Should the Baltic Germans be compensated by Russia?

[Vixen]

The same paras in that wiki article say that in Estonia 1,065 estates were expropriated and in Latvia 1,300 estates. Now with the figures there, calculate how much those 50 ha per estate is as percentage of the total land that was owned by the German nobility. Show us for once that you can do highschool math.

Oh, and I'm from the continent, it's quite silly for you to convert hectares to acres.

There was more to it than land. There were voting privileges and the right to be a member of the Landrat.

 

[Vixen]

Your racism is shining through.

And yes, a century ago land reform and land redistribution was very much a way to address excessive wealth inequities.

Don't be silly. You always have to go to hysterical extremes.

 

[Vixen]

Eh, um, well. If feudalism is wrong, then taking feudal estates away is right, isn't it. You're saying the equivalent of "slavery is wrong; all that the plantation owners want from the federal government is to get their labourers back, who were taken away in 1863."

But of course your post is obviously jocular, and I'm doing your sense of humour an injustice by taking it seriously.

The British plantation owners were given plenty of compensation after the 1824 Manumission Act. It was a very handsome sum of money.

The Baltic Germans have been given nothing, after having lived in the region for almost 800 years. They were blameless for having been caught between the Swedish empire on the one hand and against Russia on the other; Peter the Great's Russia allied with Augustus II 's Saxony - Poland-Lithuania and Frederik's Denmark-Norway seizing control away in the Great Northern War 1700- 1721.

Up until then Sweden had ruled over the Baltics countries, which included Estonia, Livonia, Ingria and Karelia from 1560 and 1658, gaining addition tracts in Germany from the Duchy of Bremen, Wismar, Verden and Western Pomerania from the Thirty Years War.

The Swedish empire never once in its history had feudalism. Neither Sweden or Finland ever had peasants or serfs. Their people were always free men.

It was the Russians who kept up feudalism, and even they abandoned it in 1836. Anyone who claims the Baltic Germans were using ordinary people as serfs are lying to you. The non-landowners paid tithes to them. However, that is hardly different from tenant farmers paying rent and a commission on the yield from farming. Even the Church was taking tithes from local peasants in England, sparking off the Peasants Revolt in C14.

Times have moved on. The displaced Baltic Germans should be compensated for the value of the land stolen from them by the communist, or at least be given the opportunity to move back, once again into their ancient home land.

It was the Baltic Germans who built the fine harbour at Riga, and made it into the town that it is.

 

[Vixen]

Wo auch immer wir stehen, ist Deutschland!

Und Gott mit uns! Oder mit Vixen!

Please take your Roman salute elsewhere.

 

[Vixen]

A couple of days ago I read that Canadian white supremacist Lauren Southern had taken up the mantle of the white South-African farmers. I thought that there was nothing more stupid in today's world than hitch your wagon to the cause of the guys who invented Apartheid. But Vixen has topped it with this inane cause.

I don't think she's jocular in this thread. She just has a hard-on for piling all "evil" in the world on Stalin.


Vixen denies that the Nazis ever murdered ethnic Poles. Because, you know, Stalin must have murdered more people than Hitler so it's most convenient to deny roughly half of the civilian murders by the Nazi regime.

I have never denied it.

Stalin is responsible for at least an equal amount of atrocities outside of the Holocaust abomination.

 

[Vixen]

No what is wrong is you continuing to repeat the same false claim. The Baltic Germans privileges had been removed, and all but a tiny fraction of their land had been seized, by the independent Baltic nations decades before the USSR invaded and BTW current day Russia is not the USSR.

The Russians have always seen themselves as Russian.

 

[Vixen]

SO Vixen never heard of what Henirich Himmler and his "General Plan East"?
Nice.
Poland probably suffered more then any other country in World War 2. It was raped and brutalized by both Hitler and Stalin. Hitler killed a lot more Poles, but Stalin got his share also.

You acknowledge that the Poles were raped and brutalised by both Hitler and Stalin, but you can't bring yourself to admit the Baltic Germans were, too?

 

[Vixen]

A century ago? If only ... but in Scotland we were somewhat belated in taking action against feudalism.

The Act [Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000] officially brought to an end annual feu duties, a vestige of feudal land tenure, on 28 November 2004 ... After that date, the former vassal of an estate was the sole owner of the land, and the former superior's rights were extinguished. For a further two years, the superior had the option of claiming compensation; this was fixed at a single payment of a size that, when invested at an annual rate of 2.5%, it would yield interest equal to the former feu duty. Because inflation had eroded the value of duties, which had been fixed many years before, this payment was in most cases extremely small compared with the current value of the land.​

Yes, you read it correctly: 2004.

It was shocking the way the Scottish lairds forced the crofters off the land.

 

[Craig B]

It was shocking the way the Scottish lairds forced the crofters off the land.

Who then should be compensated? The feudal landowners or the working cultivators of the land? Landowners expelled by reason of ethnicity should be readmitted on the same footing as other residents.

And if you are shocked by the treatment of crofters in the nineteenth century, what of the Old Prussians whose language, culture and most of the population was driven to complete extinction in a crusade?

This Teutonic Knights' activity was the introduction of "High Culture" you tell us? It was religiously motivated imperialist genocide.

The Scottish aristocrats believed they were introducing "high culture" to the ignorant Gaelic speaking natives. The Irish landowners thought they were introducing high culture to the ignorant Catholic Gaelic speaking natives. Their way of doing it, as with the Teutonic Knights, was by expelling the population, obliterating their language and culture, and confiscating their plots of land. For this the aristocrats' descendants merit neither restitution nor compensation.

That the governments of the Baltic Republics should admit the descendants of German speaking Balts, on the same basis as other applicants for citizenship of their Republics, is a reasonable proposal, as long as the idea of cultural dominion, feudal supremacy and possession of large estates is definitively abandoned. That history deserves no admiration, far less restitution.

