Nazi national policy towards the Russian minority in the Baltic States

Abstract

The paper examines the position of the Russian minority in the Baltic States during the Nazi occupation. It argues that the Russians in the Baltic region experienced a higher level of discrimination than the local inhabitants, and it explores the reasons for such inequity. One of them lay in the strong anti- Russian sentiment shared by the Baltic local authorities, who aimed to use the German occupation to suppress the Russian minority. Another one was the complex and confused structure of the German occupation authorities in the Baltic region, with many political actors (such as the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Office for the Four Year Plan, Himmler’s police units, the Wehrmacht and finally the local administrations) struggling for power there. Such entanglements resulted in the inconsistency of the German policy in racial and administrative issues including their attitude toward the Russian minority. While the higher echelons of Nazi power, police and the local authorities insisted on the extermination of the Slavs as Untermenschen, the German civilian administration of the lower level considered Russians to be a useful instrument in the fight against the local Baltic administrations, over which they had been losing control. However, the attempts to involve Russians in German policy failed due to a lack of coordination between the different branches of Nazi power and as a result of the growing guerrilla movement which involved many Russian inhabitants of the Baltic States. Refs 60.