Institutions for the Administration of Vilnius at the Beginning of the German Occupation during the First World War

Abstract

The entrenched opinion in historiography is that during the First World War, the German army, after entering the lands belonging to the Russian Empire, created its own occupying administrative structures essentially in an empty space. This also applies to the case of Vilnius. Nevertheless, the diaries and memoirs of witnesses of the events of that time cast doubt on this very entrenched stereotype. Indeed, the entry of the Germans into Vilnius in September 1915 meant radical changes in the development of the city’s administration, but from an administrative point of view, the arriving conquerors did not really find an empty space here. Certain structures, the city magistrate, police and Citizens’ Committee were approved for retention. This was done not at the initiative of the Russian government that carried it out, but of the local public itself. After the Germans marched in, they did not destroy the structures of civil administration they found, but adapted them to meet their own interests. Along with this, they created military structures, leaving civilian rule on the sidelines. As the Germans gradually established themselves, the rudiments of occupation civilian rule, which were drawn from cadres of local Poles, began to emerge. This was associated with the trend the German authorities expressed in the first months of the occupation to link the future of the Vilnius region with Poland. The Poles of Vilnius, dominating in the structures of the civil administration, hoped for a liberal system of government, similar to that of occupied ethnic Poland. However, in the late autumn of 1915, at the initiative of the highest German military command in the East, a special administrative formation, the Oberost, began to be created, which was to become an economic and military colony of Germany. The Vilnius region was also to be part of it. From then on, the creation of the German civil administration began on a purely military basis, with the suppression of the Polish identity and the gradual restriction and pressure on all former local administrative structures, which was fully revealed at the beginning of 1916.