OUP Awarded AABS Book Publication Subvention for Latvian Soldiers of World War II by Harry Merritt

During World War II, the country of Latvia was occupied in succession by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; yet nearly 200,000 soldiers from Latvia served. Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service traces the origins, wartime experience, and legacies of soldiers from Latvia who fought in national formations on both sides of the Eastern Front: in the 130th Latvian Rifle Corps of the Soviet Union’s Red Army (“Latvian Riflemen”); and in the Latvian SS Volunteer Legion of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS (“Latvian Legionnaires”).

Through the lenses of social, cultural, and political history, this book analyzes military records and government documents drawn from archives across four countries to uncover how these national formations were created in negotiations between the occupying powers and Latvian advocates. Utilizing first-person primary sources (“ego-documents”)—including wartime interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories—this book reveals how Latvian soldiers adapted to their new ideological settings and incubated Latvian nationalist ideas while serving in the armies of occupying powers. These soldiers distinguished themselves in combat on both sides, with the Latvian Legion becoming the most decorated non-Germanic unit of the Waffen-SS and the Latvian Rifle Corps emerging as a highly decorated Red Army formation, one division of which earned the designation of an elite Guards unit. Veterans of each side then became key political actors in postwar Soviet Latvia and the Latvian diaspora in the West respectively.

After the war, the victorious Latvian Riflemen gradually became marginalized—first in Soviet Latvia, then in independent Latvia—while the defeated Waffen-SS Latvian Legionnaires successfully integrated into Cold War-era Western democracies and developed durable institutions and narratives in exile that were later imported into post-Soviet Latvia. In the memory wars that followed World War II, wartime victors became the losers of history and the “lost cause” of the defeated side triumphed, yielding ongoing tensions both within Latvia and between Latvia and other countries, most notably Russia.