported from Lithuania to Siberia and Central Asia, most of them during Operation Priboi in March 1949. Lithuania regained its independence only on 11 March 1990; Klaipėda and its region remained within its borders.

Place in the war

Militarily, the capture of Klaipėda was a sideshow. The bridgehead ceased to be of use to the Germans the moment the 3rd Belorussian Front’s offensive opened the road to Königsberg, and the evacuation made it possible to strengthen the defence of Samland, which held out until April 1945. For the Red Army it meant closing the front on the lower Neman and freeing forces for the fighting in East Prussia and against the Courland group, which held out until Germany’s surrender in May. Politically, 28 January 1945 ended the division of Lithuanian lands between Germany and the USSR and began almost half a century of Soviet Lithuania, in which Klaipėda – the former Memel – became a city resettled from scratch, mostly by Lithuanians and Russians.