Lithuania

Lithuania (capital in 1939, Kaunas), the largest and most southerly of the three Baltic States, started the Second World War as an independent republic and ended it as an involuntary component of the USSR.

In 1939, Lithuania was ruled by the nationalist dictatorship of A. Smetona. Unlike Estonia and Latvia, it had enjoyed good relations with Moscow, largely through shared antipathies against Poland. Its main concerns centred on its frustrated claims to Wilno, the historic capital of Lithuania which had been annexed by Poland in 1922 and whose large Polish majority wished to remain in Poland, and on German claims to Memelland. Lithuania was a member of the League of Nations. Its independence had been established by a bilateral treaty signed with the USSR in July 1920, and confirmed by the Soviet–Lithuanian Non-aggression Pact, signed on 28 September 1926 and prolonged in 1934 for a ten-year period to 1944.

Lithuania's vulnerability was underlined in January 1939 when a Polish ultimatum forced an end to the state of war which had formally persisted ever since the start of the dispute over Wilno in 1920. It was fully exposed on 22 March 1939 when German forces seized and annexed Memelland.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact initially assigned Lithuania to Germany's sphere of influence. But during the invasion of Poland in September, Soviet troops occupied Wilno; and the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Demarcation of 28 September secretly transferred the whole of Lithuania to the Soviet sphere. As a result, Moscow's demands for the conclusion of a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the Lithuanian government in Kaunas were supported by an apparently generous offer—to hand Wilno over in return for permission to station Soviet troops on Lithuanian territory.

However, when the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty was activated in June 1940, the entry of the Red Army was soon followed by subversive agitation against the Lithuanian government; by widespread arrests and killings; by fraudulent elections conducted by the Soviet security organs (see NKVD); and by the declaration of a Lithuanian SSR that was formally admitted to the Soviet Union on 5 August 1940.

The first Soviet occupation ( June 1940– June 1941) was a time of mass terror, when all of Lithuania's native institutions were destroyed. Repressions were also directed against everyone connected with the former Polish state. The German population was deported to Germany.

The German occupation ( June 1941– July 1944) saw Lithuania incorporated into the Reich Commissariat Ostland. Lithuanian police and military units were formed under German command, and served on the Eastern Front. A Lithuanian Division was recruited for the Waffen-SS. The large Jewish community was concentrated, especially in the ghettos of Wilno and Kaunas, and then killed. Elements of the Polish Home Army (see Poland, 4) were active in underground resistance, and participated in the liberation of Wilno.

The second Soviet occupation, which began in April 1944, was accompanied by a renewed wave of terror: by forced collectivization of the peasantry: by the deportation of most remaining Poles: and by persecution of the Catholic Church (see also religion).

Lithuania's population was diminished by at least 25% by the deportations and repressions, and by the loss of its German, Jewish, and Polish elements, but, unlike Estonia and Latvia, it was not subjected to a major post-war influx of Russians.

Norman Davies