Hjalmar Mäe’s Estonian Self-Administration

On 15 September 1941, two and a half weeks after the capture of Tallinn, General of Infantry Franz von Roques, commander of the rear area of Army Group North, signed an authorisation for five Estonians. They were to exercise civil administration in the country on his behalf, in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Estonia, insofar as the German command had not repealed them. The new body was named the Estonian Self-Administration (Eesti Omavalitsus, German Estnische Selbstverwaltung), and its members were called directors. The first of them was Dr Hjalmar Mäe, who was responsible for personnel matters, culture, education, propaganda and the judiciary, and who soon became head of the whole Self-Administration. To Estonians, who in the summer had welcomed the Germans as liberators from Soviet terror, the signal was unambiguous: instead of a reborn state they had been given an auxiliary administration of the occupier.

Chronologies state that the Self-Administration headed by Mäe “was appointed by the German military administration”. That is true, and the date of 15 September is well attested in Estonian sources. It should be added, however, that this was only the first stage. Civil authority was formally handed over to the Self-Administration on 5 December 1941, when Estonia passed from military rule to German civil administration, and its directors were then reappointed by the Generalkommissar, Karl-Siegmund Litzmann.

The hopes of summer 1941

Estonia entered the German–Soviet war after a year of Soviet rule, which had begun with the entry of the Red Army in June 1940 and ended with the June deportations of 1941. President Konstantin Päts was in a Soviet prison, and most of the ministers and military commanders had been arrested or murdered. When the Germans crossed the border, the Forest Brothers and the re-formed Omakaitse home guard drove the Russians out of the small towns of the south on their own, and in the Summer War they won Tartu for the Germans. When in August the Wehrmacht reached the Gulf of Finland and took Narva and Tallinn, Omakaitse units went with it. Many of them hoped that as a reward the Germans would allow the state to be rebuilt.

That was the hope of the last constitutional prime minister, Jüri Uluots, who under the constitution was acting as president. On 29 July 1941 he met the German military authorities in Tartu, thanked them for the liberation and asked for permission to form a government of an independent Estonia with its own army. The Germans refused. They offered him the leadership of a self-administration under their supervision, but Uluots in turn refused them. This was no accidental misunderstanding. In the plans of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and a Baltic German born in Tallinn, Estonia was to become part of the Reich. He did regard the Estonians as the most “Germanic” of the Baltic peoples and envisaged the Germanisation of a large part of them, but the rest, according to the assumptions of the Generalplan Ost, were to be resettled further east. A reborn Estonia with a government and an army did not fit these plans.

Meanwhile the Germans quickly showed who was in charge. At the end of July they disbanded the spontaneously formed Omakaitse units and re-established them as an auxiliary formation under Wehrmacht supervision, dispersed the Estonians who had paraded in Tartu, and ordered the blue, black and white flags to be taken down. The municipal councils set up by the insurgents under the pre-war laws were replaced by an administration subordinate to the German field commandants.

The Germans’ man

The choice of Mäe was a political one. Born in 1901 at Tuhala near Tallinn, he had studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz, where he gained doctorates in geophysics and in law and political science. In the 1930s he was head of propaganda of the Vaps movement, a radical right-wing league of veterans of the War of Independence whose draft constitution had won a referendum in 1933. Päts, who in March 1934 had suspended democracy precisely in order to stop the Vaps, had him arrested. In December 1935 Mäe was imprisoned again, accused of taking part in a conspiracy to stage an armed coup, and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour. He was released under an amnesty in 1938. After the Soviet occupation of Estonia he left for Germany, taking advantage of the resettlement of the Baltic Germans. In the spring of 1941 he became head of the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and on 22 June, the day of the attack on the USSR, he sent memoranda to the Reich authorities asking for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Estonia and the release of Estonians conscripted into the Red Army who were taken prisoner.

The Germans had no intention of restoring relations with a state whose existence they did not recognise. Mäe was useful to them, however, as a man with long-standing ties to Germany, an enemy of Päts’s authoritarian regime and a politician ready to cooperate without setting the kind of conditions Uluots had insisted on. He arrived in Tallinn on 29 August. Alongside him, the directors of the Self-Administration were Oskar Angelus, responsible for internal affairs, the municipal police and construction; Alfred Wendt, for the economy, finance and transport; Otto Leesment, for social affairs and health; and Hans Saar, for agriculture. County governors and mayors were appointed by the same order. The authorisation stated explicitly that the rear-area commander could amend or annul any decision of the Self-Administration.

