Act of Lithuania's Declaration of Independence

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
original
Nude transcript

Act of the Declaration of Independence of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Valstybės atkūrimo aktas ), also law of February 16 , is the document with which the Lietuvos Taryba , the Lithuanian State Council, provisionally governed the independence of Lithuania both from the German Empire and from the ( 1918 ) Russia declared.

backgrounds

Lithuania came under Russian rule in 1795 during the Third Partition of Poland . As a result of the January uprising , which was suppressed in 1863 , there was an intensified policy of russification . During the First World War , the German Reich occupied the Lithuanian territories in 1915 and later only wanted to recognize an independent Lithuanian state if it was in economic and military union with the Reich. Against this background, the Taryba , the Lithuanian State Council, declared on December 11, 1917 the restoration of the "independent" state of Lithuania with the capital Vilnius and with ties to the German Empire . On June 4, 1918, Wilhelm Karl von Urach was offered the Lithuanian royal crown from a Catholic branch of the Württemberg royal family . He should receive the royal name Mindaugas II . The new kingdom thus proclaimed existed practically only as a concept on paper. Since Germany delayed its recognition, the Lietuvos Taryba proclaimed Lithuania's independence again on February 16, 1918, without any ties to the other states. This day is still a national holiday today .

Original documents of the declaration of independence

The copy of the declaration, which was kept in the country until the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, has been lost. The original of the handwritten copy of the declaration handed over to the then German Reich was found by Professor Liudas Mažylis, who teaches at the Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania , in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Berlin at the end of March 2017 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Foreign Office: "Birth Certificate" of Lithuania discovered . In: Deutschlandfunk . March 30, 2017 ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed April 1, 2017]).
  2. ^ A b Reinhard Veser: Declaration of Independence: A century find for Lithuania . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . March 30, 2017, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed March 30, 2017]).
  3. ↑ Istorinį dokumentą suradęs Liudas Mažylis: “Apėmė pergalės jausmas” . ( lrytas.lt [accessed March 30, 2017]).
  4. ↑ afp.com : Historians: Lithuania's missing declaration of independence found in Berlin. In: The world . March 30, 2017, accessed March 11, 2020 .