Ask Lemmygrad

What you said here really applies more broadly to all of the former socialist bloc. But the Baltics in particular have a history of even more enthusiastic Nazi collaboration and violent anti-semitism and anti-communism than most of the rest of the eastern bloc. They were, for a long time, colonized by the Germans (later also the Swedes), going all the way back to the middle ages. For nearly seven hundred years the ruling and cultural elites of the Baltics were primarily Germanic, and so they have an inferiority complex that drives them to go to great lengths to prove they belong in the "Aryan" club.

The history of German colonization in the Baltic Provinces for eight centuries proves that Teutonic activity has never been seriously impeded there. It commenced in the Middle Ages, in the golden age of feudal Germany, and it is linked by a continuous bond with the German renaissance of the nineteenth century. The Germans have had their own way in the Baltic Provinces. They have there put into effect in all its severity and rapaciousness hegemonic colonization, or colonization through social control, as they understand it; although numerically inferior they have become the Herrenvolk, an expression which we sometimes inadequately translate by "the master people." It really means "the race of masters," a different concept, having a significance of its own. The history of these lands of servitude demonstrates what would be the fate of all of eastern Europe if the Germans were left free to exploit the political disintegration of the Slavs. It also shows the West what its fate would be had German power not been crushed.

"German Colonization in Eastern Europe" (1918)