"...there will be no need for any fairy tales about corrupted timecodes in Latvia at all, because we are gifted so generously with the openly national-chauvinistic cultural products of a foreign neighbouring country, Russia, that Putin and his gang in the Kremlin, as well as their sycophants in Latvia, can rest easy – the ideological training of the fifth column in Latvia is proceeding successfully!"
Normunds Naumanis, “Patriotism Lessons”, Diena, 28 February 2008

Jürgen Kröger was listening to Königsberg radio on 2 September 1939 and was genuinely delighted by the German triumphal march in Poland. Kröger was preparing for the autumn harvest on his Zemgale estate and the war in Poland was far from him, but even so, he listened to German radio stations and never ceased to admire Adolf Hitler's ability to inspire the German nation towards a new, brighter future. Jürgen Kröger, a Baltic German, scion of the Courland nobility, despite the global upheavals of that autumn, continued to cultivate his ancestral land, which, however, had become smaller than what his ancestors had owned due to the 1920 land reform. He also used to talk often with his Latvian neighbours, for instance, with Grantiņš, who would invite him now and then to hunts organised by the Latvian hunters' association. These always took place in forests that had once belonged to the Kröger family. When Kröger began writing his diary in August 1939, he could not have imagined that just a month later, the Hitler he admired at that moment would call the Baltic Germans “home”, and Kröger himself would sell everything he owned in the Zemgale countryside to leave the land he consistently called “homeland” in his diary.

In the late 1930s, Baltic Germans were a true fifth column even in the eyes of a moderate Latvian nationalist: people who had inhabited this land for seven centuries, had been the masters of the Latvians throughout this time, and had always wanted Latvia to be a German, not a Latvian, land; as Germany regained its power, they became increasingly arrogant. The deep misunderstanding was mutual; even if Grantiņš and Kröger spoke and were almost friends, Kröger would conclude in his diary after these conversations: “...and still he is a Latvian, and I am a German.” Despite the centuries their ancestors had spent together, Grantiņš and Kröger, while standing and talking in the fields of Zemgale, both called this land “homeland”, but they had very different understandings of what that word meant. To one, it was Kurzeme (Kurland), with its aristocratic traditions; to the other, it was Latvia, which had finally become a free state, with Latvians freeing themselves from the German yoke.

The solution to the confrontation between Latvians and Baltic Germans came on 7 October, when Hitler called on the Baltic Germans to return to the “homeland”. Following this Führer's appeal, not only Jürgen Kröger and his family, but tens of thousands of Baltic Germans sold all their belongings and property within a couple of weeks, and by the beginning of November, they had boarded ships to leave the land that had been their homeland for generations. The decisions to leave were made quickly, in the hope of joining the resurgent German nation sooner.

Latvians did not grieve for this; the nation was overcome with joy that finally they, those who had caused so much suffering to the Latvians, were simply leaving. Many ordinary people, even seeing the weeping Baltic German repatriates at the port, said: “Why are you crying like that, we are glad that you are finally leaving.” No sympathy, just a sense of relief, because a “problem” had suddenly been solved, one that in other parts of the world had been resolved before and since with the help of ethnic cleansing and deportation. Furthermore, the Latvian state looked with suspicion and dislike at the several thousand Baltic Germans who, for various reasons, had decided to stay in Latvia, and the head of the political police, Fridrihsons, instructed his agents to explain to those staying that it would be better to leave, but if they were to stay, they would no longer be Germans and must declare themselves Latvian. No fifth column – everyone out! The liquidation of the column was not just the repatriation of Baltic Germans; in fact, it was the unexpected end of a column-liquidation operation that the Ulmanis regime had not even foreseen. Who could have imagined before the autumn of 1939 that the Baltic Germans would leave Latvia formally voluntarily, at the Führer's request, with the initiative not coming from the Latvians?

The Ulmanis regime began the path to the solution of the Baltic German “problem” as early as 1934, immediately after coming to power. One of the first tasks it carried out was not reprisals or settling scores with the Baltic Germans, but rather “reclaiming” the past. It was precisely “reclaiming the past” that was the regime's main task, because otherwise it was impossible to make Latvians the nation's elite and push the Baltic Germans out of it. The task of historians was to prove that the Germans had not brought culture and civilisation to this land, that culture and civilisation had been here even before the arrival of the Germans, because we surely had our own “states”, “kings” and “cities”, to create a nation's history by excluding the (Baltic) Germans, “putting them in their place”, often even balancing on the edge between ideological history and crude historical falsification. Arveds Švābe tried to make the chronicler Heinrich into “Latvian” Indriķis with the help of questionable philological methods; Augusts Tentelis and Fricis Balodis created the “correct” prehistory of Latvia, and Marģers Stepermanis recognised the Duchy of Courland as a “Latvian state”. In 1935, archives belonging to various Baltic German organisations were nationalised because historical sources essential to the Latvian nation could not remain in the hands of a small, ideologically unreliable minority; they had to become the nation's property. The University of Latvia history professor, the Baltic German Leonīds Arbuzovs, wrote a rather critical review of the history of Latvia written in the spirit of the “new” history by the historian and diplomat Arnolds Spekke, and in 1934 he was forced to say goodbye to his professor's position at the University of Latvia. Henceforth, Arbuzovs, a Latvian citizen who was neither a Nazi nor a Baltic German chauvinist, could no longer publish his constructive criticism in Latvia and was forced to place articles under various pseudonyms in journals published in Germany.

Baltic Germans as a fifth column were ideologically fenced in even before the repatriation in the late autumn of 1939. There is no denying that there were indeed people among them who actively collaborated with the Nazi German authorities and secret services, or, like Jürgen Kröger, sympathised with Hitler as a leader, but a portion of the Baltic Germans were nevertheless loyal citizens of the Republic of Latvia. The Ulmanis regime tried to build a Latvia in whose new history and future there would no longer be anything of the Baltic Germans, and the column was liquidated by nationalising Baltic German archives and museums, dismissing Baltic German historians, and tearing down part of “German” Old Riga.
Article first published in the April 2008 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks