The guerrilla war in the Baltic states was an insurgency waged by Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian) partisans against the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1956. Known alternatively as the "Forest Brothers", the "Brothers of the Wood" and the "Forest Friars" (, , ), these partisans fought against invading Soviet forces during their occupation of the Baltic states during and after World War II. Similar insurgent groups resisted Soviet occupations in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ukraine.
Soviet forces, consisting primarily of the Red Army, occupied the Baltic states in 1940, completing their occupation by 1941. After a period of German occupation during World War II, the Soviets reoccupied them from 1944 to 1945. As Soviet political repression intensified over the following years, tens of thousands of partisans from the Baltics began to use the countryside as a base for an anti-Soviet insurgency.
According to some estimates, at least 50,000 partisans (10,000 in Estonia, 10,000 in Latvia and 30,000 in Lithuania) in addition to their supporters were involved in the insurgency. The partisans continued to carry out an armed struggle until 1956, when the superiority of the Soviet security forces, largely in the form of secret agents which infiltrated the partisan groups, caused the Baltic population to change tactics and utilise other forms of resistance.
Background
The term Forest Brothers first came into use in the Baltic region during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Varying sources refer to forest brothers of this era either as peasants revolting or as schoolteachers seeking refuge in the forest. This term Forest Brothers was used and known only in occupied Estonia and Latvia, but in Lithuania partisans were called originally: (Green People), (Forest People) or just (Partisans).
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania gained their independence in 1918 after the collapse of the Russian Empire. The ideals of nationalism and self-determination had taken hold with many people as a result of having the independent states of Estonia and Latvia for the first time since the 13th century. At the same time, Lithuanians re-established a sovereign state, which had a rich former history, having been the largest country in Europe during the 14th century, but which was occupied by the Russian Empire since 1795.
In the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, all three of the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, a move that the Western Allies deemed illegitimate annexations. When Nazi Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet Red Army was driven out of the Baltics and the area came under German military occupation. After the departure of Soviet troops from the region, formal independence to the Baltic states was not restored by Germany. Meanwhile, Allied declarations such as the Atlantic Charter had offered promise of a post-war world in which the three Baltic states could re-establish themselves. Having already experienced occupation by the Soviet regime followed by the Nazi regime, many people were unwilling to accept another occupation at the end of the war.
Unlike Estonia and Latvia where the Germans conscripted the local population into military formations within the Waffen-SS, Lithuania never had its own Waffen-SS division. In 1944, the German authorities had created an ill-equipped but 20,000-strong "Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force" under General Povilas Plechavičius to combat Soviet partisans led by Antanas Sniečkus. The Germans, however, quickly came to see this force as a nationalist threat to their occupation regime. The senior staff were arrested on May 15, 1944, with Plechavičius being deported to the concentration camp in Salaspils, Latvia. However, approximately half of the remaining forces formed guerrilla units and dissolved into the countryside in preparation for partisan operations against the Red Army as the Eastern Front approached.