Revolt in Klaipėda

On 10 January 1923 about a thousand armed men in civilian clothes, wearing armbands with the letters MLS (volunteer of Lithuania Minor), crossed the border between Lithuania and the Klaipėda Territory (PL). Officially they were insurgents who had come to help the local Lithuanians oppressed by foreigners. In fact they were soldiers of the Lithuanian army, cadets of the military school and members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (PL), and the whole operation had been secretly prepared by the government in Kaunas. The same day they took Šilutė (PL) (Heydekrug) and Pagėgiai without a fight. Their goal was Klaipėda, the only port through which Lithuania could reach the sea.

The land on the Niemen

The Klaipėda Territory, a strip of land north of the Niemen with the town the Germans called Memel, had belonged to East Prussia before the war. In 1915 the Russians had held it for a few days. Under the Treaty of Versailles Germany renounced it in favour of the Allied powers, and in February 1920 a French battalion of chasseurs alpins arrived and took it over to administer on behalf of the Entente. The town was German, the countryside largely Lithuanian. German circles, and with them the French High Commissioner, Gabriel Petisné, leaned towards creating a free state on the model of Danzig. Petisné was, moreover, accused by Germans and Lithuanians of a pro-Polish policy.

The Klaipėda question became entangled with the dispute over Vilna. In 1919 the Polish delegation at the peace conference supported the union of Klaipėda with Lithuania, counting on a union of Lithuania with Poland. After Vilna was taken by Żeligowski’s troops, the powers offered Kaunas various compromises, among them an exchange of “Klaipėda for Vilna”. The Lithuanians rejected them. The Conference of Ambassadors, which was to decide the territory’s fate at the beginning of 1923, was inclining, as Kaunas expected, towards a solution unfavourable to Lithuania. On 20 November 1922 the government of Prime Minister Ernestas Galvanauskas (PL) decided at a secret meeting to use force.

Budrys’s operation

The commander was a Lithuanian counter-intelligence officer, Jonas Polovinskas, who adopted the more Prussian-Lithuanian sounding name of Budrys. According to a Lithuanian list, the special-purpose unit numbered 40 officers, 584 soldiers and 455 riflemen, and on the spot it was joined by some 300 volunteers from the Klaipėda Territory. It was divided into three groups: the strongest marched on Klaipėda, the second on Pagėgiai to secure the border with Germany, and the third on Šilutė. On 9 January the Supreme Committee for the Salvation of Lithuania Minor, chaired by Martynas Jankus (PL), announced in Šilutė that it was taking power in the territory. The Lithuanians knew that Germany would not object: Berlin preferred Klaipėda in the hands of weak Lithuania to having it under French and Polish influence, and the insurgents’ weapons were bought in Germany. The moment was well chosen. France’s attention was taken up by the occupation of the Ruhr, which began in the same days.

By 11 January the insurgents controlled the whole territory except Klaipėda itself, which was defended by some 250 French soldiers and the German police. Petisné refused to surrender. The assault on 15 January was short. Twelve Lithuanians and several other people were killed, among them French soldiers and a German policeman, after which Petisné agreed to a ceasefire and the French stayed in their barracks. French warships and a British cruiser soon arrived in the port, but they did not intervene.

Poland and Klaipėda

Poland protested, but did not want to risk a war. The Foreign Minister, Aleksander Skrzyński (PL), reacted with restraint, for which he was criticised at home for allegedly neglecting Polish interests. The powers viewed this attitude favourably. In February the Conference of Ambassadors recognised Lithuania’s rights to the Klaipėda Territory, on condition that it was granted autonomy and that Poland kept its existing rights to use the port. The matter was finally settled by the Klaipėda Convention (PL) signed in Paris in 1924. Budrys was governor of the Klaipėda Territory in 1924–1925.