Foreign News: Balts' Return

When Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler began signing agreements, diplomats guessed that there was more to the partnership than at first met the eye. They suspected the existence of secret clauses, annexes, even verbal understandings that were not made public. They were right. As events began to unravel, and perhaps as Dictator Stalin got unexpectedly grabby, he got a big slice of Poland. Not long thereafter the Eastern Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and perhaps Finland) became an uncontested sphere of Red imperialism. All told, Herr Hitler had won Russian "friendship," but it looked as though, so far, Tovarish Stalin had won the war.

Last week another curious and unannounced by-product of the Hitler-Stalin "agreements" came dramatically to light. As the advance guard of 21,000 Red Army troops, supported by 400 tanks, marched in to protect little Estonia from the threats of "imperialist adventurers," some 18,000 German-speaking Estonians, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and Hanseatic merchants who had settled in the Eastern Baltic six and seven centuries ago, made haste to get out. Further south, in Latvia, 60,000 Balts—as the Germans are known in the Baltic—simultaneously began a mass migration back to the "spiritual homeland" they have not known for centuries, while in Lithuania, where Russian troops are expected before long, a mass exodus of 40,000 "racial comrades" was to begin shortly.

On Short Notice. Astounding as it was that Adolf Hitler, exponent of Pan-Germanism, should relinquish so lightly one of the oldest European outposts of German commerce and culture, the details of this mass migration were even more amazing. The Balts first learned that they were to be sent back to Germany on a Saturday, when German diplomats first broached the subject to the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian Governments. On Sunday a special German Commission to arrange details arrived at Riga. On Friday ten German merchant vessels, the first contingent of 42 specially chartered ships, steamed into Riga Harbor to take home the first batch of refugees.

German schools and hospitals were abruptly closed. German theatres suddenly went dark. Shops owned by Germans were hastily shut, while their owners hurried to liquidate what they could. Some Balts simply packed their bags, locked up their houses and went to the steamers. In some places they were allowed to take along their personal effects and $22.50, the final liquidation of their property, which must amount to many millions of dollars, being left to the Commission. In Tallinn alone, 1,000 apartments and houses were already vacant and in Riga, where 40,000 Germans lived, the commercial district was almost deserted. German language newspapers folded. Among the famed journals of Riga was Das Baltikum, founded by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, chief of the Nazi Party's foreign political office and long regarded as the spiritual font of Naziism. The Hitler-Stalin collaboration has ended Baltic-born Dr. Rosenberg's dream of German eastward expansion at the expense of Russia, and the doctor is now rumored even to have lost the Führer's friendship.