Baltic Landeswehr strike-troop commander who led the Liepāja coup and fell at Riga
A Baltic German baron from Courland who fought as a Bavarian uhlan officer in the First World War, he became a staff officer and strike-troop commander of the Baltic Landeswehr in 1919. On 16 April he led the Liepāja coup against the Ulmanis government, and on 22 May he was killed at twenty-five in the attack that retook Riga from the Red Army.
Related historical events
1919: from the coup at Liepāja to death at Riga
Hans von Manteuffel-Szoege was born on 19 January 1894 on the Kapseden estate in Courland, the son of the Baltic German noble Georg von Manteuffel-Szoege and Countess Sophie von Rüdiger. He studied law at Heidelberg, where he belonged to the student corps Saxo-Borussia, and when the First World War came he, though a subject of the Russian Empire, volunteered for the 2nd Bavarian Uhlan Regiment, fought on the western and eastern fronts and was commissioned lieutenant in 1915. After Germany's November revolution he returned to Courland and in early 1919 joined the Baltic Landeswehr, the force raised by the Baltic German landowners, as first general staff officer, becoming commander of its strike troop of war veterans.
The Landeswehr nominally defended Ulmanis's Latvian provisional government, but its German soldiers had no wish to serve a Latvian state that promised land reform. On 16 April 1919 Manteuffel's strike troop raided the government in Liepāja and tried to arrest the ministers; Ulmanis took refuge aboard the ship Saratov under British protection. Neither the Allied missions nor von der Goltz's German command supported the coup officially, but Goltz acquiesced, and on 10 May a pro-German government under the pastor Andrievs Niedra was installed. On 22 May the Landeswehr and the Iron Division retook Riga from the Red Army. Manteuffel was shot dead at the head of the troops crossing the Daugava bridge into the city. He was twenty-five.
Among Baltic Germans he was remembered as 'the most capable political and military leader' of their community, and his name survives on the commemorative badge of the Landeswehr strike troop and on the memorial to the Baltic fallen at Schliersee in Bavaria. In Latvian accounts he is the leading figure of the coup that tried to overthrow the young republic. The executions and reprisals of the days after the recapture of Riga, the Landeswehr's defeat by the Estonians at Cēsis in June and Ulmanis's return are told in the 'Baltic wars of independence' document.