Germany's non-aggression pacts with Estonia and Latvia

On 7 June 1939 in Berlin, the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed two almost identical non-aggression treaties: one with the Estonian Foreign Minister Karl Selter and one with the Latvian Foreign Minister Vilhelms Munters. Each had only two articles. In the first, the parties undertook that “in no case” would they resort to war or to any other use of force against each other, and that should a third state take such action against one of them, the other would give it no support. The second set the term: ten years from the exchange of ratifications, with automatic extension for a further ten years unless one of the parties denounced the treaty a year before it expired. The two pacts were linked: if one lapsed, so did the other. Ratifications were exchanged in Berlin on 24 July 1939, and the treaties entered into force that day. The day after the signing, Adolf Hitler received the Estonian and Latvian envoys and talked with them mainly about expanding trade.

It is often written that the pacts were meant to last ten years but were broken when Germany invaded both countries in 1941. The first part is true; the second simplifies matters. By 1941 Estonia and Latvia were no longer independent states. As early as 23 August 1939, in the secret protocol to its pact with the Soviet Union, Germany had recognised both countries as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and in the summer of 1940 the USSR occupied and annexed them. The Wehrmacht, which entered Riga and Tallinn in July and August 1941, was therefore advancing across Soviet territory in its war against the USSR. The pacts of 7 June lost all meaning when Hitler handed both states over to Stalin, not two years later.

Between two neighbours

Estonia and Latvia won their independence in 1918–1920 by fighting the Bolsheviks, and the Latvians also German volunteer units and the Baltic Landeswehr. Soviet Russia recognised them in peace treaties in 1920, and in 1932 both states signed non-aggression pacts with the USSR, Latvia on 5 February and Estonia on 4 May. In 1934 authoritarian regimes took power in both countries: that of Konstantin Päts in Estonia and that of Kārlis Ulmanis in Latvia. In the same year, together with Lithuania, they formed the Baltic Entente, though it was more a consultative association than a military alliance.

After Munich both states concluded that they could not rely on the League of Nations in a conflict between the great powers, and at the end of 1938, like Lithuania, they passed laws on strict neutrality. Their elites, however, did not view their neighbours in the same way. In Estonia the leadership regarded the Soviet Union as enemy number one: in January 1939 the Latvian envoy in Tallinn reported that Selter had painted him a grim picture of Estonia’s fate under Russian occupation and claimed that no such cruelties could be expected from Germany, whatever it might be like. In Latvia, where memories of the former dominance of the Baltic barons were still vivid, public opinion was more clearly anti-German, but Munters tried to maintain correct relations with Berlin. Both countries carried on a brisk trade with Germany.

Spring 1939

March 1939 shook the region. After seizing the Czech lands, the Reich issued an ultimatum to Lithuania and took Klaipėda (Memel). Hitler arrived there aboard a battleship, demonstrating that Germany could appear on the eastern shore of the Baltic within hours. On 28 March the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, handed the Estonian and Latvian envoys in Moscow declarations stating that the USSR could not remain indifferent to any agreement, voluntary or imposed, that limited their independence in favour of a third state. In Tallinn and Riga they were read as a sign that Moscow was claiming the right to decide their fate.

These fears were heightened by the Anglo-French–Soviet negotiations. From the Soviet alliance proposal of 17 April onwards, the USSR demanded that the three powers jointly guarantee the security of the states between the Baltic and the Black Sea, even without their consent. On 2 June Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov’s successor, presented a draft in which Estonia and Latvia were named. Both states declared that they did not want guarantees they had not asked for and that they would treat any attempt to impose assistance on them as an attack on their neutrality. A Soviet guarantee meant for them the risk that the Red Army would enter their territory on the pretext of defending it.

The German offer therefore fell on fertile ground. Hitler had announced it in his Reichstag speech of 28 April, in reply to Roosevelt’s appeal, which had listed Estonia and Latvia among the states Germany was not to attack. At the end of April Berlin offered non-aggression pacts to the Nordic and Baltic states. Sweden, Norway and Finland refused; Denmark signed a treaty on 31 May. The drafts for Estonia and Latvia were ready at the beginning of May, but the signing was postponed twice because Riga asked for clarifications. For both governments a pact with Germany was to serve as a counterweight to Soviet guarantees: proof that they were neutral towards both neighbours, and an argument that they needed no one’s protection.

What lay behind the pacts

The text of the treaties was innocuous, but their political meaning was clear to Berlin. The pacts were meant to shield the Baltic states from both Western and Soviet influence and, in the event of war with Poland, to make them a barrier against any Soviet intervention. Reports later emerged that a secret clause had been attached to the pacts, under which Estonia and Latvia were to undertake, in agreement with Germany, military security measures against Soviet Russia. Its existence has not, however, been confirmed by documents. What is certain is that military contacts intensified in the summer of 1939: in June the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, Franz Halder, visited Estonia and Finland, and the head of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Canaris, also travelled to the Baltic states.

Moscow read the pacts as proof that Germany was moving into a zone the USSR regarded as its own forefield, and as an argument for demanding, in the negotiations with London and Paris, the right to respond to “indirect aggression”, that is, also to a situation in which one of the Baltic states drew closer to Germany without being coerced. The dispute over this definition was one of the reasons why a three-power alliance never came about.

Significance

Two and a half months later it became clear what the pacts were worth. On 23 August 1939 Ribbentrop signed a pact with the USSR in Moscow, and its secret protocol drew the line between the spheres of influence along the northern border of Lithuania: Finland, Estonia and Latvia fell to the Soviet Union. The Reich, which in June had promised not to use force against them, handed them over to their other neighbour without their knowledge.

The consequences came swiftly. After the interned Polish submarine ORP Orzeł escaped from Tallinn in September 1939, Moscow accused Estonia of violating its neutrality and on 28 September forced on it a mutual assistance pact with Soviet military bases. On 5 October Latvia had to sign a similar treaty. In the autumn Hitler called on the Baltic Germans to “return” to the Reich, and several tens of thousands of them left the countries where their ancestors had lived for centuries. In June 1940, while the world watched the fall of France, the USSR presented Estonia and Latvia with ultimatums, and on 17 June the Red Army occupied both countries. After rigged elections they were incorporated into the Soviet Union in August. Päts and Ulmanis were deported into the interior of the USSR and died there; Munters too was sent into exile. Germany did not protest. On 14 June 1941 the NKVD deported more than twenty thousand people from the two republics into the interior of the USSR.

A week later Operation Barbarossa began. The Wehrmacht took Riga on 1 July and Tallinn at the end of August 1941. Both countries became part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Contrary to the hopes of some of their inhabitants, they did not regain independence. With the help of local collaborators the Germans murdered almost all Latvian and Estonian Jews, among other places in the Rumbula massacre near Riga. In 1944–1945 the Red Army returned, and Estonia and Latvia remained part of the USSR until 1991. The pacts of 7 June 1939 were thus not broken by the invasion of 1941. They had ceased to mean anything as early as August 1939, when their German signatory divided up with Moscow the region to which it had promised peace.