On the 22nd of June, 1941, the Germans launched a blitzkrieg war into Soviet territory. Avoiding urban areas, reconnaissance detachments rushed ahead moving at speeds of up to twenty-five miles per hour. A column of mechanized infantry and artillery followed. Thus began the war on the Eastern Front – the largest and most brutal battle of modern history ending only after the deaths of tens of millions of human beings.

While the main event was the mechanized war fought mainly by Germans and Russians, many highly significant sideshows occurred among other peoples and nationalities. This chapter covers one of them: violence in the Baltic states and eastern Poland in the anarchic days of the last week of June 1941. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divided northern Eastern Europe between the Soviets and the Germans. Stalin's regime incorporated the eastern half of Poland (henceforth called Poland B) in 1939 and then annexed the Baltic states in 1940. This ethnically diverse region thus encountered a rapidly changing political environment moving in a short period of time from independent states to Soviet occupation and then German occupation.

This project aims to isolate the effects of mass-based emotion on ethnic violence. There is perhaps no better period in twentieth century Europe to isolate this force than in the days immediately following the launch of Barbarossa. These few days approximated a Hobbesian state of anarchy with a thorough disintegration of social and political control.