German occupation of Estonia during World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  The German occupation of Estonia during World War II began in the summer of 1941 and lasted until 1944, a period that would leave a permanent mark on a small nation caught between two totalitarian powers. Just one week before German troops crossed into Estonian territory, Soviet authorities had deported tens of thousands of people from Estonia and the other lands the USSR had seized since 1939. When German soldiers arrived, many Estonians welcomed them with open arms. The question that hung over every Estonian in those years was not whether an occupier would rule them, but which occupier, and what that choice would cost. What followed was three years of exploitation, mass murder, and a desperate scramble by Estonian leaders to preserve some thread of national continuity. The story of those years runs from the forests where Estonian partisans fought the Red Army, to the corridors of Stockholm where an underground government kept its papers in order, to the concentration camps where thousands of lives ended. It is a story about a people trying to survive between two powers that neither recognized their right to exist.

• 2. The Forest Brothers Rise

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, the same day Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union, a group of Estonian Forest Brothers attacked Soviet trucks in the district of Harju. They did not wait for German forces to cross the border, which did not happen until July 7-9. The Forest Brothers numbered around 50,000 in Estonia, and their resistance against the retreating Soviets was devastating: as many as 4,800 Soviet troops were killed and 14,000 captured. Many of these fighters were Estonian border guards who had previously fought for an independent Estonia and now slipped back into the forests rather than serve the Red Army. The writer Juhan Jaik captured the mood in 1941 when he noted that bogs and forests had become more populated than farms and fields, with the forests serving as Estonian territory and the farms occupied by the enemy. When German troops approached Tartu on July 10, they found Estonian partisans already engaged with Soviet forces. Rather than join the fight, the Wehrmacht stopped its advance and let the Estonians handle it. Under the leadership of Friedrich Kurg, the partisans drove the Soviets from Tartu on their own, while inside Tartu Prison the Soviets killed 192 citizens before the city fell. Both German and Estonian forces took Narva on August 17 and Tallinn on August 28, the day Fred Ise replaced the Soviet flag on Pikk Hermann with the Estonian one.

• 3. Illusions of Liberation

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  Estonia had gained independence in 1918, carved free from the warring German and Russian Empires. That memory was vivid in 1941. As soon as the Soviet regime retreated, Estonia formed a provisional administration led by Jüri Uluots, the last constitutional prime minister, before German troops even arrived. The hope was real. It was also quickly extinguished. Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and himself a Baltic German born in Tallinn, had laid out his plans for the region in April 1941. His framework called for Germanization of those deemed racially suitable, colonization by Germanic settlers, and the exile or deportation of everyone else. Rosenberg considered Estonians the most Germanic people in the Baltic area, estimating they had reached fifty percent Germanization through centuries of Danish, Swedish, and German influence. The other fifty percent were to be relocated to a region he called "Peipusland" to make way for German colonists. The provisional Estonian government was dissolved. The territory was organized on the 5th of December 1941 as Generalbezirk Estland, subordinated to the Reichskommissariat Ostland. A Sicherheitspolizei was established under Ain-Ervin Mere to handle internal security. The draft was introduced in 1942, and some 3,400 men chose to flee across the Gulf of Finland to fight in the Finnish Army rather than serve under German command.

• 4. Estonians in German Uniform

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  On the 28th of August 1942, the German authorities announced the formation of what they called the Estonian Legion within the Waffen SS. Oberführer Franz Augsberger was named its commander. By the end of 1942, about 1,280 men had volunteered into the training camp. The first 800 to complete training at Heidelager formed Bataillon Narwa, which was sent in April 1943 to Ukraine to join Division Wiking, replacing a Finnish volunteer battalion recalled for political reasons. In March 1943, a partial mobilization conscripted 12,000 more men into the SS. On the 5th of May 1943, the 3rd Waffen-SS Brigade (Estonian) was formed and sent to the front near Nevel. By early 1944, as the Red Army pushed the front back almost to the old Estonian border, the calculus changed for many Estonians. Jüri Uluots, who had previously opposed German mobilization of Estonians, delivered a radio address on February 7, urging all able-bodied men born from 1904 through 1923 to report for military service. Following that address, 38,000 conscripts crowded registration centers. The maximum number of Estonians enrolled in German military units reached 70,000. Many hoped that by resisting the Soviet re-entry, they might attract Allied support and eventually recover their interwar independence. The original volunteer Legion had by 1944 grown into a full conscript division, the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian), whose units fought along the Narva line throughout that year.

• 5. The Battle of Narva

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  The advance guard units of the 2nd Shock Army reached the Estonian border on the 1st of February 1944 as part of the Kingisepp-Gdov Offensive. Field Marshal Walter Model commanded the German Army Group North. The Soviet Narva Offensive, running from the 15th to the 28th of February and led by General Leonid A. Govorov of the Leningrad Front, was met by a counterattack on February 24, Estonian Independence Day, aimed at breaking Soviet bridgeheads. A battalion led by Rudolf Bruus destroyed one bridgehead; another under Ain-Ervin Mere succeeded at Vaasa-Siivertsi-Vepsaküla. The Leningrad Front eventually concentrated nine corps at Narva against seven divisions and one brigade. On March 17, twenty Soviet divisions attacked the three defending divisions at Auvere and were repelled again. The 658th Eastern Battalion under Alfons Rebane and the 659th Eastern Battalion under Georg Sooden were among the units that stopped the March 1-4 Narva Offensive. The Soviets launched yet another Narva Offensive on July 24, and after further fighting Narva was evacuated; the front settled on the Tannenberg Line in the Sinimäed Hills. Near Tartu, the 3rd Baltic Front was stopped by the Kampfgruppe Wagner, involving units from Narva under Alfons Rebane and Paul Vent alongside the 5th SS Volunteer Sturmbrigade Wallonien led by Léon Degrelle. When Finland left the war on the 4th of September 1944, the defence of the Estonian mainland became practically impossible, and the Germans decided to retreat. Resistance continued in the Moonsund Archipelago until the 23rd of November 1944, when the Germans evacuated the Sõrve Peninsula.

