The Germans take Riga

On 3 September 1917 (21 August in the Julian calendar) the German 8th Army of General Oskar von Hutier occupied Riga, the capital of the Governorate of Livonia and one of Russia’s largest ports on the Baltic. Two days earlier the Germans had crossed the Dvina near Ikšķile, and the commander of the Russian 12th Army, General Dmitry Parsky, decided to give up the city without a fight in order to save his army from encirclement. Since 1710, when the Russians had taken it, no enemy had set foot in Riga.

The last night of Russian Riga

All through the night of 2–3 September columns of the Siberian corps, which until then had held the bridgehead on the left bank of the Dvina, streamed north-east through the city. A dozen or so kilometres to the east, on the Little and Great Jugla, Latvian Riflemen and Russian regiments covered this retreat against the Germans advancing from the Ikšķile bridgehead, while German heavy artillery was already shelling Riga. In the morning Russian sappers blew up both iron bridges over the Dvina, and the wooden bridge was set on fire. Railway stations, warehouses and depots were burning, among them the main food and equipment depot of the 12th Army in a jute mill by Lake Stint. Some soldiers and the city rabble looted abandoned houses and shops. The German war correspondent Rolf Brandt noted that the owner of the Hotel de Rome greeted him with the words that he had just emptied both his revolvers at looters.

During the day German troops entered the city from two sides. From the west, from the former Russian bridgehead, through the Mitau suburb on the left bank of the river, came artillery and a Landwehr regiment, and from the south-east, along the Dvina, the leading units of General Julius Riemann’s group. According to the communiqué from Berlin, the first Germans entered the city at about eleven; Brandt wrote of three in the afternoon. The discrepancy probably arises because the troops reached different districts on both banks of the Dvina at different times. East of the city, on the Great Jugla, heavy fighting with Russian rearguards was still going on.

The welcome

For the Baltic Germans, for centuries the wealthiest class of the city, it was a day of liberation. During the war the Russian authorities had painted over German inscriptions on shop signs, banned German newspapers and made it difficult to use German in the streets. Brandt, who had crossed the Dvina by boat, described people waving handkerchiefs, shouts of “Willkommen!” and questions: “Why do you come so late? How long we have waited!” and “Will the Kaiser come?”. His account was propaganda and showed only one part of the population. Latvians made up the majority of Riga’s inhabitants, and in the elections to the city council, which had ended just before the battle, the Latvian Social Democrats won the most votes, about 59,000, and the German parties about 22,000. On the evening of 3 September the new council met to elect a mayor, but the German army dispersed it. Many Latvians fled with the army, and the chief of staff of Ober Ost, Colonel Max Hoffmann, admitted that inhabitants of nationalities other than German received the army “without touching joy”.

On 4 September a German naval detachment occupied the abandoned fortress of Dünamünde at the mouth of the Dvina, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the army group commander General Hermann von Eichhorn and Hutier drove through the streets of the city to cheers. Notices were posted in the streets announcing the introduction of Central European Time and the Gregorian calendar, and workers on ladders scraped the paint off the German street names on the trilingual signs.

The Kaiser in Riga

In Germany the capture of Riga was received with enthusiasm. Bells rang, thanksgiving services were held in the churches, and towns were decorated with flags. The press and Pan-German politicians wrote that Riga, founded by the Hanseatic League, was German at heart and would remain with the Reich for ever. In an order to the 8th Army, Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed: “Riga is free”, and wrote of a city that for centuries had guarded its German origins and had now been freed from long oppression. He donated 100,000 marks to Riga’s charitable institutions. A few days later, on 6 or 7 September (sources differ), he came to Riga in person and took the parade of the victorious troops on the esplanade. For the occasion the composer Karl Hagen wrote the “Riga Entry March” (Rigaer Einzugsmarsch).

Fear in Petrograd

In Russia the news of the fall of Riga caused a shock. The Russian military communiqué stated that the city had been abandoned because of the threatening situation, and added that some units had left their positions without orders and were retreating north. From Riga to Petrograd was less than 500 kilometres in a straight line. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, recalled that everyone who could was preparing to leave, and that the government was considering moving the archives and its own seat to Moscow. Since 1 September a special interdepartmental commission had already been at work looking for buildings for government offices in Moscow and other cities.

The fall of Riga at once became a weapon in the political struggle. The right and the high command presented it as the result of the army’s disintegration under the soldiers’ committees and Bolshevik agitation. Lavr Kornilov, who at the conference in Moscow had predicted the loss of Riga, demanded that the government place Petrograd under him for operational purposes. The Bolsheviks and Lenin, for their part, accused the generals of deliberately surrendering the city to the Germans in order to have a pretext for crushing the revolution. Alexander Kerensky’s government found itself caught between these two camps. A few days later the dispute between the prime minister and the commander-in-chief turned into open conflict.

Riga remained in German hands until the end of the war. For the German command it was a starting point for further blows along the Dvina and against the islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga, and for many Baltic Germans a hope of binding the country permanently to the Reich.