The Latvian Legion (1943-1945)

The Latvian Legion (1943-1945) PDF

Author: Edmunds Svencs

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2013-06-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781506144702

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The Latvian Legion was the largest Latvian military formation that served Nazi Germany from 1943 until the end of World War II. As the most decorated non-German Waffen-SS formation, it fought from the outskirts of Leningrad until the defensive lines of Berlin. However, it also has become a focal point of heated contemporary discussions between historians of Western Europe and the Russian Federation with accusations that the Latvian Legion engaged in war crimes and supported Nazi ideology. The author analyses the development of the Latvian nation, and what influence Russia and Germany have had on it; the creation of the Latvian Legion and what lingering effects it has on today's Latvia.

Stormtrooper on the Eastern Front

Stormtrooper on the Eastern Front PDF

Author: Mintauts Blosfelds

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2008-09-19

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1781596514

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The memoir of a reluctant soldier coerced into military service by the Nazis and driven from his homeland by the Russians. Following the conquest of his native Latvia by the Nazis, Mintauts Blosfelds was given the stark choice: service in the SS or forced labor in a slave camp. So he “volunteered” to fight for the Nazis. In this memoir he describes his training and how he became an instructor before being sent into Russia. He nearly perished during the terrible winter of 1943–44 after being wounded and finding himself with his friend lying dead on top of him. As the tide turned, the Russians advanced remorselessly through. He would be wounded twice more and awarded the Iron Cross for bravery. With German resistance collapsing, he had to flee for his life—capture by the Russians meant almost certain death. He surrendered to the Americans, but describes the neglect he suffered at their hands. Unable to return to Latvia, which was now occupied by the Russians, he became a Displaced Person, eventually settling in the UK. This book tells his compelling story.

Latvia in World War II

Latvia in World War II PDF

Author: Valdis O. Lumans

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780823226276

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Valdis Lumans provides an authoritative, balanced, and comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War. Struggling against both Germany and the Soviet Union, Latvia emerged as an independent nation state after the First World War. In 1940, the Soviets occupied neutral Latvia, deporting or executing more than 30,000 Latvians before the Nazis invaded in 1941 and installed a puppet regime. The Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and reincorporated Latvia as a Soviet Republic. By the end of the war, an estimated 180,000 Latvians fled to the West. The Soviets would deport at least another 100,000. Drawing on a wide range of sources--many brought together here for the first time--Lumans synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history. He moves carefully through traditional sources, many of them partisan, to scholarship emerging since the end of the Cold War, to confront such issues as political loyalties, military collaboration, resistance, capitulation, the Soviet occupation, anti-Semitism, and the Latvian role in the Holocaust.

Amidst Latvians During the Holocaust

Amidst Latvians During the Holocaust PDF

Author: Edward Anders

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9984993183

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Edward Anders, son of Adolf Alperovitch (1897-1941) and Erika Sheftelovitch-Meiran (1895-1992), was born in 1926 in Libau, Latvia. He immigrated to the United States in 1949. He married Joan Fleming in 1955. They had two children.

Blood in the Forest

Blood in the Forest PDF

Author: Vincent Hunt

Publisher: Helion and Company

Published: 2017-05-04

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1912866935

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With original research and interviews with survivors, a journalist reveals the brutal yet forgotten battles in Latvia during the final months of WWII. While the eyes of the world were on Hitler’s bunker, more than half a million men fought six cataclysmic battles in the fields and forests of Western Latvia known as the Courland Pocket. Just an hour from the capital Riga, German forces bolstered by Latvian Legionnaires were trapped with their backs to the Baltic. Forced into uniform by Nazi and Soviet occupiers, Latvian fought Latvian – sometimes brother against brother. Hundreds of thousands of men died for little territorial gain in unimaginable slaughter. When the Germans capitulated, thousands of Latvians continued a war against Soviet rule from the forests for years afterwards. An award-winning documentary journalist, Vincent Hunt travels through the modern landscape gathering eye-witness accounts, piecing together the stories of those who survived. He meets veterans who fought in the Latvian Legion, former partisans and a refugee who fled the Soviet advance to later become President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga. A survivor of the little-known concentration camp at Popervale details his escape from a death march and subsequent survival in the forests with a Soviet partisan group - and a German deserter. With detailed maps and expert contributions alongside rare newspaper archives, photographs from private collections and extracts from diaries translated from Latvian, German and Russian, Hunt assembles a ghastly picture of death and desperation in a nation both gripped by war and at war with itself.

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