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The occupation of the Baltic states was a period of annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by the Soviet Union from 1940 until its dissolution in 1991.For a brief period, Nazi Germany occupied the Baltic states after it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Between 23 January and 5 May 1945, up to 250,000 Germans, primarily from East Prussia, Pomerania, and the Baltic states, were evacuated to Nazi-occupied Denmark, [89] [90] based on an order issued by Hitler on 4 February 1945. [91] When the war ended, the German refugee population in Denmark amounted to 5% of the total Danish population.
In 1939, the British and French tried to arrange a "guarantee" of the Baltic states to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states would have preferred to remain neutral, but the only security systems on offer were German or Soviet. [27] In June 1939, Estonia and Latvia yielded to German pressure and signed non-aggression pacts. [28]
Baltic Germans (German: Deutsch-Balten or Deutschbalten, later Baltendeutsche) are ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their resettlement in 1945 after the end of World War II , Baltic Germans have markedly declined as a geographically determined ethnic group in the region.
15 June 1941, The Governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, declares 15 June to be Baltic States Day. 22 June 1941 Germany enacts Operation Barbarossa, invades Soviet Union. In Soviet historiography, start of World War II as the Great Patriotic War. 24–25 June 1941 Soviet authorities massacre political prisoners in Rainiai, Lithuania.
Territorial changes of the Baltic states refers to the redrawing of borders of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after 1940. The three republics, formerly autonomous regions within the former Russian Empire and before that of former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and as provinces of the Swedish Empire, gained independence in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The UK treated the issue in the same way as it had treated the Sudeten Crisis and made no plans to assist Lithuania or the other Baltic States if they were attacked by Germany. [16] The Soviet Union, while supporting Lithuania in principle, did not wish to disrupt its relations with Germany at that point, since it was contemplating a pact with ...
The Russian Bolsheviks ceded the Baltic areas to Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918. The Imperial German government established occupation governments in Estonia and Latvia [1] and formally recognised the independence of a puppet government in Lithuania on March 24, 1918. [2]