Germans take Dorpat

On 24 February 1918, the sixth day of the offensive on the Eastern Front, German troops entered Dorpat (Tartu), the largest town of the Estonian part of the Governorate of Livonia. They came from the south. Units of General Günther von Kirchbach’s 8th Army, which after 18 February had moved off from the Dvina and from near Riga, took the railway junction of Walk (Valga) on the Latvian-Estonian border on 22 February, and from there advanced north along the railway. No one defended the town. The Bolshevik authorities and Red Guard detachments withdrew east, and the remnants of the Russian garrisons dispersed to their homes. A British chronology of the war gives the capture of Dorpat under 24 February, just as Estonian sources do. Some studies give the date as 25 February.

Dorpat was a special town. It was home to a university, founded in 1632 by the Swedes and re-established in 1802 as a German-language institution, at which the elites of the Baltic Germans were educated throughout the 19th century. In 1893 the Russian authorities renamed the town Yuryev and Russified the university. At the same time Tartu was the cradle of the Estonian national movement. Since November 1917 Estonia had been ruled by the Bolsheviks, who dispersed the Estonian provincial assembly, the Maapäev. In December the Baltic barons asked Germany for protection, and as early as January the Estonian leaders had decided to declare independence before the Germans arrived.

On the same 24 February, according to Estonian sources, the Germans also entered Pernau, and on 24 or 25 February Viljandi. In Tallinn, meanwhile, the Estonian Salvation Committee issued a manifesto proclaiming an independent Republic of Estonia. The Germans had no intention of recognising it. In the towns they took they at once set up their own military administration, appointing mainly local Germans to posts. As Wheeler-Bennett wrote, in Livonia and Estonia the middle and well-to-do classes greeted the German troops as deliverers from the Bolshevik terror, and not only the Baltic Germans, but also some Latvians and Estonians. The workers and peasants, who had tasted power during several months of revolution, kept silent.

The capture of Dorpat also had military significance. The town lies about 40 kilometres from Lake Peipus, and the Germans wanted to reach the line of the lake before resuming negotiations with Russia. Ludendorff argued that a front from Dvinsk across the lake to the Gulf of Finland would not require many more troops than the previous line from Dvinsk to the Gulf of Riga, and would cover the whole of Livonia and Estonia. The government of Vladimir Lenin had already agreed to sign peace, but the Germans went on. The next day they took Reval and Pskov. Dorpat remained under German occupation until November 1918. For part of the winter semester of 1918/1919 a German State University (Landesuniversität Dorpat) was reopened here. After the Germans withdrew the town was taken by the Red Army, and on 14 January 1919 the Estonians recaptured it.