The Great War experiences of Lithuanians: an overview

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s and 1930s, public attention was mostly focused on two experiences of World War I in Lithuania: the misery of everyday life during the German occupation and the efforts of political actors to cope with that misery and struggle for national independence. A variety of other experiences of the Lithuanian population during the Great War attracted much less attention. This had a subsequent impact on how the importance of the Great War was represented to Lithuanians for several generations. This article presents an overview of the experiences of the Lithuanian population during the Great War with a focus on the quantitative data on those experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• World War I
• forced displacement
• military service
• occupation
• representation
• war losses
• prisoners of war

Acknowledgments

The project “Remembrance of the First World War: A Comparative Analysis of Lithuania and East Prussia (before 1939)” at Klaipėda University has been partly supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (Grant No. MIP-021/2015). For more on the results of the project, see the monograph “Didysis karas visuomenėje ir kultūroje: Lietuva ir Rytų Prūsija” (2018, co-authors: Vasilijus Safronovas, Vytautas Jokubauskas, Vygantas Vareikis, and Hektoras Vitkus) and the set of articles “Lithuanians in the Great War and the Great War in Lithuania: Experiences and Memories” (2017, ed. Vasilijus Safronovas). I am grateful to Tomas Balkelis for his help in preparing the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘occupation’ as a descriptor of such experiences probably began circulating in Lithuanian public discourse in 1917. In September 1917, the newspaper Lietuvos aidas (Lithuanian Echo) began to publish the official statements of the authorities in a column entitled ‘Announcements of the German Occupying Authorities’ (see Lietuvos aidas No. 2 from 13 September and beyond).

2. I calculated this number using East Prussian data adjusted for the German average (81% of all men fit for military service [Overmans 2009, 664] or 435,000 men [Safronovas et al. 2018, 26]) and proportionately adjusted for the size of the Klaipėda region (6.82% of all East Prussia’s inhabitants in 1910).

3. Lithuanian soldiers in the Russian army in the 1917–1919 national movement (undated). Lietuvos centrinis vastybės archyvas (Lithuanian Central State Archives, hereafter LCVA), f. 1446, ap. 1, b. 1, l. 110.

4. This number was calculated by applying the proportion of the population of the Klaipėda region (6.82%) in East Prussia to the total number of prisoners of war from East Prussia (32,800). The latter number was obtained by taking proportionately the number of prisoners of war attributed to East Prussia from Germany’s total (Safronovas et al. 2018, 38–39).

5. See Dabartis, 22 December 1915; 4–7 August 1918.

6. Letter from the Labor and Social Welfare Department under the Ministry of the Interior to the European Central Department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13 August 1921. LCVA, f. 383, ap. 7, b. 216, l. 6.

7. A comparison of data from 1912–1913 with data from the 1916 census shows that less than 40% of locals remained in Kaunas (19.6%), Šiauliai (23.9%), Władysławów (Kudirkos Naumiestis) (31.7%), Kalvarija (33.9%), Šeduva (35.3%), and Trakai (39.7%). The majority of the other larger towns retained 40–70% of their residents. See KGSK (1913, 56–57), VGSK (1913, 2), Strasburger (1916, 12), and MVL (1917, Anlage IX).

8. Contemporaries provide differing accounts. Martynas Yčas, for example, who was also very well acquainted with refugee affairs, claimed that around 700,000 of Lithuania’s residents became refugees (Tumas 1915, 1).

9. In this case, I am using the final data of the census, based on which the 63,275 km² area of the Lithuanian military district was populated by 1,929,073 individuals (Häpke 1921, 40). I apply the resulting population density of 30.49 individuals/km² to the territory of interwar Lithuania without the Klaipėda region (52,822 km²).

10. The shares of the Tilsit and Ragnit districts that fall to the Klaipėda region here have been calculated by me.

11. See endnote 6.

12. For the sake of greater accuracy, this number could be narrowed down by 7,000 to a total of 358,000 (see Safronovas et al. 2018, 51–52).

13. About 2.8 million German soldiers returned home after being demobilized with long-term bodily injuries of one form or another (Whalen 1984, 95).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lietuvos Mokslo Taryba (LMTLT) [MIP-021/2015].

Notes on contributors

Vasilijus Safronovas

Vasilijus Safronovas is a Research Professor at Klaipėda University. He has published widely on issues of memory, identity, nationalism, mental geography, conceptual history, and cultural contacts. His publications include several books and over 40 articles in scholarly journals and collected volumes. From 2015 to 2018, he led a research group on memory and World War I in East Prussia and Lithuania at Klaipėda University. He is currently the Head of the Institute of Baltic Region History and Archaeology at Klaipėda University.