For over 700 years Baltic Germans called Estonia
home. The first Germans came in the 12th
Century with the Christianisation of Eastern and Northern Europe and further
waves of German-speaking merchants, crusaders and missionaries came in the
decades that followed. Their descendants
would later make up the local German-speaking population which remained in
Estonia and Latvia for countless generations thereafter.
The Baltic Germans formed the social, political and
commercial elite in the territories which later became Estonia and Latvia. The descendants of the crusaders formed the
population of feudal landowners and the traders’ descendants formed the urban
elite. Indigenous Estonians and Latvians
were for many centuries serfs and did not enjoy the same rights that the German
minority did. As influential as the
Germans were, they never comprised more than 10% of the local population.
Both Estonia and Latvia have been occupied by
foreign empires for most of their documented histories including the Danish,
Swedish and Russian empires and later the Soviet Union. The German minority managed to hold on to
their hegemony throughout the centuries, even as the lands they controlled fell
to other powers. The various empires
essentially gave them free rein or stewardship over the lands. Their privileged position came to an end with
the rise of Estonian and Latvian nationalism in the early 20th
Century and the birth of the independent Baltic States. Since the Germans had lived relatively
peacefully alongside the respective indigenous populations, many of them stayed
and took on either Estonian or Latvian citizenship, successfully integrating
into life in the young independent republics.
Many Baltic Germans intermarried with the local populations over the
centuries and their descendants came to love Estonia and Latvia as their own
countries, despite their German ethnicity.
The rise of Nazism in Germany and Stalinism in the
Soviet Union would, however, permanently alter the destiny of the Baltic
Germans. Hitler’s rise to power in the
1930s and ambitions of conquering Europe led him to sign a secret pact with
Stalin known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fell under the Soviet “sphere of
influence” and Hitler successfully persuaded the great majority of Baltic
Germans to resettle in newly conquered Polish lands which had been annexed to
the German Reich, before the Soviet invasion which occurred in 1940. Any Baltic German who wanted to emigrate
could.
Many Germans did not want to leave the only home
they had ever known with the first wave but once the Soviets had occupied the
Baltic countries, many Germans got a taste of how horrific life would be under
Soviet rule and petitioned the German government to be allowed to
resettle. This resulted in a second wave
of resettlement to the new “German” lands known as the Nachsiedlung and effectively emptied the Baltic region of nearly
all its ethnic Germans.
Soviet occupation after WWII from 1945 to 1991 meant
that the Baltic Germans never returned and ceased to exist as a separate ethnic
group. However, their legacy in Estonia
and Latvia remains with the many manor houses they built, language (30% of Estonian
vocabulary comes from Low German), work ethic and Lutheran Christianity.
© Tania Lestal 2014
Baltic Germans leaving Estonia in 1939
Baltic German resettlement