Soviet victory The Baltic offensive operation resulted in the expulsion of
German forces from Estonia and
Lithuania. The Soviet fronts involved in the battle lost a total of ca. 280,000 men to all causes (killed, missing, wounded, sick). Communication lines between
Army Group North and
Army Group Centre were permanently severed, and the former was relegated to an occupied Baltic seashore area in Latvia. On 25 January,
Adolf Hitler renamed Army Group North to
Army Group Courland implicitly recognising that there was no possibility of restoring a new land corridor between
Courland and
East Prussia. The Red Army commenced the encirclement and reduction of the
Courland Pocket which retained a possibility of being a major threat, but were able to focus on operations on its northern flank that were now aiming at East Prussia. Operations by the Red Army against the Courland Pocket continued until the surrender of the Army Group Courland on 9 May 1945, when close to 200,000 Germans were taken prisoner there. The German command released thousands of native conscripts from military service. However the Soviet command began conscripting Baltic natives as areas were brought under Soviet control.
Reoccupation of the Baltic states , 1944. Soviet rule of the Baltic states was re-established by force, and
sovietisation followed, which was mostly carried out in 1944–1950. The forced
collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the
mass deportation of civilians in March 1949. All private farms were confiscated, and farmers were made to join the collective farms. An armed
resistance movement named '
Forest Brothers' was active until the mass deportations. Tens of thousands participated or supported the movement; thousands were killed. The Soviet authorities fighting the Forest Brothers also suffered hundreds of deaths. Among those killed on both sides were innocent civilians. Besides the armed resistance of the Forest Brothers, a number of underground nationalist schoolchildren groups were active. Most of their members were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The punitive actions decreased rapidly after
Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; from 1956 to 1958, a large part of the deportees and political prisoners were allowed to return to their homelands. Political arrests and numerous other kinds of
crimes against humanity were committed all through the occupation period until the late 1980s. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the populations remained anti-Soviet. This helped the Baltic citizens to organise a
new resistance movement in the late 1980s and then rapidly develop a modern society after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. ==Formations and units involved==