Blood in the Forest

The End of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket

Vincent Hunt

• Publisher: Helion & Company
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781913336035
• eBook ISBN: 9781912866939
• Subtopic: Baltic History

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.

1

Maybe it’s Easier to Forget

Seventeen floors above street level, the view from the roof of Riga’s Academy of Sciences is spectacular. It’s possibly the best in town.

Like a 1950s nicotine-stained version of the Empire State Building with cousins in Moscow and Warsaw, the Academy is a symbol of fifty years of Soviet power; a period of alien occupation, repression and suppression which ended only in 1991 with the restoration of Latvian independence.

Few tourists come here, but many should. There’s a bird’s eye view to the east over the Daugava, the wide and rolling river that flows through Riga to the Baltic. A tall red TV tower rises from an island in the middle of that blue ribbon which divides Latvia as it flows from Russia and Belarus into the Gulf of Riga.

To the west is the five-arched railway bridge into the city, an icon in metal which brought to Riga industry, machinery, trade, wealth and, perhaps most significantly, people. Further to the west are the symbols of the new Riga: an enormous glass and steel national library, the 27-storey smooth glass cylinder Swedbank building known as The Sun Stone, and a little further to the right the beautifully-weighted Valdemara Street suspension bridge across the river.

The Academy of Sciences stands alone on the Old Town side of the Daugava as a magnificent monstrosity: a classic Soviet-era monolithic skyscraper gifted to the city by the Kremlin, its tower narrowing in stages as it rises into the sky.

From the viewing platform there is a glorious panorama through the centuries of Riga’s existence. The tall spire of St Peter’s Church and the Riga Dome are landmarks on the cobbled streets of an Old Town dating back to the 13th century. By day they buzz with the conversations of tourists in bars and restaurants in the picturesque squares. By night they echo to the drunken shouts of stag parties and the thumping beats of basement nightclubs.

When the visibility is good – like today – it’s possible to see Riga unfolding for several miles in each direction before the forests begin. They are dark, dense fringes of pine trees skirting the suburbs, marking the boundaries of urban habitation.

People say there are two Latvias: Riga, and everywhere else. But there’s also the Latvia of the towns and the land of the forests. Both are utterly different.

The forests are a world of silence, stillness and secrets. In the cities material things move on – the cars, the clothes, the phones – but in the forests time has stood still.

There are far fewer tourists at the top of the Academy today than are leaning out from the viewing deck of St Peter’s, one of the plum platforms for casual city visitors. The Academy tower lies outside the safety of the Old Town in a poor, rundown area called the Moscow suburb. There’s a feeling of dodginess in the streets around here that would be enough to put off those who prefer sightseeing in absolute safety. Independent travellers say a market round the corner from here is the first place that stolen mobile phones re-appear. It’s one of the most desperate markets I’ve ever seen. Part-worn bicycle tyres, junk furniture, second-hand clothes, car parts: on my first visit I couldn’t quite believe the stuff displayed in the canvas-covered stalls actually had a price.

The Moscow suburb is, like Latvia itself, a crossroads of history. The junction of Gogola Street* close to the market is a classic example. The imminent arrival in Riga – then part of the Russian Empire – of Napoleon’s forces on their way to Moscow triggered such a crisis that the houses to one side were cleared to allow a greater field of fire to stop them. In the end, Napoleon never arrived.

On one corner of that junction a savage episode in Latvia’s more recent history was played out when Nazi troops torched the Great Choral Synagogue as one of the first acts of the Holocaust. Having forced the Red Army out of Riga, the Nazis began the systematic genocide of European Jews with Riga the epicentre of the killing machine.

Within days of the German occupation in late June 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms in Riga started. Fascist Latvian thugs encouraged by their new Nazi masters roamed at will, beating up Jewish women, children and old men, raping and humiliating them. Then the killing started.

Historians disagree on the exact number of dead but just 200 metres from where I am this synagogue was set ablaze on the evening of 4 July 1941. The event was filmed for use in Nazi propaganda newsreels. The story goes that as many as 300 Lithuanian Jews, mostly women and children, were locked in the basement by a squad of pro-Nazi Latvian auxiliaries known as the Arājs Kommando. Led by former policeman Viktors Arājs the 200–300 volunteers in the Arājs Kommando shared anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic political leanings and from the earliest days of German rule embarked on a vicious and drunken rampage of hatred and death.1

The synagogue fire was just the start. Before long their missions of murder spread out across the Latvian countryside. They drove from town to town in blue transit buses, rounding up Jews and forcing them to dig their own graves before shooting them, aided and guided by the notorious Nazi Einsatzkommando mobile killing units.2

Some historians estimate the Arājs Kommando volunteers were responsible for the deaths of 26,000 people, mostly Jews.3

By the end of February 1942 the SS reported 65,000 Latvian Jews executed, most by Einsatzgruppe A and their Latvian auxiliaries. Altogether only 1,000 Latvian Jews survived the war out of a pre-war population of 70,000; only 100 were left alive in Riga.4

