Germans take Vilna

On 18 September 1915 troops of the German Tenth Army of General Hermann von Eichhorn marched into Vilna. The Russians did not defend the city. On the night of 17–18 September its garrison marched off eastwards, and in the morning, after reconnaissance, German units entered it. A German communiqué of 19 September announced that the enveloping attack of Eichhorn’s army had “led to complete success” and that “strongly fortified Vilna” had fallen into German hands. For Russia it meant the loss of one of the largest cities of the western governorates, the capital of the Vilna Governorate and an important railway junction. For its inhabitants it was the start of a German occupation lasting more than three years.

Retreat without a fight

All summer the Russians had been preparing Vilna for defence. Kilometres of trenches were dug in the suburbs and the surrounding area, fortifications and artillery positions were built, and the local population was driven to the work. On the Viliya the Russian Tenth Army had been defending itself for weeks. Everything was changed by the attack the Germans began on 9 September north of the city. Their cavalry passed through a gap between the Russian armies, took Sventiany and then reached Molodechno and Smorgon, on the Tenth Army’s lines of retreat. Defending Vilna threatened the encirclement of a large part of the troops, so on 17 September the Russian headquarters ordered the armies of the Western Front to withdraw to a new line further east.

The retreat was carried out efficiently. Tadeusz Hryniewicz, a resident of Vilna, noted that from four in the morning the ground shook with the rumble of baggage wagons and guns, which until eight o’clock kept passing along Tatarska Street and other streets. According to his account the departing troops hardly looted the depots. The Russians tried to blow up the bridges on the Viliya, but did little damage. The diarist Stanisław Aleksandrowicz claimed that the city authorities had saved them by bribing the soldiers. Some of the buildings and storehouses of the railway station were, however, destroyed. Because the Russians gave up defending it, the city itself was spared street fighting and shelling.

Before that, for several weeks, the Russians had been evacuating offices, banks and factories from Vilna, and with them some of the officials, workers and men of military age, often by force. Archives, church bells and monuments were taken away, including the monument to Empress Catherine II and the monument, hated by the Poles, to Mikhail Muravyov, known as “the Hangman”. In the first days of September the city was bombed by German aeroplanes and airships, and the streets were filled with refugees driven eastwards. Most of the inhabitants, however, stayed in their homes.

The Germans in the city

According to Polish accounts, regular German units entered Vilna on 18 September from the direction of Trakai. Czesław Jankowski, a journalist and cultural activist, wrote that the first to march in were regiments from the corps of General Karl Litzmann, the conqueror of Kovno. He was struck by the amount of artillery and baggage, the good horses, the excellent uniforms and the smart marching of the soldiers. “All Vilna is on its feet. Watching. Rubbing its eyes,” he wrote. The inhabitants took the change of rule calmly. Part of the Jewish population greeted the Germans with flowers, while among the Poles a wait-and-see attitude prevailed. Memories of Russian policy towards the Poles mingled with habituation to the old order and with the fact that many people of Vilna were serving in the Tsar’s army.

The commander of the incoming troops, Count Pfeil, issued a proclamation to the population in which he recalled the traditions of friendship between Germans and Poles, called for calm and left the running of the city to the existing authorities. The mayor, Michał Węsławski, and two other members of the city authorities were held as hostages, answerable for the maintenance of order. Officers took over three hotels in their entirety, the Bristol, the Europejski and the Georges, and for the first 11 days the city had to feed the troops at its own expense. Clocks were set to Central European Time. On 21 September the new German governor of Vilna announced, in a notice in German, Polish and Lithuanian, that the city had passed under German rule, introduced a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and threatened the death penalty for hiding Russian soldiers and for looting. He also fixed the exchange rate of the rouble at 1 mark 60 pfennigs.

A city of three nations

Vilna, the former capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was a multinational city. According to the Russian census of 1897 it had about 155,000 inhabitants, of whom about 40 per cent spoke Yiddish, about 31 per cent Polish, about 20 per cent Russian and only about 2 per cent Lithuanian. The first German census, in November 1915, counted 142,000 inhabitants, and the census of March 1916, carried out after many of the Russians had left, showed about 50 per cent Poles, 43.5 per cent Jews and 2.6 per cent Lithuanians.

Each of these communities attached different hopes to the new situation. The Poles hoped for a revival of Polish public life, schools and press, suppressed by decades of Russian rule. The Lithuanians, few in the city itself but regarding Vilna as their historic capital, had national activists there, such as Antanas Smetona, one of the leaders of the Lithuanian Society for the Relief of War Sufferers. Jewish charitable organisations took care of the poorest, among whom hunger soon took hold.

The good first impression quickly faded. The Germans treated the occupied lands as spoils, requisitioned food, restricted freedom of travel and the rations of the civilian population, and later drafted inhabitants into labour battalions. Vilna became the centre of the German military administration in the Lithuanian lands, and in December 1915 it was visited by Kaiser Wilhelm II. German troops remained in the city until the end of the war.