The Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania–lay at the heart of the strategic considerations and various negotiations of the major powers in 1939. Historians have looked at the Baltic issue in Soviet–Western negotiations in the spring and summer of 1939. They have also analysed German–Soviet contacts and negotiations leading to the pact of 24 August 1939, whose secret protocol divided the Baltic region into a Nazi German and a Soviet sphere of interest along the Lithuanian–Latvian border. Surprisingly they have not–looked in detail at Nazi German policy towards the Baltic states before the German–Soviet pact. Did Nazi Germany have a special policy for these states on the eve of the Second World War and if so, how and when did it start, what were its features and when did it end?

Hitler's writings before 1933 elaborate the idea of gaining living space at the expense of the Soviet Union. They hardly mention Poland, but the following abstract statement relates to the Baltic region: ‘What the Mediterranean Sea is to Italy, the Eastern Coast of the Baltic Sea is to Germany’. This simple sentence seems to have been important to Hitler, for he repeated it many years later in his conversation with the Italian Foreign Minister, Ciano, on 12 August 1939. There can be no doubt that Hitler's long-standing aggressive intentions in eastern Europe and in particular against the USSR were also directed against the three Baltic states.