The loss of Ruhnu

On 15 December 1944 German troops left Ruhnu, a small island in the middle of the Gulf of Riga and the last scrap of Estonian territory still in the hands of the Third Reich. Four days later, on 19 December, Soviet troops appeared on the island. According to Estonian studies, it was the last part of the country to be occupied by the Red Army during the Second World War. The event had no operational significance – there was no fighting on Ruhnu – but symbolically it brought to an end the German occupation of Estonia, which had lasted since the summer of 1941.

War chronologies record under 15 December that the Germans evacuated the island of Ruhnu, their last outpost in Estonia, and that Soviet troops occupied it on 19 December. Both dates are confirmed by Estonian historical calendars. It should be added, however, that the sources say very little about the German post itself and its withdrawal: they give neither the size of the garrison nor the course of the evacuation.

A Swedish island in the Gulf of Riga

Ruhnu (Swedish and German: Runö; Latvian: Roņu sala) covers only about 11.9 km². It lies some 37 km from the coast of Courland, and thus closer to Latvia than to any point in the rest of Estonia. The island’s highest point, the hill of Håubjärre, rises about 30 m above sea level. Since 1877 it has carried a steel lighthouse guiding ships through the Irbe Strait and the Gulf of Riga. Administratively the island belonged, and still belongs, to Saare County.

For centuries its inhabitants were almost exclusively Estonian Swedes. They had been settling on the island since at least the 14th century, and the first written mention of Ruhnu dates from 1341. They lived by seal hunting, fishing and small-scale farming, governed themselves by traditional Swedish law and spoke their own dialect, known as runömål. The island has a wooden church from 1644, regarded as the oldest surviving wooden religious building in Estonia. In 1934 Ruhnu had 282 inhabitants, 98 per cent of them Swedes.

After the First World War, during which the island was occupied by German troops (1915–1918), Ruhnu was claimed by both Latvia and Sweden. The islanders, however, opted for the newly founded Republic of Estonia, which took over the island in 1919. The Estonian state courted the islanders’ loyalty: identity documents were issued to them for a token fee, and the men were allowed to do their military service on the island.

Two occupations

In the summer of 1940 Ruhnu, together with the whole of Estonia, was occupied and annexed to the USSR. In July 1941, as the Wehrmacht approached Pärnu, the islanders overthrew Soviet rule on 9 July: they imprisoned the lighthouse crew, dissolved the executive committee, restored the parish council and hoisted the blue, black and white Estonian flag on the lighthouse. The rising was short-lived. According to some accounts, Soviet aircraft bombed the island on 6 August, and on 7 August more than 500 men of the NKVD destruction battalions landed there. The leaders were arrested; of the seven men taken away, five – according to Estonian studies – were murdered in Kuressaare during the mass executions of prisoners before the Red Army’s retreat from Saaremaa. Soviet troops left the island on 7 September, and on 28 September 1941 it was taken by the Germans – at the time when the Wehrmacht was capturing the Estonian islands.

Under German occupation Ruhnu lay on the margins of the war. The Germans kept a small garrison on the island; the available studies give neither its strength nor its unit. For the inhabitants, however, what mattered most was the conscription of men – during the war Estonian Swedes were called up first into the Red Army and then into the German forces – and the fear of a return of Soviet rule, of which the islanders had already had bitter experience in 1941.

Flight to Sweden

The islanders began leaving Ruhnu in the autumn of 1943. In November the first group, numbering about 75 people according to various sources, moved to Sweden. Over the following months others sailed away in their own boats. Departures of Estonian Swedes from the whole coast at that time took place with the consent of the German authorities and with Swedish support. The last large transport left on 4 August 1944: the motor schooner Juhan carried almost all the remaining inhabitants to Sweden. According to Estonian studies, 255 people from Ruhnu left in this way in 1943–1944, and only two families remained on the island. The abandoned farms were taken over by caretakers brought in mainly from Saaremaa and the island of Kihnu. Some of them soon fled as well.

Ruhnu shared the fate of the entire Swedish minority in Estonia. According to Swedish figures, there were 6,554 Estonian Swedes in Sweden on 8 June 1945. A community that had lived on the coast and islands of Estonia for six centuries had practically ceased to exist there. So when the Germans withdrew in December 1944, almost none of the island’s former inhabitants were left.

The end of the fighting for the Estonian islands

The fate of Ruhnu had been decided earlier and elsewhere. On 14 September 1944 the Red Army launched its offensive in the Baltic states. On 22 September it entered Tallinn, and at the end of the month it began landings on the West Estonian Archipelago. At the beginning of October it took Hiiumaa and within a few days overran most of Saaremaa, the German defence holding out only on the Sõrve peninsula. Meanwhile, on 10 October, troops of the 1st Baltic Front reached the Baltic near Klaipėda. Army Group North was cut off from East Prussia and shut in Courland. On the night of 23/24 November the Germans evacuated Sõrve, and the whole of Saaremaa fell into Soviet hands.

After the fall of Sõrve, Ruhnu became a German outpost of no significance whatsoever. It lay deep in the Gulf of Riga, all of whose shores except those of Courland were already controlled by the Red Army, and Riga had been in Soviet hands since mid-October. Keeping a post on the island no longer served any purpose, so the Germans withdrew it on 15 December. On 19 December Soviet troops occupied Ruhnu. Estonian calendars record that day as the moment when the last part of Estonia came under the control of the USSR.

Place in the war

The occupation of Ruhnu was a footnote to the great offensive in which the Germans lost Estonia, Lithuania and most of Latvia. For Estonia, however, it marked the end of one occupation and the beginning of another, which lasted until 1991. The Soviet authorities declared void the agreements under which the new settlers had been looking after the Swedish refugees’ farms. The land and buildings were taken over by the state, and in 1949 a collective farm was set up on the island, a fishing one from 1951. A Soviet unit operating a radar station was also stationed on Ruhnu.

The Germans held out in Courland, a few dozen kilometres from the island, until the capitulation in May 1945. The former inhabitants of Ruhnu and their descendants founded an association in Sweden, Runöbornas förening, which keeps alive the memory of the island’s culture. After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, the houses and land were returned to their pre-war owners or their heirs, most of whom lived in Sweden. Few of them returned for good. Ruhnu is today the smallest municipality in Estonia, with a little over a hundred inhabitants.