A summary of the memoirs and testimonies of Estonian communists concerning the Summer War of 1941 that were collected in the Soviet rear area in 1942 appeared in the first issue of 2020 of the historical periodical Tuna. This current introduction of sources is the follow-up of that summary because the collection of memories and documents reflecting the same events was launched in German-occupied Estonia as well shortly after the war summer of 1941.
First of all, the propaganda agencies of the Estonian Self-Administration, the local civilian administration of the German occupying authorities, collected materials. The initial objective was the compilation of a propaganda album entitled Õuduste aasta [The Year of Horrors], which would have reflected events of the year of Soviet occupation and of the Summer War of 1941. This plan was later abandoned, and in 1943, the two-volume collected work Eesti rahva kannatuste aasta [The Year of Suffering for the Estonian People] was published on the given theme. This can conditionally even be referred to as a semi-scholarly treatment.
Secondly, the collection of memories of the war summer of 1941 was launched in units of the Omakaitse [Home Guard], an Estonian volunteer auxiliary police organisation. Reports of the Omakaitse units on the basis of materials collected in 1941–1942 were completed by mid-1942. Descriptions of the actions of forest brothers (Estonian patriotic partisans) in the Summer War of 1941 were added to these reports as illustrative material. In parallel with the reports, the compilation of historical overviews of the Omakaitse units began at the start of 1942, starting with the liquidation of the Kaitseliit [Defence League] organisation in the summer of 1940 and continuing to the development of the Omakaitse organisation. These overviews were completed by 1943.
The history of the origin of the Omakaitse reports and historical overviews is briefly examined in this source introduction. The contents of these documents are characterised in the context of that time and at the same time, their value as historical sources is analysed.
The summaries and historical overviews drawn up by Omakaitse staff officers are by their nature activity reports of their units. The Kaitseliit organisation of the Republic of Estonia is emphatically highlighted as the predecessor of the Omakaitse organisation. And this in turn also gives this work a very clear-cut distribution according to units and counties, and also a clear orientation that the first year of Soviet occupation in 1940–1941, the Summer War, and the history of the development of the Omakaitse had to be treated as a unified whole. It is not known if there were plans to separately publish what had been written – evidently not – but the collected material was surely used in the two-volume collected work Eesti rahva kannatuste aasta, which was published in 1943.
The Omakaitse was an internal defence organisation with auxiliary police functions. It is perhaps unreasonable to demand objective writing of history from it, and evidently that was not the intent. In the case of these documents, the aim was not a more general treatment of the war summer of 1941, but rather, as can be read in the instructions for the Omakaitse reports – ‘the year of horrors for the Estonian people and the struggle in the name of liberation from the yoke of Bolshevism’. The Germans were admittedly ‘liberators’ in this context, but nevertheless emphatically secondary characters.
Regardless of the objective, the Omakaitse summaries are and will remain primary sources for every researcher of the forest brother movement of 1941 and of the history of the origin of the Omakaitse organisation. In terms of source criticism, these documents nevertheless do not claim to present the whole historical truth nor do they aspire towards greater generalisation, rather they reflect events very clearly relying on the understandings of one side and chiefly on memories. In summary, we can recognise that at least as they relate to the Summer War of 1941, the Omakaitse summaries should be related to precisely as is good practice in the case of oral tradition – considerably more source-critically than average.