Jüri Uluots calls for mobilisation

On 7 February 1944 Jüri Uluots, the last prime minister of Estonia appointed in accordance with the constitution before the Soviet occupation, made a radio speech calling on the men covered by the mobilisation proclaimed under the occupiers to report to the recruiting stations. Only a few months earlier he himself had advised his compatriots against serving under German command. He changed his mind because the Red Army had reached the Narva, and Estonians once again faced the prospect of the Soviet occupation they had known in 1940–1941. His appeal turned a call-up that had so far been met with reluctance into a mass rush to enlist.

Some chronologies speak of a “radio interview” and describe Uluots as “acting head of state”. It was, however, a speech, not an interview, and the title needs explaining: under the Estonian constitution, from 21 June 1940 Uluots was “prime minister acting as president”. That was how he and the Estonian diplomats in the West saw it, but neither Germany nor the USSR recognised this authority, and in the occupied country he held no office at all.

The front returns to the Narva

In January 1944 the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts launched the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive. The siege of Leningrad was broken for good, and Army Group North fell back to the Panther Line, under construction since the autumn and anchored on the Narva and Lake Peipus. On 2 February Soviet units reached the river and seized bridgeheads on its western bank. This was the start of the fighting at Narva, which grew into the six-month Battle of Narva. The inhabitants of Narva were evacuated.

For Estonians it was a moment of dread. Since October 1939 Soviet garrisons had been stationed in their country; in June 1940 their state ceased to be independent, in August the USSR annexed it, and a year of Soviet rule brought arrests, executions and the June deportation of 1941. President Konstantin Päts and Commander-in-Chief Johan Laidoner were deported deep into Russia. In the summer of 1941 Estonians, especially the Forest Brothers, took up arms themselves in the Summer War, and many of them greeted the arrival of the Germans as liberation. The Germans, however, did not restore the state. On 29 July 1941 in Tartu Uluots asked in vain for permission to form a government and a national army; instead the occupiers set up Hjalmar Mäe’s Self-Administration, subordinate to the Reichskommissariat Ostland.

From volunteers to conscription

Estonians had served on the German side since 1941, initially in rear-security and police battalions and in the Omakaitse Home Guard. On 28 August 1942 the creation of the Estonian SS Legion was announced, but there were fewer volunteers than had been hoped. In 1943 the occupation authorities therefore began calling up entire age groups: in February men born in 1919–1924, who were to choose between the labour service and the Legion, and in the autumn those born in 1925. The Legion grew into a brigade, and on 24 January 1944 this was expanded into the 20th Estonian SS Volunteer Division, later the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian), under the command of Franz Augsberger.

The call-up was resented. Many young men went into hiding, and according to various estimates some 3,000–3,500 crossed the Gulf of Finland to Finland. They wanted to fight the USSR, but in Finnish rather than German uniform. Some of them remembered that several thousand Finnish volunteers had fought in Estonia’s War of Independence in 1918–1920.

Uluots opposed these call-ups. His reasoning was that Estonians would be shedding their blood for someone else’s cause, in a war in which Germany denied them a state, and that after the Reich’s defeat they would be left without an army and without allies. Many pre-war politicians thought the same, pinning their hopes on a victory of the Western Allies and on a repeat of the scenario of 1918, when an independent state had emerged between a collapsing Germany and the advancing Bolsheviks.

The mobilisation of 1 February

At the turn of January and February 1944 the Germans decided to draw on every man fit for service. On 1 February Hjalmar Mäe, on behalf of the Self-Administration, proclaimed a general mobilisation of men born in 1904–1923 – twenty age groups. Older men were directed to the Omakaitse. Estonia and Latvia were the only countries occupied by Germany in which the non-German-speaking population was subjected to general conscription in this way. Formally, the basis was a decision of the Estonian Self-Administration, which had no electoral mandate whatsoever. The post-war Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity judged this conscription to have been unlawful.

The occupiers knew that after the experience of 1943 an order from Mäe’s Self-Administration alone would not be enough, and they wanted the voice of someone whom Estonians regarded as their legitimate leader. Uluots, for his part, concluded that the situation had changed fundamentally: Soviet troops stood on the border, and the country might be occupied again before any decisions on the future of the Baltic states were taken in the West.

