Wartime collaboration in the Baltic states
Wartime collaboration occurred in every country occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, including the Baltic states.
[2] Unlike the other Baltic states, the seizure of Estonian territory by German troops was relatively long, from July 7 to December 2, 1941.
It is estimated that the NKVD's subordinate destruction battalions killed some 2,000 Estonian civilians,[3] and 50–60,000 people were deported deep into the USSR.
[10] Estonian police cooperated with Germans in rounding up Jews, Roma, communists and those deemed enemies of existing order or asocial elements.
[14] After the one-year contract expired, some volunteers transferred to the Waffen-SS or returned to civilian life, and three Eastern Battalions (No.
[17] As the Red Army advanced, a general mobilization was announced, officially supported by Estonia's last Prime Minister Jüri Uluots.
[22] Deportations and murders of Latvians by the Soviet NKVD reached their peak in the days before the capture of Soviet-occupied Riga by German forces.
[26] Einsatzkommando-influenced[27] mobs of former members of Pērkonkrusts and other extreme right-wing groups began pillaging and making mass arrests, and killed 300 to 400 Riga Jews.
[23][26] The activities of the Einsatzkommando were constrained after the full establishment of the German occupation authority, after which the SS made use of select units of native recruits.
[24] German General Wilhelm Ullersperger and Voldemārs Veiss, a well known Latvian nationalist, appealed to the population in a radio address to attack "internal enemies".
During the next few months, the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police primarily focused on killing Jews, Communists and Red Army stragglers in Latvia and in neighbouring Byelorussia.
[25] In February–March 1943, eight Latvian battalions took part in the punitive anti-partisan Operation Winterzauber near the Belarus–Latvia border, which resulted in 439 burned villages, 10,000 to 12,000 deaths, and over 7,000 taken for forced labor or imprisoned at the Salaspils concentration camp.
[30] The creation of the Arājs Kommando was "one of the most significant inventions of the early Holocaust",[29] and marked a transition from German-organised pogroms to systematic killing of Jews by local volunteers (former army officers, policemen, students, and Aizsargi).
[31] Although the Latvian Legion was a formally volunteer Waffen-SS unit, it was voluntary only in name; approximately 80–85% of its men were conscripts.
[32] Prior to the German invasion, some leaders in Lithuania and in exile believed Germany would grant the country autonomy, as they had the Slovak Republic.
The provisional government disbanded, since it had no power and it had become clear that the Germans came as occupiers not liberators from Soviet occupation, as initially thought.
Units under Algirdas Klimaitis and supervised by SS Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker started pogroms in and around Kaunas on 25 June 1941.
[38] Elsewhere, Sužiedėlis similarly emphasised that Lithuania's "moral and political leadership failed in 1941, and that thousands of Lithuanians participated in the Holocaust",[39] though he warned that "[u]ntil buttressed by reliable accounts providing time, place and at least an approximate number of victims, claims of large-scale pogroms before the advent of the German forces must be treated with caution".
[clarification needed] On August 16, the head of the Lithuanian police, Vytautas Reivytis [lt], ordered the arrest of Jewish men and women with Bolshevik activities: "In reality, it was a sign to kill everyone.
[41][clarification needed] In Minsk, the 2nd Battalion shot about 9,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and in Slutsk it massacred 5,000 Jews.
[47][49] The events happening in the USSR's western regions occupied by Nazi Germany in the first weeks after the German invasion (including Lithuania – see map) marked the sharp intensification of the Holocaust.
