Following World War I, the victorious Entente powers stripped Germany of several territories with mixed populations, including the Klaipėda region, previously known as Memel. Initially, the plan was to establish an internationally governed status for the area. However, in January 1923, about a thousand armed Lithuanians, dressed in civilian clothes, occupied Klaipėda and, after brief resistance, compelled the French military contingent stationed there to surrender. Western European nations reacted with condemnation, leading to a convention signed in Paris in May 1924 that recognized the Klaipėda region as an autonomous part of Lithuania, granting it its own parliament and ensuring the preservation of traditional rights and culture for its residents.

Germany consented to this arrangement, likely anticipating that it could reclaim the territory from Lithuania in the future. This vague German hope began to take a more concrete form nearly 15 years later, in the spring of 1938, when German Führer Adolf Hitler announced that the recovery of the Klaipėda region was one of his primary goals. As tensions in Europe escalated during this period, the significance of the Klaipėda region took on renewed importance in the context of rising German nationalism and expansionist ambitions.