The speech

On 7 February Uluots spoke on the German-controlled radio. He did not call for a fight for the Reich or for National Socialism. He said that answering the mobilisation was, at that moment, unavoidable and that only in this way could a better future for Estonia be hoped for. He also added a sentence that his listeners understood without difficulty: an Estonian army on Estonian soil had a significance “far wider” than he could or would reveal there. The point was that when Germany collapsed, Estonia should have its own armed force, capable of defending its borders until the end of the war and of serving as a bargaining chip in talks about the country’s future. Estonian accounts present the speech as recognising the fighting of Estonian units alongside the Germans as defence of the homeland against Soviet aggression, not as a German war.

The appeal worked. According to the historians Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, some 38,000 men reported to the recruiting stations. The Estonian historical commission gives about 32,000 called up after Uluots’s appeal, while other accounts speak of about 45,000. The differences stem from who is counted: conscripts alone, volunteers, or also men sent to the Omakaitse. The conscripts were used to bring the 20th SS Division up to strength and to form border guard regiments, which from the spring defended the coast and sectors of the front on the Narva and Lake Peipus. Those mobilised who did not want to wear SS uniform quickly learned that they had no choice: a German recruiting officer declared that it was the occupier who decided where a conscript would go. In all, according to various estimates, 50,000–60,000 men were serving in Estonian units under German command in the summer of 1944, and over the course of the war at least 70,000 Estonians served in German formations.

The Finnish boys

The appeal also reached Estonians in Finland. The volunteers who had been crossing the gulf since the spring of 1943 served at first in a battalion of the 47th Infantry Regiment. On 8 February 1944, the day after Uluots’s speech, Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim ordered them to be formed into a separate 200th Infantry Regiment (JR 200). Estonians called its soldiers soomepoisid, “the Finnish boys”. At the beginning of May the regiment numbered 1,973 Estonians and 361 Finns, and its motto was “For Finland’s freedom and Estonia’s honour”. In the summer of 1944 it fought on the Karelian Isthmus around the Bay of Viipuri (Vyborg).

Uluots and the Estonian pro-independence circles hoped that all these forces, in Estonia and in Finland, would come together on Estonian soil at the decisive moment. In August 1944, as Finland prepared to leave the war and the Red Army was breaking through the front in southern Estonia, most of the “Finnish boys” did indeed return home. The Germans promised them an amnesty, and about 1,800 of them were drafted into the 20th SS Division.

A choice between two occupations

Uluots’s decision captures the position of the Baltic nations in 1944. They could not choose freedom; at most they could choose which occupier to fight against, and for what purpose. Germany had taken away Estonia’s statehood and plundered its economy, and with the participation of local police and the Omakaitse had murdered Estonia’s Jews and Roma. The USSR had destroyed the state in 1940–1941 and deported tens of thousands of people, and now it was coming back. Uluots had no intention of supporting Germany; he wanted to use its mobilisation for aims that the Germans did not recognise. And the Western Allies gave the Estonians no guarantees.

For the conscripts the choice was even simpler and at the same time harsher: report, hide in the forest, or flee across the sea. Most of those who reported believed they were defending their own homes against the return of Soviet rule, and that is how most Estonians judge them today. At the same time they fought in German uniform and under German command, and their resistance prolonged the Third Reich’s rule over the country and over the forced labour camps on its territory. Both these truths sit side by side in Estonian memory.

Place in the war

Estonian units strengthened by the mobilisation took part in the heavy fighting on the Narva – in the battles for the bridgeheads in February and March, and in July and August in the defence of the Sinimäed hills on the Tannenberg Line. The front held until September 1944, when Army Group North left mainland Estonia. In the chaos of the retreat Uluots, by then ill with stomach cancer, appointed the government of Otto Tief on 18 September, which tried to proclaim the restoration of the state. Four days later the Red Army took Tallinn. Uluots fled to Sweden, where he died on 9 January 1945.

The men who heeded his call paid a heavy price. Thousands were killed at the front; some withdrew with the Germans and fought on until the end of the war; others hid in the forests and joined the post-war Forest Brothers partisans. Veterans of German formations who stayed in the country or fell into Soviet captivity went through the Gulag camps and repression. In the West their status was long disputed, because the Nuremberg Tribunal had declared the SS a criminal organisation. In 1950, however, the US Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Baltic Waffen-SS units should be treated as separate and distinct from the German SS, since most of their soldiers had been conscripted.

The speech of 7 February 1944 itself has remained a point of reference in Estonia: for some, proof that the fighting on the Narva was a fight for the country; for others, a warning of how hard it is for a small nation to keep its own cause when it must take the side of one of two occupiers.