Germans Entrenched in the Baltics (Again)
Some things are cyclical.
The proclivity of the German Army being semi-permanently in the land presently and historically known as Lithuania goes back almost a millennia. After all, it was the Livonian/Teutonic Order’s 13th Century Ostsiedlung and Lithuanian Crusades that ostensibly brought Christianity to the pagan Baltic tribes starting in 1202. This persisted into the 15th Century.
After the Battle of Grunwald (1st Tannenberg) 1410 during the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War. The early fourteenth century was marked by military incursions by the German Order of Teutonic Knights into the land of the Northern Slavs. In response, The Polish King Wladyslaw Jagiello and the Czech King Vaclav IV signed a defensive treaty which was first acted upon at the battle of Grunwaldu in 1410 when the Slavs won an important victory. Mucha elects to illustrate not the fighting but the aftermath, with the Polish King holding his face in sorrow as he views the cost to both enemy and ally.
Even with the defeat of the Teutonic knights and their allies, the flotsam left behind continued their German societies and schools, with Balic German petit nobility continuing to own and manage large estates in the region under first Swedish and then Russian patronage.
This led to the current Lutheran-practising/German-speaking Deutschbalten minority that remains in the country to this day even after getting stomped out for most of the 20th Century.
Speaking of the 20th Century, when the Russian Eastern Front collapsed in 1917 after the fall of the Tsar and the short-lived Provisional Government, the Kaiser’s troops marched into most of the Baltics in September that it hadn’t already captured in 1915 and established first the military Ober Ost administration and then a “Grand Duchy of Livonia” which would merge the region with Imperial Germany.
After the Kaiser left his throne empty and shagged off to exile in Holland in November 1918, rouge German troops under Generalmajor Rüdiger Graf von der Goltz reformed as the “Baltic Landwehr” and remained a force in being, much like the “free companies” of old, and remained in place until finally forced out in 1920. Much of this was allied to Baltic Germans later of the Tsar’s army, such as Prince Lieven.
Col. Prince Anatol Leonid von Lieven. Born to a family of well-connected Baltic German nobility in 1872, the young Prince Lieven graduated from law school in St. Petersburg and then joined the Chevalier (Cuirassier) Guard Regiment– the most upper crest unit in the Tsar’s Army– as a volunteer officer in 1896. Passing into the reserve list in 1898 to rejoin his business and political concerns, he returned to his regiment in 1914 as a 32-year-old cornet (junior lieutenant). Earning the St. George in tough fighting near the village of Yakyany in August 1915 in which his troop broke a German position, he would rise to the rank of captain by 1916. Cashiered after the Revolution and later arrested in February 1918 by the Reds, he was sent to Ekaterinburg in the Urals for safekeeping- the same city as the Tsar’s exile and execution. However, he and 161 other Germanic hostages were paroled in conjunction with the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March and Prince Lieven soon was riding as an officer of the German-allied anti-Red Baltische Landeswehr under German Maj. Gen. Rüdiger von der Goltz. Post-war, in January 1919, Lieven raised a Friekorps-style unit of his own, the Libau Volunteer Rifle Detachment, and his “Līvenieši” soon helped drive the Reds out of Riga that summer in conjunction with British forces (earning a British Military Cross in the process). Folding his regiment in with Yudenich’s Northwest White Army for the failed attempt on Petrograd in late 1919, he withdrew his band back to Latvia and laid down his arms following the collapse. He spent the interwar period as head of a brickmaking works, wrote a book about his service under several flags, and was Brother No. 1 in the Latvian Brotherhood of Russian Truth, a White Russian exile group formed by Duke George of Leuchtenberg, the former colonel of the Chevalier Guards. Prince Lieven died in Latvia in 1937, aged 64.
Then of course there is the sticky history of the German liberation of the Baltics from the Soviets in 1941 and their own subsequent occupation of the region until pushed out in 1944. One that resulted in Berlin ordering the evacuation of tens of thousands of Baltic Germans to the Reich and occupied Poland while unleashing the Holocaust against hundreds of thousands of Baltic Jews in the most brutal fashion. At the same time, while something approaching 200,000 Balts joined a myriad of German-run Waffen SS combat units, auxiliary police (Hilfspolizei or Selbstschutz) battalions, anti-aircraft Flakhelfer batteries, construction battalions, and home guard organizations to fight Stalin, additional thousands formed resistance and insurgent bands to fight the occupation.
After the Soviets came back in 1945, the legendary Forest Brothers who remained at large in the countryside for years after the war contained many former German soldiers– see Bruno (Bronius) Sutkus for example.
Meet Brigade Litauen
Now, with thunder on the border with Russia, the Germans are being welcomed back, on a permanent basis.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and his counterpart Arvydas Anušauskas from Lithuania last week signed an agreement stationing a 5,000-man “war-ready” (kriegstüchtigen) Bundeswehr armored brigade in Lithuania.
The Lithuania Brigade (Brigade Litauen) is expected to be fully operational capability by the end of 2027.
This isn’t a rotational force or an exercise, but a permanent unit that will be comprised of the (currently) Bavarian-based Panzergrenadierbataillon 122, Panzerbataillon 203 from Augustdorf, and a third battalion drawn from other NATO allies which will be a continuation of the current German-led “Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) Battlegroup Lithuania.”
German Leopard 2A6 tanks headed to Lithuania in 2020
German Leopard 2A6 Main Battle Tanks of NATO Battle Group Lithuania Dec 2021.
Formed in 2017 to help train the local forces and deter Russian aggression, eFP Battlegroup Lithuania is based in Rukla, at the door to the dreaded Suwalki Gap, about 100 km northeast of Lithuania’s capital of Vilnius and 100 km in from the Russian frontier.
Consisting of 1,700 men, it is formed from German troops as well as those from the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Luxembourg.