Uluots's appeal

On 19 August 1944 Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister of Estonia, went on the radio for the second time that year to appeal to his compatriots. In February he had called on men to report for the German call-up; now, with Soviet forces having broken through the front in southern Estonia and approaching Tartu, he urged the soldiers in German uniform, and those who were evading service, that the only way to save the nation was to stop the Red Army. That same day Estonian volunteers who had spent the past year and a half fighting in the Finnish army arrived in the port of Paldiski.

Popular summaries call Uluots “acting head of state” and claim that he called on conscripts to hold back the Russians “until a peace treaty with Germany was signed”. Both points need explanation. Under the Estonian constitution, Uluots was from 21 June 1940 the “prime minister performing the duties of president”; that was how he himself, the underground national committee and Estonian diplomats in the West saw it, but neither Germany nor the USSR recognised this authority. And the known passages of the speech say nothing of peace with Germany. Uluots said that there was “no second or third possibility” of saving the nation other than one: not to allow the Bolsheviks to occupy the country. Behind this appeal, however, lay a calculation that historians attribute to Uluots from the beginning of the year: by fighting, the Estonians were to survive until the end of the war and win Western support for independence, as in 1918–1920, when the country’s fate was settled only at the negotiating table.

The date of 19 August appears in the chronicle of the Estonian parliament and in historians’ studies; the text of the speech was printed the following day by the newspaper Eesti Sõna. One bibliographical listing, based on a reprint in the daily Uus Elu of 20 August, dates the address to 17 August.

The front in southern Estonia

From February 1944 the main fighting for Estonia took place in the north, in the Battle of Narva. At the end of July Army Detachment Narva fell back to the Tannenberg Line on the Sinimäed hills, where it repulsed the assaults of the Leningrad Front; on 10 August Marshal Leonid Govorov broke off the offensive. Meanwhile the threat came from the south. After the defeat of Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944, Soviet forces had reached Latvia, and the flank of Army Group North between Lake Peipus and the Gulf of Riga was thinly held.

On 10 August the 67th Army of General Ivan Maslennikov’s 3rd Baltic Front broke through the defences of the German XXVIII Corps, and on 13 August it took Võru. On 16 August General Aleksei Grechkin’s group crossed the lake, routed the units of the Estonian Omakaitse Home Guard defending the shore and seized a bridgehead near Mehikoorma. The road to Tartu, the country’s second city and seat of its university, lay open. The Germans patched up the front with improvised battle groups, police units, the Omakaitse and Estonian border guard regiments, made up largely of conscripts from the February mobilisation. It was at this moment that Uluots spoke.

The second speech

The speech of 19 August, as Estonian historians note, was far less well known than the February one. Uluots did not announce a new mobilisation in it, but explained why fighting alongside the Germans was the only possible and at the same time sensible choice. He tried to give the soldiers a sense that they were fighting their own war, not someone else’s: “Not a herd of slaves, not mercenaries, but a small, sober northern nation is fighting today for its right to life, its living space and its freedom,” he said. He assured them that the whole country stood behind the front, and called on those who were hiding from the call-up, “if they wish to be Estonians and to remain Estonians”, to return “to the right path, to the ranks of the fighters”.

Behind the prime minister stood the underground National Committee of the Estonian Republic. Its manifesto, dated 23 June, proclaimed the continuity of the state and the illegality of the Soviet annexation, and in mid-August Uluots’s deputy, Otto Tief, became chairman of the committee. In the West the committee presented the February mobilisation as forced and unlawful, while at home its members – liberals and socialists who as late as the autumn of 1943 had advised against serving the Germans – supported it as a patriotic necessity. The author of an article on the committee’s “impossible mission”, published in the Estonian monthly Vikerkaar, regarded this duality as something that must not be passed over: the committee’s liberal-democratic aspirations and its sympathy for the West were sincere, but the history of the committee and of the later Tief government cannot be told without the German uniform.

