The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier by Max Egremont

Author:Max Egremont [Egremont, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Baltic States, Travel, Eastern, political science, Genocide & War Crimes, geopolitics, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, World, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Political Freedom, Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, General, Religion, Religious Intolerance; Persecution & Conflict
ISBN: 9781509845460
Google: H_IWEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2021-07-22T23:47:54.223812+00:00

Rüdiger von der Goltz.

Would they go to Riga? The attack began, Blanckenhagen riding with his squadron, seeing retreating Bolsheviks and hearing the cry, ‘The way to Riga is open!’ Childhood friends were ahead, again with those Baltic names – Kruedener, Foelkersahm, Berg, Samson – some soon hit, falling from their horses, their commander and ‘soul’ Hans von Manteuffel killed: then over the bridge across the Duna River, with the Landeswehr and the Iron Division and into the city.

Baltic German memoirs state that it was the Bolshevik Latvian ‘Flintenweiber’ (rifle women) – ‘most beautiful things’, devilish participants in ‘sexual orgies’ – who committed the worst atrocities in Riga. The Landeswehr, however, embarked on similar violence, the French Colonel du Parquet writing of Bolsheviks forced to dig their own graves and Baltic Germans rampaging through the streets. Four hundred Flintenweiber lay dead, Germans ‘callously’ marching over them.

Only Germany, Blanckenhagen thought, could stop Bolshevism; it was the nearest great power, now humbled and uncertain but capable of revival. As for these new states – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – they were unsustainably small, bound to be absorbed by one of their giant neighbours: Russia or Germany. Only Germany could drag them into the West, away from barbarism.

Whispers of doom, however, could accompany this saving of civilization. In the early winter months of 1919, Herbert von Hoerner, also in the Baltic Landeswehr, broke away to reach his family’s property in Courland, a manor built in 1849 by his grandfather. The night was achingly cold and he crept through the back door, to find two old Latvian women plucking chickens in the kitchen. Hoerner asked them to make supper; then he went through the freezing rooms to what had been his father’s study.

Portraits of ancestors in tarnished golden frames were dim on the walls and a fire crackled in the grate, prompting pride in what his family had done in this now devastated land. Having eaten, Hoerner asked the women to open the front door so that he should leave through it. ‘I was the last one, who, in departing, was taking something with me that would never return – Old Courland!’ Hoerner’s regret was more realistic than Blanckenhagen’s euphoria. Latvia had been almost completely overrun by Bolshevik troops, including the formidable Latvian Riflemen, but the Estonian provisional government raised an army, commanded by men such as Johan Laidoner who’d served in the imperial Russian forces.

For the Germans, the slide began after their Riga triumph: the defeat outside Cēsis in June 1919 of von der Goltz by the Estonians (and Latvians who’d joined them), the failure of General Yudenich’s White Russian forces and the Estonian Balts to reach St Petersburg. The British watched; the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was cautious about intervention, Winston Churchill much more enthusiastic. After the German defeat at Cēsis, the Allies pressed for a ceasefire. On 28 June, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, emphasizing the existence of the three new Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Von der Goltz rejected attempts to get him and his forces to return to Germany.

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