Foreign News: Balts' Return

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Roots. Amazing it was that one of the most violent and hasty uprootings of history did not evoke more protests, or even, apparently, more tears. The Balts seemed to take their removal to the Reich stoically, or even as a matter of course.

In Latvia the Balts were mostly merchants; in Estonia they were rich landlords and, until the recent land reforms, 600 German families had owned half the country; in Lithuania, they were mostly smalltime, fairly well-to-do farmers who had left Germany centuries ago.

Because of their superior economic position, their high standard of living, their separate educational system, they had long held a power far exceeding their numbers. They had become part & parcel of the political and social life of the countries of which they were only nominally citizens. As "capitalists," they could scarcely have welcomed the classless, propertyless society which Russia threatens to introduce in those Baltic States, and they would probably be the first to suffer in a hammer-&-sickle regime. Understandably, most Balts chose return to Germany as the lesser of two evils.

To Poland. What kind of life were they going to? The German radio announced they had a German job to perform, that they were to repopulate some of the newly won Polish areas, where the Reich needs "settlers capable of restoring German order." They were to be given property as nearly as possible like that which they left behind. At Gdynia, the port built by the late Polish Government, 14,000 apartments vacated by fleeing Poles awaited them. There the merchant class would presumably be set to work to build up a transformed, Germanized city.

Moreover, in what was once western Poland the Führer would make room for those who wanted land in the Polish Corridor. The hundreds of thousands of Poles in the Corridor were to be pushed eastward into whatever rump Poland the Führer decided to create. Later, some 80,000 Germans living in Russian Poland were expected to be exchanged for the Ukrainians and White Russians still left in German Poland. There were still further hints of greater mass migrations to come, of repatriating other widely scattered German populations in Europe: 800,000 in Rumania, 600,000 in Hungary, 600,000 in Yugoslavia, 1,100,000 in Russia.

Plan or Necessity? All this was in line with Führer Hitler's policy of a "new order of ethnographic relations" in Eastern Europe in collaboration with Russia, as announced in his recent Reichstag speech. It was also consistent with mutual Soviet-German declarations that Hitlerism is for the Germans and Bolshevism for the Slavs, but that the two do not necessarily mix. But the unseemly haste with which the evacuation began suggested that here was a complicating detail of his new policy which the Führer had overlooked until the last minute, and that, far from being planned, the transfer was the result of pure immediate necessity. Germany has long considered the Baltic a "German lake." Friendship with Joseph Stalin evidently comes high.