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For a brief period, Nazi Germany occupied the Baltic states after it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The initial Soviet invasion and occupation of the Baltic states began in June 1940 under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, made between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in August 1939 before the outbreak of World War II.
The Germans agreed to leave the Baltic states, except for Lithuania (which was later ceded in exchange for oil-rich regions of Poland), under the Soviet sphere of influence in the 1939 German–Soviet Pact. The Germans lacked concern for the fate of the Baltic states, and initiated the evacuation of the Baltic Germans. Between October and ...
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.
Wartime collaboration occurred in every country occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, including the Baltic states.The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were occupied by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, and were later occupied by Germany in the summer of 1941 and then incorporated, together with parts of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of ...
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]
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.
As a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War, many Baltic Germans fled to Germany. After 1919, many Baltic Germans felt obliged to depart the newly independent states for Germany, but many stayed as ordinary citizens. [17] In 1925, there were 70,964 Germans in Latvia (3.6%) and 62,144 in 1935 (3.2% of ...
Germany and the Soviet Union concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, dividing Eastern Europe into their respective spheres of influence. Lithuania was, at first, assigned to Germany. [ 9 ] The Nazis went so far as to suggest a German–Lithuanian military alliance against Poland and promised to return the Vilnius Region , but Lithuania ...