• 6. The Underground Government

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  In June 1942, political leaders who had survived Soviet repressions gathered secretly, somewhere hidden from the occupying authorities, to discuss forming an underground Estonian government and preserving the legal continuity of the republic. On the 6th of January 1943, a meeting at the Estonian foreign delegation in Stockholm concluded that Jüri Uluots, as the last constitutional prime minister, must continue to exercise his responsibilities to maintain that continuity. In June 1944, the elector's assembly of the Republic of Estonia gathered in secrecy in Tallinn and appointed Uluots as prime minister with the responsibilities of the President. On June 21, Uluots appointed Otto Tief as deputy prime minister. As German forces retreated in September 1944, Uluots formed a government led by Tief. On September 20, the Nazi German flag on Pikk Hermann was replaced with the Estonian tricolor. Two days later, on September 22, the Red Army took Tallinn and replaced the Estonian flag with the Soviet one. The underground government, recognized by neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union, fled to Stockholm and operated in exile. It did not dissolve. It continued until 1992, when Heinrich Mark, Prime Minister of the Republic of Estonia in duties of the President in exile, presented his credentials to the newly elected President Lennart Meri. On the 23rd of February 1989, the flag of the Estonian SSR had been lowered on Pikk Hermann; it was replaced with the Estonian flag the following day to mark Independence Day.

• 7. The Holocaust in Estonia

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  Alexander II of Russia granted Jews the right to settle in Estonia in 1865, and when the Republic of Estonia was created in 1918, approximately 200 Jews fought in combat for that republic, 70 of them as volunteers. On the 12th of February 1925, the Estonian government passed a law on the cultural autonomy of minority peoples. Estonian Jews numbered 3,045, just meeting the minimum threshold of 3,000 required for cultural autonomy, and in June 1926 the Jewish Cultural Council was elected and that autonomy declared. The Jewish National Endowment presented Estonia with a certificate of gratitude. By the time of the Soviet occupation in 1940, roughly 4,000 Estonian Jews lived in the country. The Cultural Autonomy was immediately abolished, institutions closed, and an estimated 350-500 Jews were deported to Siberia along with other Estonians. About three-fourths of Estonian Jewry managed to leave during that period. Of the approximately 4,300 Jews in Estonia before the war, almost 1,000 were trapped by the Nazis. Round-ups and killings began immediately after the first German troops arrived in 1941, closely followed by the extermination squad Sonderkommando 1a under Martin Sandberger, part of Einsatzgruppe A led by Walter Stahlecker. Estonia was declared Judenfrei at the Wannsee Conference. The number of Jews who remained and were killed was recorded as 921 by Sandberger, 929 by Evgenia Goorin-Loov, and 963 by Stahlecker; fewer than a dozen Estonian Jews are known to have survived the war inside Estonia. The Nazi regime additionally established 22 concentration and labor camps on occupied Estonian territory for Jews from other countries. The largest, Vaivara concentration camp, held 1,300 prisoners at a time. Several thousand foreign Jews were killed at the Kalevi-Liiva camp. Three Estonians have been honored as Righteous Among the Nations: Uku Masing, his wife Eha Masing, and Polina Lentsman.

• 8. Memory and Dispute

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  The human cost of the fighting over Estonian territory was staggering, and the numbers themselves remain contested. Soviet data places their casualties in the conquest of Estonia at 126,000; other estimates argue that the Battle of Narva alone cost the Soviets 480,000 casualties, given the intensity of the fighting. German figures show 30,000 dead on their side, a number some historians consider too low, with alternative estimates beginning at 45,000. The political meaning of those years is no less disputed. Estonian representatives at the European Parliament moved for a resolution acknowledging 48 years of occupation; the final resolution acknowledged only that Estonia lost independence from 1940 to 1991 and that the annexation was considered illegal by Western democracies. The Russian government's position, articulated by Kremlin European affairs chief Sergey Yastrzhembsky, was blunt: "There was no occupation." Russian officials described the events at the end of the war as liberation from fascism. Estonians who fought on opposite sides during the war saw it differently from each other. Ilmar Haaviste, who fought on the German side, said both regimes were equally evil and that Stalin was simply more cunning. Arnold Meri, who fought on the Soviet side, believed every Estonian faced one unavoidable choice: which side of the bloody fight to join. In 2004 the Monument of Lihula sparked controversy. In April 2007 the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn became the focal point for divergent histories. Seven ethnic Estonians, including Ralf Gerrets, Ain-Ervin Mere, Jaan Viik, Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas, Aleksander Laak, and Ervin Viks, have faced trials for crimes against humanity related to the killings at camps including Kalevi-Liiva.