Southern Lithuania
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Southern Lithuania (German: Süd-Litauen, Lithuanian: Pietinė Lietuva) was a unit of military administration of the German Lithuanian Province. It was established by Germans in July 1918 in course of World War I, in a part of territories of the Ober Ost military administration (the Ober Ost itself was established in part of the areas conquered by Germany from Imperial Russia in the effect of the Central Powers' offensive of 1915).
[edit] Geography
The southern border of Southern Lithuania was along Bug River. The border then ran eastwards to the north of Brest-Litowsk (currently Brest in Belarus), west of Slonim and then to the north. It then turned to the west again, north of Druskininkai town. To the north it bordered with the so-called Wilna-Gebiet (Wilna Area) of the Ober-Ost.
The head of local military administration was stationed in Bialystok and Grodna was another notable city in the area.
[edit] Demography
The population was linguistically mixed; there were speakers of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Yiddish, as well as Polish-Belarusian pidgins. The population censae were done by language criterion rather than nationality, therefore nationality percentages are currently disputed as pidgin speakers were considered as a part of nationality which fit political agenda of the time. What is known is that Yiddish and Russian were spoken mostly by Jews in the cities [citation needed]. There were probably some Russians, too, as the area was occupied by Russia previously, but it is impossible to tell how much because censuses mixed them with Russian speaking Jews. Most Polish speaking residents were also living in cities. Lithuanian speakers were mainly in the north, Polish speakers in the west, and Belarusians in the east. The percentage of Belarusian language is hard to count however because most of pidgin speakers were written in censae as Belarusian speakers due to political agenda, while some of them were of other nationalities. [citation needed]
As for the religion, Southern Lithuania was predominantly Catholic (both Roman and Greek catholicism were being practised). [citation needed]
[edit] History
As part of their Mitteleuropa plan, the Germans intended to transfer the area to one of the puppet states planned there. Some claim that the planned Lithuanian state, established as Lithuanian Province, encompassed three precincts, and the Southern Lithuania was southernmost of them (with the others being Vilnius government precinct and Kaunas government precinct). However, with the German defeat in 1918 and the successes of the Bolshevist Russia in the Russian Civil War, the German garrisons were withdrawn, the plans for creation of puppet states abandoned and on February 16, 1919, the area was transferred by the Ober Ost commanders to newly-reborn Poland.
After World War I Lithuania regained independence and signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia in 1920 which left the northern part of the precinct within the territory of the Republic of Lithuania (the southern border ran along Neman River). Eventually, after the Soviet defeat in the Battle of Warsaw the territory went under Polish control. The northern part of the area, which was ceded to Lithuania by the Soviet treaty, continued to be claimed as part of Lithuania. A small part of it which was attached to Lithuanian SSR in 1940 (Druskininkai and surroundings) belongs to Lithuania today.
