Germans occupy Tiflis

In June 1918 regular German troops marched into Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, which had been independent for two weeks. The British chronology of the war records the occupation of the city by the Germans under 12 June, but the word “occupation” is misleading and the date not quite accurate. Two battalions, the Bavarian 1st Reserve Jäger Battalion and the Prussian 10th Assault Battalion, which had landed at Poti on 8 June, were taken by rail to Tiflis over the following two days. According to most accounts, on 10 June they marched along the city’s main street, Golovinsky Prospekt (today Rustaveli Avenue), in a joint German-Georgian parade. By 12 June they were no longer in Tiflis. During the night of 11/12 June they set off southwards, to the border with the Turks.

The Germans came not as occupiers but at the invitation of the Georgian government. Their arrival had been announced by General Otto von Lossow in a letter of 28 May, attached to the agreement signed that day at Poti, under which the Reich took Georgia under its protection. The Tiflis newspaper Borba wrote on 13 June that the German troops had come at the invitation of the government, to defend the borders of the republic in full agreement with it and on its instructions. In practice Georgia became a German protectorate. A German consul, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, was already active in Tiflis, and order at the railway stations was kept by guards made up of former German prisoners of war. German and Georgian flags flew side by side at the stations.

The haste was no accident. The Turks, who at Batumi on 4 June had taken the districts of Akhaltsikhe and Akhalkalaki from Georgia, had not given up their march on Tiflis and the railway to Baku. According to the British historians of the Caucasian wars W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, on 10 June, while the parade was under way in the capital, the leading units of the Turkish 9th Caucasian Division clashed at Vorontsovka, on the road from Alexandropol to Tiflis, with a small German-Georgian detachment in which two German companies were fighting. The Turks threw it back and took many prisoners. The next day the German Supreme Army Command, in a telegram to Constantinople, threatened to withdraw all German troops and officials from Turkey if the Turks did not halt their march and release the prisoners.

The battalions that left Tiflis on the night of 11/12 June fought for about two weeks, together with weak Georgian forces, against Muslim bands, supported by Turkish officers and soldiers, that had broken into southern Georgia. According to the German historian Winfried Baumgart, they drove them back across the border without coming to an open battle with their Turkish ally. “Our friendship with the Georgians was sealed with German blood”, wrote Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, who took command of the German troops in the Caucasus after arriving in Georgia on 23 June. Under pressure from Berlin, Enver Pasha gave up the march on Tiflis and recalled Vehip Pasha, and turned Turkish ambitions towards Baku and northern Persia. German troops remained in Georgia until the end of the war, and the last transport of soldiers sailed from Poti in December 1918.