Between Giants, Buttar - C

                                         This book is a history, primarily a military one, of the three Baltic states who were dealt the unplayable geo-strategic hand of being caught between Germany and the USSR in WW2.  Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (from north to south) lie west of heavy forests and marshes and east of the Baltic Sea.  To the north-east is Russia and to the south was East Prussia.  All three were part of the Russian Empire and entered the 20th century with a strong desire for independence and a deep antipathy for Russia. After WW1 and the Russian Civil War, they found themselves independent countries.  Although frequently lumped together, they are different in important ways. The Estonians are linguistically connected to the Finns, and both they and the Latvians are Protestant and were heavily German. Lithuania is Catholic and was heavily Polish.  All three were occupied after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and suffered the indignity of being forced to 'apply' to become members of the USSR.  General Plan-Ost called for the liquidation of 85% of the Lithuanians and half of the Estonians and Latvians, with the goal of being completely Germanized in twenty years. Within two months of the launch of Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, they were completely overrun.
                                        Each country had a disparate Jewish tradition. There were only 4,000 Jews in Estonia, but Lithuania had hundreds of thousands and, indeed, Vilnius was called 'The Jerusalem of the North' because of tis tradition as a home to Jewish studies and culture.  Unfortunately for the Jews of the Baltic, as well as those of Belarus and the Ukraine, the Wehrmacht were handmaidens of the SS's Einsatzgruppen. Systematic slaughter by handgun and rifle  ensued.  In January 1942, a more efficient approach using xyklon-B was approved by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference.  All three nationalities pitched in on initiating the Holocaust and signed up for a uniform.  The more trusted Estonians and Latvians were afforded the opportunity to create SS battalions; the less trustworthy Lithuanians, police battalions.
                                      As the focus of the book is military, the author skips over 1942-3 in a paragraph and moves on to the Russian re-conquest.  That is, of course, his prerogative, but the book seems incomplete for this reason.   The siege of Leningrad was lifted in early 1944 and the Soviets entered Estonia in January.  It was a hard nut to crack. It took the full effort of Operation Bagration, symbolically scheduled by Stalin for June 22 to crack Army Group Centre in Lithuania and isolate Army Group North in Latvia and Estonia. Because Stalin and the Finns were talking cease-fire, Hitler approved the evacuation of Estonia and the Soviets did not occupy Tallinn until Sept. 22, the day after the German walked out.  Riga soon followed and by the end of the year, the Army, now called Army Group Courland, was isolated on the Latvian coast.  The war moved on and the enclave held out to the very end.
                                      The three countries were unquestionably part of the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement because they had been when war broke out between Germany and the USSR.  There was no one to plead their case at any of the post-war councils, and there was certainly very little sympathy for them either. They had fought with the Nazis.   The had fought with the 'bad' guys and then wound up being occupied by the next set of 'bad' guys for four and a half decades.  Their history is at best ambiguous.  Amazingly though, these three countries have gone from 19th century Russian satraps, to 20th century battlegrounds to members of the EU and NATO today.