Courland in the First World War

Courland, the land between the Baltic, the Gulf of Riga and the Dvina, was in 1914 a province of the Russian Empire. Most of its inhabitants were Latvians, while the landed and urban elite had for centuries been Baltic Germans. In 1915 the German army occupied almost the whole land, and for more than two years the front stood on the Dvina. Under occupation Courland became part of the military state of Ober Ost, and in 1918 the Germans wanted to turn it into a duchy tied to the Reich. The war ended, however, with the birth of an independent Latvia.

Ports on the border (1914–1915)

Courland’s main port, Libau, lay only a few dozen kilometres from the border with East Prussia. The Russians had long considered it impossible to hold. On 2 August 1914 German cruisers shelled it, firing the first shots of the war in the Baltic. The Russians, who had already moved their fleet further north, then blew up their own ammunition and coal stores. In November the Germans shelled Libau again and sank old ships in the harbour entrances.

In the spring of 1915, while the blow at Gorlice was being prepared in Galicia, the Germans carried out a diversionary raid into Lithuania and Courland. They did not reach Mitau, the provincial capital, but on 7 May they took Libau, from which the Russians withdrew, blowing up forts and depots. The port became an advanced base of the German fleet in the eastern Baltic. Looking for someone to blame for its defeats, the Russian command ordered in May the mass expulsion of Jews from the provinces of Kovno and Courland.

Summer 1915: the front on the Dvina

On 14 July 1915 the German Niemen Army of General Otto von Below crossed the Windau river and in the Battle of Šiauliai occupied western Courland with the whole coast from Libau to Windau. On 1 August the Germans entered Mitau, and in August their fleet tried to force its way into the Gulf of Riga. In September the Niemen Army reached the Dvina, but failed to take Dvinsk or Riga. The Russians held a bridgehead on the left bank of the river covering Riga, and the front settled down for two years.

Before the war about 800,000 people lived in Courland. More than half a million fled from the front or were evacuated into the interior of Russia, as part of the great bezhenstvo of 1915. According to a German census taken in the autumn, about 245,000 inhabitants remained. In July 1915 the Tsar agreed to the formation of Latvian rifle battalions. The first of them consisted almost entirely of volunteers, and their organising committee proclaimed from the outset the aim of freeing Courland from the Germans.

Under Ober Ost (1915–1917)

Occupied Courland was ruled by the German army. Erich Ludendorff turned the army administrations into permanent occupation authorities, and Courland became one of the three great districts of Ober Ost, alongside Lithuania and the Białystok–Grodno area. According to the historian Kai-Achim Klare, the military dreamed of a settlement colony, and the Baltic lands were to be tied to the Reich by a personal union with the Emperor. Forced labour and requisitions ruined the local economy. The occupiers saw their partners in the Baltic Germans: in September 1917 an assembly summoned to the castle at Mitau adopted a draft constitution for the country.

Meanwhile trench warfare went on along the Dvina. At sea the Russians laid mines off the Courland coast. On one of these barrages, off Windau in December 1915, the cruiser Bremen was sunk. In January 1917 the Russian 12th Army, in which the Latvian riflemen fought, tried to strike from the bridgehead near Riga towards Mitau, but without significant gains. In September 1917 the Germans crossed the Dvina and took Riga, and in October, in Operation Albion, they captured the islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga.

A duchy on paper (1918)

In the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk the Germans argued that Courland had separated itself from Russia, and in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Russia renounced sovereignty over it. On 8 March 1918 the Land Council, dominated by Baltic Germans, proclaimed at Mitau the restoration of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and offered the crown to Wilhelm II. On 15 March the Emperor recognised the duchy as a “free and independent state”, closely bound to the Reich economically and militarily, but did not accept the crown.

Latvian national activists, who in January had declared for an independent Latvia including Courland, condemned these puppet institutions. The duchy never really functioned. On 5 November 1918 the Baltic Germans proclaimed the United Baltic Duchy in Riga, but after Germany’s defeat, on 18 November, Latvia’s independence was declared. On 7 December the German military authorities handed power over to the Latvian provisional government.