The veritable flood of books and articles on the annexationist policies of Imperial Germany between 1914 and 1918 prompts the thought that historians at least have taken to heart Clemenceaus's advice, that war is too serious a business to be left to soldiers. That monument to German military ambition in the East in 1918, the Treaty of Brest–Litovsk, which Sir John Wheeler-Bennett once described as the ‘forgotten peace’, is anything but that. That it will continue to be the object of attention has since been assured by those historians of National Socialism who have increasingly located the events of 1918 in the mental world-view of the Third Reich's leaders. Along with the growing number of studies of National Socialist policy in the 1930s, investigations of Wilhelmine Germany's occupation of the Baltic provinces of Russia in the First World War have made a major contribution to the now long-established debate about the ‘continuity’ of foreign policy aims between Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany. Fritz Fischer's pioneering book, Griff nach der Weltmacht, dealt extensively with German–Baltic relations in the war and provided a foundation for the more detailed studies of Wilhelmine Baltic policy by Baumgart, Basler, Mann, Volkmann and others.

Apart from Volkmann, few of these historians have followed the thread of German policy through to the 1920s and the startling fact is that today there is still no overall analysis of German–Baltic relations in the inter-war period. There has been, therefore, a serious absence of information to substantiate or refute some of the generalizations made about Weimar Ostpolitik in the course of the continuity debate.