 

[Tolls]

... Things came to a head during 1905-1917 culiminating in WWI and the Bolshevik uprising.

Ahead of Operation Barbarossa, 1941, Hitler made plans to move the Baltic Germans out of the Baltic area and as per the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, gave up their rights to the land.

Why do you persist in skipping the intervening 20 years?
You know, the 20 years in which the Baltic German landed classes lost their lands almost entirely and also lost their control of the reigns of power in those states?

 

[ddt]

There was more to it than land. There were voting privileges and the right to be a member of the Landrat.

You say that as if it's a bad thing they lost political privileges. What kind of anti-democrat are you?

 

[ddt]

I have never denied it.

Stalin is responsible for at least an equal amount of atrocities outside of the Holocaust abomination.

You've stubbornly refused to admit that the Nazi regime murdered millions of Polish, Belarus, Ukrainian and Russian citizens when repeatedly pressed on the issue by Craig B, TubbaBubba, me, and some other posters in the 100 years Finland thread. That is tantamount to deny it. And in this post in that thread, I collected some quotes of you from an earlier thread where you argued that the Shoah was all hunkydory legal and that all those 6 million Jews were German citizens anyway.

We've also gone repeatedly over the numbers of victims of the Hitler and Stalin regimes, and no, it's a plain lie of yours that Stalin is responsible for more victims than Hitler.

You acknowledge that the Poles were raped and brutalised by both Hitler and Stalin, but you can't bring yourself to admit the Baltic Germans were, too?

Why should he? The plain facts are that the Baltic Germans were not raped and brutalized by Stalin. First of all, their possessions were expropriated and their political privileges abolished by the nationalist governments of independent Latvia and Estonia in 1918-1920. Those governments had nothing to do with the bolsheviks; on the contrary, they had fought against the bolsheviks in their independence wars (and in the Latvian case, they had also fought against the German army and the Baltische Landwehr who wanted to establish a Latvian state where the German upper class still had their political control, or wanted to attach Latvia to Germany).

Second, the "resettlement" of the Baltic Germans didn't occur on the eve of Barbarossa, as you claim in your OP, in direct contradiction of the wiki article you cited, but directly after the invasion and occupation of Poland, on the initiative of Hitler, not of Stalin, and while Latvia and Estonia were still independent republics. "Heim ins Reich" was a Nazi idea, not an idea of Stalin. And the majority of those Baltic Germans were "resettled" in the Warthegau, a region of occupied Poland that the Nazis annexed and was their first target for Germanization. Around 630,000 ethnic Poles and Polish Jews were deported from the region, and Baltic and other Germans were to repopulate it.

 

[ddt]

Please take your Roman salute elsewhere.

Maybe you shouldn't continually engage in denial of Nazi crimes or apologetics for Nazi crimes if you don't want that kind of reactions.

 

[ddt]

The same paras in that wiki article say that in Estonia 1,065 estates were expropriated and in Latvia 1,300 estates. Now with the figures there, calculate how much those 50 ha per estate is as percentage of the total land that was owned by the German nobility. Show us for once that you can do highschool math.

Bump.

Show us your math. You are an accountant, right? Show us for once that you can do a simple calculation.

 

[Border Reiver]

Times have moved on. The displaced Baltic Germans should be compensated for the value of the land stolen from them by the communist, or at least be given the opportunity to move back, once again into their ancient home land.

You realize that the Estonian and Latvian Republics that confiscated the estates weren't communist right? And why should the great-great grandchildren of the affected persons receive anything? Articulate an actual argument based on current conditions that would justify compensation:

a. Have they been an oppressed minority in either Estonia or Latvia;
b. Other than losing former privileges and estates, did the former Baltic Germans lose civil rights (such as being barred from office or being able to vote);
c. Has this oppression carried on; and
d. Are they disadvantaged in their current states due to continuing efforts by Latvian or Estonian efforts to hamper trade, etc.?

What prevents any descendants of the Baltic Germans from immigrating to either Latvia or Estonia?

It was the Baltic Germans who built the fine harbour at Riga, and made it into the town that it is.

So? What have they done lately? Resting on the deeds of an ancestor and expecting to continue to receive privileges for it is antithetical to any merit based society.

 

[sackett]

Please take your Roman salute elsewhere.

Anteeksi, en puhu suomea.

 

[ddt]

Anteeksi, en puhu suomea.

Be careful what you say, you might end up in a Finnish concentration camp.

(and for clarity: these camps were in Eastern Karelia, a region that never was Finnish but that Finland conquered during WW2, something that Vixen also has been denying).

 

[Garrison]

The Russians have always seen themselves as Russian.

That's nice, doesn't change the fact the USSR was not Russia, oh and of course neither was Stalin Russian. Are you ever going to deal with hard facts or just keep blundering on repeating your false claims?

 

[Cleon]

The Russians have always seen themselves as Russian.

By "Russian," do you mean russkiy, or do you mean rossiskiy, and do you know the difference without googling?

 

[TubbaBlubba]

By "Russian," do you mean russkiy, or do you mean rossiskiy, and do you know the difference without googling?

Since she says "always", she must clearly mean Руси, being that the Rurikid "Velikyi Knyaz Vseya Rus", and later "Tsar Vseya Rus" predates the Romanov use of "Rossiskaya". (I am not sure when "Rus" got turned into Russkiy - are you? My feeling is that it is a 19th century attempt at creating a distinct Russian - not Great Russian - national identity, but I'm not certain.)

Anyway, I think we can all conclude that the Viking Age Swedes are to blame, as always, and Roslagen should be ceded to the Baltic states as reparations.