The German ultimatum to Lithuania

On 20 March 1939, five days after the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop received the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Juozas Urbšys, in Berlin. The conversation lasted about forty minutes. Ribbentrop demanded that Lithuania immediately return to Germany the Klaipėda Region (the Memel Territory), which the Treaty of Versailles had detached from the Reich, and made it plain that if the Lithuanians resisted, or if German blood were shed in Klaipėda, the army would have its say. The demand was not put in writing and no deadline was set, which is why some historians prefer to speak of “demands” rather than an ultimatum. In practice, however, it was an order backed by the threat of force, and Lithuania, abandoned by the very powers that had guaranteed Klaipėda’s status fifteen years earlier, gave way in less than two days.

Klaipėda between Germany and Lithuania

Klaipėda – Memel in German – was the northernmost town of East Prussia, a port where the Curonian Lagoon opens into the Baltic. The Klaipėda Region, a strip of land on the right bank of the Neman covering some 2,400 square kilometres, had around 140,000 inhabitants. The town was German, but the countryside was home to many Prussian Lithuanians: Lithuanian-speaking Lutherans who had lived within the Prussian state for centuries and often felt more Prussian than citizens of the young, Catholic Lithuanian state. The Treaty of Versailles separated the area from Germany without a plebiscite and placed it at the disposal of the Allied powers. From 1920 it was administered by the French, and the Conference of Ambassadors leaned towards creating a free city there, on the model of the Free City of Danzig.

Lithuania needed Klaipėda as its only real port. After Żeligowski’s mutiny had given Wilno to Poland in October 1920, Kaunas decided not to wait for the powers to make up their minds. On 10 January 1923, while Europe’s attention was fixed on the occupation of the Ruhr, an “uprising” broke out in the Klaipėda Region; in reality it had been prepared by the government of Prime Minister Ernestas Galvanauskas. It was carried out by soldiers in civilian clothes and members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, some 1,500 men in all. After a brief exchange of fire the small French garrison capitulated. Weimar Germany, which preferred to see Klaipėda in the hands of weak Lithuania rather than under Polish influence, did not intervene. In mid-February 1923 the Conference of Ambassadors accepted the fait accompli, and on 8 May 1924 in Paris Lithuania signed the Klaipėda Convention with Britain, France, Italy and Japan. The Klaipėda Region became an autonomous part of Lithuania, with its own diet, a directorate and two official languages, and its status could not be altered without the consent of the signatories.

The Nazis in Klaipėda

The autonomy worked badly from the outset. In every election to the regional diet the German lists won a clear majority, with the votes of Prussian Lithuanians as well, and the government in Kaunas – after the coup of December 1926 the authoritarian government of President Antanas Smetona – responded with pressure, martial law and settlement from Lithuania proper. Even so, relations with Berlin in the 1920s were correct, since the two countries shared a dislike of Poland. In 1928 they settled their border, leaving Klaipėda on the Lithuanian side.

Everything changed after 1933. Two parties modelled on the NSDAP appeared in Klaipėda: the Christian Socialist Working Community of Pastor Theodor von Sass and the Socialist People’s Community (Sovog) of the veterinary surgeon Ernst Neumann. In 1934 the Lithuanian authorities arrested their leaders and charged them with preparing the armed secession of the region. In a celebrated trial before a military court in Kaunas, 87 people were convicted on 26 March 1935, several of them sentenced to death. Germany retaliated with a boycott of Lithuanian agricultural exports, which hit the farmers of Lithuanian Suvalkija. In a speech on 21 May 1935 Adolf Hitler declared that he could not conclude a non-aggression pact with a Lithuania that “persecuted” Germans. Under pressure from Berlin – and from London, Paris and Rome, which instead of backing Kaunas advised it to be accommodating – Smetona commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment, and in 1937–1938 the convicts were amnestied. Neumann was released and took charge of the entire German movement in the Klaipėda Region.

1938

The real turning point came in 1938. On 17 March, a few days after the Anschluss of Austria, Poland presented Lithuania with an ultimatum demanding the establishment of diplomatic relations. Berlin let it be known at the time that if a Polish–Lithuanian war broke out, German troops would occupy Klaipėda and a large part of western Lithuania. Kaunas accepted the Polish demands on 19 March, but only a few days later Germany handed it an eleven-point memorandum demanding freedom of action for the Klaipėda Germans and a curb on Lithuanian influence. According to accounts from the period, Hitler regarded Klaipėda as the next objective of his policy after the Sudetenland.

The Lithuanians gave ground step by step in the hope of calming the situation. At the turn of October and November 1938, after the Munich Agreement, they lifted martial law and censorship in the Klaipėda Region. The local Germans formed squads modelled on the SA, attacked Lithuanian organisations and hung out swastikas, while in schools and offices people spoke ever more openly of a “return to the Reich”. The Jews, urged to boycott and threatened with pogroms, began to leave Klaipėda. In the diet elections of 11 December 1938 the German list won some 87 per cent of the vote and 25 of the 29 seats. In December Hitler received Neumann and assured him that the Klaipėda question would be settled in the spring of 1939. Neumann demanded the right to self-determination, and the diet, which was due to convene on 25 March 1939, was ready to vote for union with Germany. Official Berlin kept silent: it hoped that Lithuania would hand over the troublesome region of its own accord, and it did not want to disrupt the talks it was holding with Poland that spring. The government of the priest Vladas Mironas had no answer to any of this.

