Balts' Return

When Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler began signing agreements, diplomats guessed that there was more to the partnership than at first met the eye. They suspected the existence of secret clauses, annexes, even verbal understandings that were not made public. They were right. As events began to unravel, and perhaps as Dictator Stalin got unexpectedly grabby, he got a big slice of Poland. Not long thereafter the Eastern Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and perhaps Finland) became an uncontested sphere of Red imperialism. All told, Herr Hitler had won Russian "friendship," but it looked as though, so far, Tovarish Stalin had won the war.

Last week another curious and unannounced by-product of the Hitler-Stalin "agreements" came dramatically to light. As the advance guard of 21,000 Red Army troops, supported by 400 tanks, marched in to protect little Estonia from the threats of "imperialist adventurers," some 18,000 German-speaking Estonians, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and Hanseatic merchants who had settled in the Eastern Baltic six and seven centuries ago, made haste to get out. Further south, in Latvia, 60,000 Balts--as the Germans are known in the Baltic--simultaneously began a mass migration back to the "spiritual homeland" they have not known for centuries, while in Lithuania, where Russian troops are expected before long, a mass exodus of 40,000 "racial comrades" was to begin shortly.

On Short Notice. Astounding as it was that Adolf Hitler, exponent of Pan-Germanism, should relinquish so lightly one of the oldest European outposts of German commerce and culture, the details of this mass migration were even more amazing. The Balts first learned that they were to be sent back to Germany on a Saturday, when German diplomats first broached the subject to the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian Governments. On Sunday a special German Commission to arrange details arrived at Riga. On Friday ten German merchant vessels, the first contingent of 42 specially chartered ships, steamed into Riga Harbor to take home the first batch of refugees.

German schools and hospitals were abruptly closed. German theatres suddenly went dark. Shops owned by Germans were hastily shut, while their owners hurried to liquidate what they could. Some Balts simply packed their bags, locked up their houses and went to the steamers. In some places they were allowed to take along their personal effects and $22.50, the final liquidation of their property, which must amount to many millions of dollars, being left to the Commission. In Tallinn alone, 1,000 apartments and houses were already vacant and in Riga, where 40,000 Germans lived, the commercial district was almost deserted. German language newspapers folded. Among the famed journals of Riga was Das Baltikum, founded by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, chief of the Nazi Party's foreign political office and long regarded as the spiritual font of Naziism. The Hitler-Stalin collaboration has ended Baltic-born Dr. Rosenberg's dream of German eastward expansion at the expense of Russia, and the doctor is now rumored even to have lost the Fuehrer's friendship.

Roots. Amazing it was that one of the most violent and hasty uprootings of history did not evoke more protests, or even, apparently, more tears. The Balts seemed to take their removal to the Reich stoically, or even as a matter of course.

In Latvia the Balts were mostly merchants; in Estonia they were rich landlords and, until the recent land reforms, 600 German families had owned half the country; in Lithuania, they were mostly smalltime, fairly well-to-do farmers who had left Germany centuries ago.

Because of their superior economic position, their high standard of living, their separate educational system, they had long held a power far exceeding their numbers. They had become part & parcel of the political and social life of the countries of which they were only nominally citizens. As "capitalists," they could scarcely have welcomed the classless, propertyless society which Russia threatens to introduce in those Baltic States, and they would probably be the first to suffer in a hammer-&-sickle regime. Understandably, most Balts chose return to Germany as the lesser of two evils.

To Poland. What kind of life were they going to? The German radio announced they had a German job to perform, that they were to repopulate some of the newly won Polish areas, where the Reich needs "settlers capable of restoring German order." They were to be given property as nearly as possible like that which they left behind. At Gdynia, the port built by the late Polish Government, 14,000 apartments vacated by fleeing Poles awaited them. There the merchant class would presumably be set to work to build up a transformed, Germanized city.

Moreover, in what was once western Poland the Fuehrer would make room for those who wanted land in the Polish Corridor. The hundreds of thousands of Poles in the Corridor were to be pushed eastward into whatever rump Poland the Fuehrer decided to create. Later, some 80,000 Germans living in Russian Poland were expected to be exchanged for the Ukrainians and White Russians still left in German Poland. There were still further hints of greater mass migrations to come, of repatriating other widely scattered German populations in Europe: 800,000 in Rumania, 600,000 in Hungary, 600,000 in Yugoslavia, 1,100,000 in Russia.

Plan or Necessity? All this was in line with Fuehrer Hitler's policy of a "new order of ethnographic relations" in Eastern Europe in collaboration with Russia, as announced in his recent Reichstag speech. It was also consistent with mutual Soviet-German declarations that Hitlerism is for the Germans and Bolshevism for the Slavs, but that the two do not necessarily mix. But the unseemly haste with which the evacuation began suggested that here was a complicating detail of his new policy which the Fuehrer had overlooked until the last minute, and that, far from being planned, the transfer was the result of pure immediate necessity. Germany has long considered the Baltic a "German lake." Friendship with Joseph Stalin evidently comes high.

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