The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
On the 24th of August 1939, a secret meeting between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed a pact of non-aggression and a division of Eastern Europe in two halves.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as it became known after the foreign minister’s who signed it, would come to have enormous consequences for not just Eastern Europe but the whole world.
A week later, on September 1st, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the West, triggering Britain and France to declare war and start WW2. The Soviet Union invaded from the East later that same month.
And just like the 1795 carving of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the country was split between the two powers, East and West.
But what did it mean for Lithuania?
Well, Vilnius was back from Poland😅
And, that’s the only positive news.
Gediminas tower in Vilnius, flying the tricolour of Lithuania
Lithuania was initially to be under the control of the Germans, but by September 28th a revised protocol was made for Lithuania to be in the Soviet sphere. And by June 1940, the USSR occupied and annexed Lithuania along with it’s Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Estonia. Of course there was a puppet government installed, and a “request” to join the USSR was staged.
The Soviet regime began it’s forced collectivisation, nationalisation of industry and suppression of religion and culture (sort of for the second time as the Russian Empire did the same from 1795-1918). And Lithuania was again forced to band together to protect a sense of identity amongst the people.
However the forced Sovietisation was broken when the Nazi’s invaded the USSR in 1941, shattering the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and opening the tug-of-war for Eastern Europe.
The Polish underground resistance to the Nazi’s, the Home Army, were operating intensely in Vilnius (which had been under Polish control since WW1) and when captured they faced harsh reprisals, with many citizens also being arrested, executed or deportated to concentration camps. The Ponary Massacre near Vilnius saw at least 100,000 executions by the Nazi’s of predominantly Jews, but also around 20,000 Poles, Roma and Soviet POW’s. Vilnius had always been a hot-bed for different cultures and peoples - as a Northern Yiddish capital, with Polish-speaking dominance, as the historical Lithuanian capital and with a cultural claim by Belarussians back to the days of the Grand Duchy.
Due to the ethnic tensions predominantly between Poles and Lithuanians over Vilnius, Lithuanian’s were known to collaborate with the Nazi’s to undermine the Polish Home army, which triggered retaliatory violence often targeting civilians. With these tensions, as with the broader Soviet vs Nazi control, the clear cookie-cutter good vs evil narrative of WW2 was extremely blurred.
It was not to be for the Nazi’s however, and by 1944 they were again retreating from Lithuania as they had done at the end of WW1. The Soviets took back control of Lithuania and it remained this way for another half century..