With the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin pact on 23rd August 1939 and its corresponding secret additional protocol, Eastern Europe was divided between the German Reich and the Soviet Union, with Estonia and Latvia falling within the Soviet sphere of interest.
On 6th October, Hitler announced the imminent start of the resettlement of almost 65,000 Baltic Germans, who – mainly for fear of a Soviet occupation of the country – left their homeland for good by the end of the year. This happened predominantly by sea and they were allowed to take a large part of their possessions with them.
The Baltic Germans were mainly settled in occupied Poland, 56,000 in in the Nazi German Reichsgau Wartheland, 18,000 of them in Poznan. They were allocated homes and property belonging to Poles and Jews who had previously been deported or murdered.
In 1940/41 65,000 Lithuanian Germans were brought to the German Reich, as well as a further 17,800 people in a subsequent resettlement, mostly Baltic Germans, but also Estonians and Latvians.
Illustration:
Historical map of the resettlements
"The unguided emigration / German farmers and citizens to the east and / the well-organised resettlement to the Greater German Reich of Adolf Hitler", Munich, 1941, offset, 40 x 56cm.
One of the means of the National Socialist Volkstum policy (related to Nazi racial ideology, anti-Jewish practices and the strengthening of German nationalism) was to bring ethnic German people from Eastern Europe "home". They were to settle the newly conquered territories in Poland and elsewhere, "Germanise" them and at the same time form a "protective wall" in the east. Many of these resettlers followed the "Führer's call" for fear of the consequences of a German-Russian confrontation or in the hope of better living conditions in National Socialist Germany.