The return of the “Finnish boys”

The second event of the day was the return of the volunteers from Finland. Several thousand young Estonians, evading the German call-up, had crossed the Gulf of Finland in 1943–1944 and joined the Finnish army. In February 1944 Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim formed them into Infantry Regiment 200 (JR 200); in May it numbered 1,973 Estonians and 361 Finns. Estonians called these soldiers soomepoisid, “the Finnish boys”. According to Estonian studies, some 3,500 Estonians served in all in the Finnish army and navy, of whom about 200 were killed.

At the beginning of August the situation changed on both sides of the Gulf. On 1 August Finnish radio announced that President Risto Ryti was stepping down; Finland was preparing for talks on leaving the war. The next day the Estonian envoy in Helsinki, Aleksander Warma, announced that the national committee had sent a telegram: “Estonians, come home!” A request, signed among others by Captain Karl Talpak and Warma, was submitted to the Finnish government to send the regiment back to Estonia fully armed. The Finns disbanded JR 200 and let the volunteers choose. The Germans promised an amnesty to those who had earlier evaded the call-up. Despite the uncertainty – the volunteers wanted to fight as a single unit, and it was unclear whether the Germans would agree to this – according to Finnish and Estonian sources roughly nine out of ten decided to return.

According to Estonian studies, the volunteers reached the port of Paldiski on 19 August; because the crossing of the Gulf took several days, some listings give a broader date for the return, 17–19 August. Their reception was not warm. The German command distrusted men who had recently fled its call-up, and scattered them among training camps and different sectors of the front instead of forming them into a single regiment. Some of them joined the Estonian grenadier regiment of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS as a battalion and were soon thrown into the front near Tartu.

The battle on the Emajõgi

The appeal and the return of the volunteers coincided with the heaviest phase of the fighting for southern Estonia. On 25 August, after street fighting, Soviet troops took Tartu and seized a bridgehead on the north bank of the Emajõgi river. The bombing and fighting destroyed, among other things, Raadi Manor, the main building of the Estonian National Museum, and seriously damaged the university. German and Estonian units – among them the “Finnish boys” – went over to the counter-attack. On 28 August, at Pupastvere, a battalion made up of the returning volunteers lost 34 killed and 170 wounded, according to Estonian figures. By 30 August the counter-offensive had eliminated the bridgehead of two Soviet divisions west of the city and recaptured the bridge at Kärevere. The front on the Emajõgi stabilised until mid-September. For the Estonians fighting on the German side this was their last defensive success on their own soil: for a few weeks the Red Army was held on the line of the river.

Place in the war

The calculation on which the appeal of 19 August rested did not come true. Uluots was playing for time: hoping that the front would hold until the end of the war and that the Western powers would stand up for the Baltic states. Instead, his fate was sealed by decisions taken outside Estonia. On 4 September Finland ceased hostilities with the USSR, and holding mainland Estonia became pointless for the Germans. From mid-September Army Group North evacuated by sea and land to Latvia. In the chaos of the retreat Uluots, already ill with stomach cancer, appointed a government on 18 September with Otto Tief as deputy prime minister; the Estonian flag was raised on the Tall Hermann tower in Tallinn, and the government tried to proclaim the restoration of the state. On 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn; Tief and most of his ministers fell into the hands of the NKVD over the following weeks, while Uluots himself escaped to Sweden, where he died on 9 January 1945.

The “Finnish boys” fought their last battle for Tallinn at Pääsküla on 22 September; many of them later ended up in Soviet prisons and labour camps, while others hid in the forests for years. The August speech remained in the shadow of the February one. In Estonian memory, both of Uluots’s addresses belong to the story of the choice “between two occupations”, and for historians they are evidence that even leaders who were counting on the West saw no other path in 1944 than fighting in German ranks. In legal terms, however, Uluots is remembered above all as a link in the continuity of the Republic of Estonia: the office of prime minister performing the duties of president passed after him to the leaders of the Estonian exile community, and in 1992 the last of them handed over his credentials to the president of the restored state.