Germany takes Klaipėda

On 23 March 1939, a few hours after the Lithuanian Foreign Minister had signed the agreement surrendering the Klaipėda Region in Berlin, Wehrmacht units marched into Klaipėda (Memel) and the German fleet entered the port. Adolf Hitler arrived aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland. From the balcony of the municipal theatre he addressed a cheering crowd, proclaiming the town’s return to the Reich. It was Germany’s last territorial acquisition before the outbreak of war, and the last to be gained without a single shot. After Austria, the Sudetenland and Bohemia, Hitler reached for a scrap of land of little strategic importance but great symbolic value: one more piece of the “wrong done at Versailles”, recovered at no cost and without opposition from the powers.

The agreement of 22 March

The annexation took a mere three days. On 20 March Joachim von Ribbentrop presented the Lithuanians with a verbal ultimatum; during the night of 21–22 March the government in Kaunas decided to give way, and on 22 March a German aircraft flew a delegation led by Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys to Berlin. The agreement was signed at around 1 a.m. on 23 March, although it was dated 22 March. It had five short articles. The first stated that the Klaipėda Region, separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, was reunited with the Reich “with effect from today”. Lithuania was to withdraw its army and police without delay and leave the region in good order. In return it received a free zone in the port of Klaipėda, and both sides undertook not to use force against each other and not to support an attack by a third state. Other matters, from state property to citizenship, were to be settled by separate agreements.

The agreement violated the Klaipėda Convention of 1924, which forbade any change to the region’s status without the consent of Britain, France, Italy and Japan. None of these states protested. The Lithuanian parliament ratified it a few days later, at a short sitting without debate.

The fleet under way

Hitler did not wait for the signature. On 22 March he left Berlin for Swinemünde and boarded the Deutschland, which put to sea during the night. He was accompanied by an impressive squadron: her sister ships Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer, the light cruisers Nürnberg, Leipzig and Köln, flotillas of destroyers and torpedo boats, submarines, minesweepers and auxiliary vessels. According to Polish studies, the force numbered several dozen ships. The commander of the Kriegsmarine, Admiral Erich Raeder, sailed aboard the flagship. The expedition was a show of strength aimed not only at Kaunas. During the night of 22–23 March the German fleet passed close to Polish territorial waters, and in Warsaw this display of power was also read as a warning.

The ship was a symbolic choice. Launched in 1931, under the Weimar Republic, as the first “pocket battleship”, she was meant to prove that Germany could circumvent the restrictions of Versailles. Now she was bringing the Chancellor to a town that the same treaty had taken from Germany.

23 March in Klaipėda

On the morning of 23 March Lithuanian troops, police and officials began to leave the Klaipėda Region. Infantry units, motorised columns, artillery and armoured cars entered from East Prussia. The local Germans, organised in squads modelled on the SA, had controlled the streets for several days, and the Lithuanian authorities had practically lost all control over them. Houses were decked with swastika flags, and companies of naval infantry were landed in the port to remain in the town as its garrison. There was no fighting.

In the course of the day the Deutschland entered the port of Klaipėda; sources differ on the time of her arrival. Hitler went ashore and drove round the decorated town. He was greeted by Ernst Neumann, a veterinary surgeon and leader of the local Nazis, who had been convicted by a Lithuanian military court in 1935 and amnestied a few years later. From the balcony of the municipal theatre on Theatre Square Hitler addressed the crowd. He spoke of the wrong done to them at Versailles and told them that they were now returning to a great new Germany that had never forgotten them. The speech was short, and after a few hours Hitler went back aboard the ship.

On the same day a law was promulgated on the reunification of the Klaipėda Region with the Reich. The region was incorporated into the province of East Prussia, within the Gumbinnen administrative region, and the pre-war division into districts was restored. Provisional administration was taken over by the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch. Inhabitants who had lost German citizenship when the region was attached to Lithuania regained it by operation of law.

Those who had to leave

For some of the inhabitants 23 March was a day of misfortune. Most of Klaipėda’s Jews had already left in the autumn of 1938 and the winter of 1939, when the local Nazis called for a boycott of their shops and threatened pogroms. Those who stayed came under the German racial laws, and their property was “Aryanised”. Some 10,000 people, most of them Jews, fled to Lithuania proper. Lithuanians who had settled in the Klaipėda Region after 1923, and locals who had worked with the authorities in Kaunas, also had to leave. According to official statistics this affected almost 9,000 people, although Lithuanian historians consider the figure too low.

Lithuania lost its only large port, which handled 70–80 per cent of its foreign trade, and about a third of its industry. The promised free zone in the port did not make up for the loss, and within a few months the country had fallen into economic dependence on Germany.

Reactions in Europe

The seizure of Klaipėda passed almost unnoticed in Europe, overshadowed by the German entry into Prague a week earlier. London and Paris did not protest, even though they were signatories of the 1924 convention; Britain took note of the change in a note of May 1939. Benito Mussolini welcomed the annexation, since he was himself preparing to seize Albania.

Poland was the most alarmed. Klaipėda lay to the north of East Prussia, and its seizure coincided with the demands that Ribbentrop had put to Ambassador Józef Lipski two days earlier: the incorporation of Danzig into the Reich and an extraterritorial motorway across Pomerania. The press asked whether Gdańsk would be next. On the afternoon of 23 March, on the instructions of Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the Chief of the General Staff, General Wacław Stachiewicz, ordered a secret emergency mobilisation of some units of the Polish Army, among them the Nowogródek Cavalry Brigade, which was moved to the Sierpc area, towards the border with East Prussia. It was Poland’s first step on a road that ended with general mobilisation at the end of August.

Significance

The seizure of Klaipėda closed the series of Hitler’s bloodless conquests that had begun with the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. Each time, threats, pressure from the local Nazi party and the conviction that the Western powers would not die for other people’s borders had been enough. Klaipėda confirmed this once again, but it was also the end of the road. Britain, shaken by the seizure of Prague, changed its policy in the last days of March. On 31 March it gave a guarantee to Poland, and in April to Romania and Greece. Hitler’s next target, Danzig and Polish Pomerania, could no longer be taken without war.

For Klaipėda itself, the annexation marked the beginning of the end of the town as it had been known for centuries. The Germans turned it into a naval base, and during the war the port served the Kriegsmarine in the Baltic. In the autumn of 1944 the Red Army reached the Baltic and cut Klaipėda off from the rest of the front. The civilian population was evacuated, and the German garrison held the town until 28 January 1945. After the war the Klaipėda Region was attached to the Lithuanian SSR. Most of its former inhabitants, Germans and Prussian Lithuanians, fled or were expelled, and settlers from Lithuania and Russia took their place. Since 1990 Klaipėda has been the main port of independent Lithuania.