From military rule to the Reichskommissariat

On 14 October 1941 the Self-Administration restored in Estonia the laws of the republic as they had stood before 21 June 1940, that is, before the Soviet takeover, insofar as they did not conflict with German law. For many Estonians this was an important gesture, but it did not alter the fact that the last word belonged to the occupier. On 5 December 1941 Estonia was transferred from Wehrmacht control to civil administration. At Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn a representative of Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse installed Karl-Siegmund Litzmann, son of a First World War general and an old SA activist, as Generalkommissar. The country became the last of the four general districts of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, with its capital in Riga, and Mäe, whom Litzmann reconfirmed along with the other directors, remained at the head of the Self-Administration. A similar role was played in Latvia, occupied earlier, by General Oskars Dankers, and in Lithuania by General Petras Kubiliūnas. Alongside the civil administration, and independent of it, operated the German police, subordinate through the SS and Police Leader in Tallinn to Heinrich Himmler.

The Self-Administration was therefore not a government, and Estonia was not even formally a protected state, as the Czech lands were. According to the findings of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, set up in 1998 by President Lennart Meri to investigate the crimes of both occupations, the directorate did not have complete freedom of action, but within the framework of German policy, including racial and economic policy, it enjoyed considerable autonomy. The commission also stressed that the posts of director were accepted voluntarily and that there is no evidence that anyone in the leadership of the Self-Administration acted under duress.

The police, the Omakaitse and the Holocaust

This autonomy had a grim side. Under the authority of the Self-Administration operated the Estonian political and criminal police and the Omakaitse, which on 1 December 1941 numbered more than 40,000 members. From July these formations, together with the German Sonderkommando 1a of Martin Sandberger, arrested and shot real and alleged communists, collaborators of the Soviet authorities, and Jews. Of the roughly 4,500 Estonian Jews, most had managed to flee or had been evacuated into the interior of the USSR. Those who remained, about a thousand people (929 according to the latest calculations), were killed by early 1942, and at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 Estonia was already listed as a country “free of Jews”. Between several hundred and a thousand Estonian Roma, according to various estimates, were also murdered. From the autumn of 1942 transports of Jews from Central Europe were brought to Estonia, most of whom were shot on arrival in the dunes of Kalevi-Liiva near the camp at Jägala, and in 1943–1944 thousands of Jews from the Lithuanian ghettos were held in the Vaivara and Klooga camps.

The orders and the organisation of the killings came from the Germans, but the Estonian commission found that some 1,000 to 1,200 members of the Omakaitse, a few per cent of the formation, took a direct part in the crimes: round-ups, escorting prisoners, guarding camps and executions. It judged most severely the senior officials of the Self-Administration itself: it concluded that by virtue of the posts they held they shared with the German authorities responsibility for all the crimes committed in Estonia, as well as for the acts of military units and police battalions formed with their consent outside its borders. According to the commission’s findings, some 6,000 ethnic Estonians and some 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war also died in Estonia during the German occupation.

Place in the war

Mäe’s Self-Administration lasted throughout the German occupation and in time became above all an instrument of recruitment. In August 1942, on the anniversary of the German entry into Tallinn, the formation of the Estonian SS Legion was announced, and Mäe called on volunteers to join it. When volunteers ran short, the Self-Administration in 1943–1944 announced the call-up of successive age groups for service in the Waffen-SS, in police battalions and for forced labour, which the commission deemed unlawful. Thousands of young men fled to Finland to escape conscription. In February 1944, when the Red Army reached the Narva, even Uluots backed the mobilisation in a radio address, hoping that Estonian soldiers would be able to defend the country until the end of the war. The conscripts formed the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.

In September 1944 the Germans abandoned mainland Estonia; Litzmann left on 17 September, and Mäe fled to the Reich. A few days before the Red Army entered Tallinn, Uluots appointed the government of Otto Tief, which tried to proclaim the restoration of the independent state but could not hold on. After the war Mäe spent two years in Allied internment camps, was questioned as a witness at Nuremberg and never stood trial. He died in Graz in 1978. In Estonian memory, in which the German occupation long remained in the shadow of the Soviet one, Mäe’s Self-Administration became after 1991 one of the most difficult subjects: an example of collaboration that began with the hope of rebuilding the state and ended in complicity in the Holocaust and in sending young Estonians to the front under German command.