Forty minutes with Ribbentrop

On 12 March 1939 Urbšys was in Rome for the coronation of Pope Pius XII. On his way home he stopped in Berlin to clarify the rumours of German plans that had been circulating for weeks. By then Hitler had already seized Bohemia and Moravia and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia had declared independence under a German umbrella. On 20 March Ribbentrop received Urbšys, while the Lithuanian envoy in Berlin, Colonel Kazys Škirpa, was told to wait in the anteroom.

Ribbentrop declared that the Klaipėda question had to be settled at once and for good, and that the Reich demanded the return of the region. If Lithuania did not give way voluntarily, the army would decide the matter, and it would not end with Klaipėda. According to Lithuanian accounts, he threatened that the Wehrmacht might go further and that the air force would bomb Kaunas. He also warned Lithuania not to seek help from other states, adding that in the event of clashes with the Klaipėda Germans the Führer would react with lightning speed. The Lithuanians were to reply without delay, and their plenipotentiaries were to come to Berlin to sign an agreement.

Urbšys immediately informed Kaunas and returned home. On 21 March the Lithuanian government met with President Smetona. It knew that it had nothing to fight with: the army was small and poorly armed, and the navy’s only ship was the converted minesweeper Prezidentas Smetona. At the same time a German naval squadron of pocket battleships, cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats was assembling at Swinemünde.

The guarantors wash their hands

Formally, Lithuania could not give up Klaipėda without the consent of the signatories of the 1924 convention. Kaunas therefore secretly informed Britain, France, Italy and Japan of the German demands. The replies dispelled any illusions. Italy and Japan, bound to Germany by the Anti-Comintern Pact, backed Berlin. Britain and France expressed sympathy but offered no help. London treated Klaipėda as it had treated the Sudetenland six months earlier: as a question of a German minority in which Germany was essentially in the right. In any case, the British government of Neville Chamberlain was preoccupied with something else in those days: after the seizure of Prague it was looking for a way to stop Hitler in Romania and Poland, not on the Lithuanian coast. The Soviet Union, with which Lithuania was on good terms, supported it in words but had no intention of risking a conflict with Germany. The Baltic Entente of 1934 had excluded the questions of Wilno and Klaipėda from the start, so Latvia and Estonia had nothing to say.

Poland watched the affair with alarm. Its press wrote of solidarity with Lithuania and asked whether Gdańsk would be the next target. The question was justified: on 21 March Ribbentrop summoned Ambassador Józef Lipski and renewed the demands on Poland concerning Danzig and a motorway across Pomerania. Warsaw, however, could not help Kaunas, with which it had established diplomatic relations only a year earlier, under the threat of its own ultimatum.

Lithuania gives way

Kaunas still tried to bargain for a compromise, but Berlin rejected it. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the German envoy in Kaunas had been instructed during the night to ring the Lithuanians out of their beds and hold a pistol to their chests: one way or the other. During the night of 21–22 March the Lithuanian government decided to accept the German demands, and on the morning of 22 March Goebbels was already able to announce that Klaipėda was German again. On 22 March a German aircraft flew the Lithuanian delegation, led by Urbšys, to Berlin. There it learned that the Reich’s fleet was already at sea and that Hitler was sailing to Klaipėda aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland. The agreement on the “reunification” of the Klaipėda Region with the Reich was signed after midnight, at around 1 a.m. on 23 March, although it was dated 22 March. Lithuania undertook to withdraw its army and police without delay; in return it received a free zone in the port, and both sides pledged not to use force against each other.

Significance

The ultimatum to Lithuania was the shortest and least costly of Hitler’s annexations. It required no conference and no mobilisation – a conversation in a minister’s office and the presence of a fleet at sea were enough. It showed that after the seizure of Prague Hitler had no intention of stopping, and that Britain and France were not prepared to defend even treaties they had signed themselves. For Poland it was the most menacing signal of all: Klaipėda lay to the north of East Prussia, and the question of whether Danzig would be next was being asked in Warsaw, London and Paris at the same time. Less than two weeks later Britain broke with the policy of appeasement and gave Poland a guarantee.

For Lithuania itself, accepting a second ultimatum within a year was a humiliation that shook Smetona’s rule. The Mironas cabinet gave way to a government under General Jonas Černius, which for the first time since the 1926 coup included opposition politicians. The country lost its only large port, which handled 70–80 per cent of its foreign trade, and about a third of its industry, while some 10,000 refugees, most of them Jews, poured into Lithuania proper.

The loss of Klaipėda pushed Lithuania into Germany’s economic orbit. The secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 initially assigned it to the German sphere, and in September 1939 Berlin urged Kaunas to join the war against Poland in exchange for Wilno. Lithuania declared its neutrality and refused. The treaty of 28 September 1939 moved it into the Soviet sphere; in October it received Wilno from the USSR but had to accept Soviet garrisons. In June 1940 Moscow presented it with yet another ultimatum, and Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union without a shot being fired. Urbšys’s conversation with Ribbentrop in March 1939 began the chain of ultimatums that destroyed its independence within fifteen months.