Germans land at Hanko

On the morning of 3 April 1918 a German squadron of warships and transports appeared off Hanko, the port on the southernmost cape of Finland. On board was the Baltic Division (Ostsee-Division) of Major-General Rüdiger von der Goltz: according to Finnish studies 9,445 soldiers, more than 3,000 horses and a great quantity of weapons, ammunition and food. The convoy was escorted by the ships of Rear Admiral Hugo Meurer, the same force that in March had carried troops to the Åland Islands. The British chronology of the war records the expedition leaving Danzig on 1 April and landing at Hanko on 3 April. Finnish sources give 1 April or 31 March for the departure: loading began on 29 March and the ships sailed one after another.

Why Hanko

Since February the Germans had been promising help to the White Senate in Vaasa, and on 7 March they had signed with it a peace treaty that made Finland heavily dependent on the Reich. Originally the expedition was to land on the west coast, behind the Whites’ lines, but the Gulf of Bothnia and the Åland Islands were locked in thick ice and the approaches were blocked by mines. In mid-March the Kaiser himself intervened, and on 20 March General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the Whites’ commander-in-chief, called further delay “fraught with consequences”, although according to Finnish historians he wanted the decisive victory at Tampere to be won by the Finns themselves. Hanko was therefore chosen, as a railway line ran from there into the interior. On 27 March Erich Ludendorff changed von der Goltz’s plan once more: instead of going by rail to the junction at Riihimäki, the division was to march along the coast straight on Helsinki, the Reds’ capital, and only from there north. This was also meant to push the Russian fleet out of Helsinki and open the Gulf of Finland to the Germans. In public the expedition was presented as aid to the lawful government. According to the German historian Manfred Menger, German aircraft dropped 130,000 leaflets over Finland in which the invaders called themselves “liberators”.

The landing

The Reds knew the Germans were coming and had withdrawn from Hanko in good time. The garrison of the Russarö fort off the port, about thirty Russians, surrendered without a fight. Russian sailors set fire to four submarines and their depot ship in the harbour so that they would not fall into German hands. At about seven in the morning the first ships came alongside the quay, and half an hour later the German flag was flying from the top of the water tower and the Finnish lion flag from the town hall mast. Supporters of the Whites greeted the soldiers with a band. Those imprisoned by the Reds were released from the gaol, and in their place about a hundred Red supporters who had stayed in the town were locked up. That same day German patrols, travelling on draisines because the Reds had not left a single locomotive in Hanko, took Ekenäs. The landing alarmed the Russians, whose ships were still lying at Helsinki. On 5 April their envoys signed an agreement with the Germans at Hanko under which the fleet was to begin leaving Helsinki from 7 April, and ships that did not manage to get away were to remain neutral.

What came next

The Reds put up their first serious resistance on 5 April at Karis (Karjaa), a railway junction, where they had gathered about a thousand men and two armoured trains. They did not, however, stop the Germans. On 7 April a second detachment, about 3,000 men under Colonel Otto von Brandenstein, sailed from Tallinn and landed near Loviisa, east of the capital. With Brandenstein’s force, later placed under von der Goltz, there were about 13,000–14,000 Germans in Finland. The landing coincided with the decisive phase of the Battle of Tampere, where Mannerheim’s Whites were just forcing their way into the city. The Red government decided it could not hold the capital and on 9 April moved to Vyborg. In the south of Red Finland disintegration set in, and less than two weeks after the landing the Germans were already in Helsinki.

Finnish historians stress that the German intervention did not by itself decide the outcome of the civil war, since the decision was being reached at Tampere, but it shortened it considerably and forced the Reds to fight on two fronts. Its price was dependence on Germany: the Baltic Division remained in the country until December 1918.