In the years 1941 to 1944 the streets of this district were designated as the Riga Ghetto, where the city’s Jews were gathered. From here men, women and children alike were marched off to the forests at Rumbula in November and December 1941 for one of the most appalling chapters of mass murder in World War II. Here 25,000 Jews were killed in two massacres by soldiers from the personal staff of SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich rich Jeckeln. He had organised the mass killings of Kiev’s Jews at Babi Yar a few months earlier. They were helped by 1,500 Latvian accomplices, including 800 Riga police, who cleared the ghetto, marched the Jews to the forest and sealed off any escape routes.5

The descriptions of what happened in the forest are unspeakable, like a glimpse of hell. Men, women and children were forced to undress and lie in a pit before being shot. The next victims were ordered to lie on top of them then they too were shot, with an officer administering a coup de grace to anyone not killed outright. This method was known as ‘sardine packing’. The process was repeated endlessly, with soil thrown over each layer of victims until everyone was dead. As the murderers marched away the mass grave twitched and groaned for a while, then fell silent. Amazingly two or three women survived by pretending to be dead, and crept out of the pile of corpses when night fell. Only one survived the war, Frida Michelson, whose account is harrowing.6

Ruthless and brutal, Jeckeln was decorated for his work in the forest. I will hear accounts of many more murders ordered by him before my journey through the Latvian battlefields is complete.

I am travelling west from Riga along the front line of the final frontier of World War II, across a region called Courland. The Germans called it Kurland, the Latvians know it as Kurzeme. It’s a land of dense forests, of lakes and rivers and sandy, unspoilt beaches – it’s a lovely place to have a holiday. But seven decades ago this land was the last battlefield in a cataclysmic fight to the death between two massively armoured ideologies, pressing anyone within reach into serving their cause.

The once-triumphant Nazi armies were pushed back by their Soviet enemy to a corner of the Baltics where, with their backs to the sea, they resisted six unimaginable onslaughts from land and air aimed at dislodging their grip on the final two ports that offered a way out. Alongside the Germans were a generation of Latvian men, many no more than schoolboys, fighting in Nazi uniforms as Waffen-SS and known as ‘the Latvian Legion’. Once the Nazis started taking heavy casualties in the East, men of fighting age in the lands they had captured were seen as ready replacements. For many Latvians the choice they were given was simple: a combat unit, a labour battalion or a concentration camp. Formed in early 1943, the Legion consisted of two divisions of Waffen-SS, the 15th Grenadier and the 19th. The 19th ended up trapped in Courland and was forced to capitulate: the 15th was shipped west to help defend Germany. Despite taking huge casualties, many men managed to surrender to the Allies and thus survive both the war and the post-war reckoning.

The Legion remains controversial as its ranks included Arājs Kommando volunteers who massacred Jews in 1941 and fought in vicious anti-partisan operations in 1942. The Kommando was merged into the Legion when it formed in 1943. Although membership was not proof of involvement in mass murder, the Kommando cast a lasting shadow over the Legion.

Army officer Artūrs Silgailis fled to Germany in 1941 after being removed as unreliable by the Soviets and was groomed by the Abwehr; German military intelligence. He returned with the Nazi invasion and helped set up the Legion, eventually becoming chief of staff to Inspector General Rūdolfs Bangerskis, nominally the highest-ranking Latvian officer but still under German command.7

As well as being an eye-witness Silgailis was a key player in the conflict in Courland. His memories are quoted throughout this book.

There were many Latvians in the Red Army too. Some were volunteers, some were Jews who went east to escape the Nazi invasion in 1941. Many were men press-ganged into a Red Army uniform as areas of Eastern Latvia were freed from Nazi control after 1944. The casualty lists in Courland record many Latvian Jews dying in Red Army service fighting the Nazis.8

My journey will take me across a land stained with wartime tragedy, revealing a nation still traumatised by its recent and not-so-recent experience. Even now Latvia is mourning its war dead … but grieving for so much loss in so many ways in such a short space of time that it is scarcely believable.

This is the story of a world at war in a small, forgotten part of a land at the crossroads of history. There are Russians and Germans, but there are Latvians too, and Spaniards, Swedes, Kazakhs, Norwegians, Ukranians, Dutch, Lithuanians … a united nations of men fighting for fascism and Adolf Hitler pitted against a united nations of men fighting for Joseph Stalin – whether they wanted to or not.

Sometimes brothers of different ages found themselves on opposing sides, facing each other across the battlefield. Civilians were grabbed from the street and sent to Germany to build defences. Boys were taken from the classroom, pressed into uniform and sent to the front line: they were often dead within days. The future President of Latvia escaped in a truck laden with refugees, dodging a hail of bullets from Soviet planes strafing the road to the coast.

The forests became places of refuge, escape and resistance as well as of ambush. Several times entire Soviet units were caught in the woods and wiped out. In the deep forests, casualties of the war have been found unburied even recently, resting for one final time against a tree. Now, just bones remain.

The forests were dangerous places, concealing deserters, partisans and armed and desperate men of all allegiances. They shared the sanctuary of the trees with refugees and people with nowhere else to go. Awful, unspeakable things were done to defenceless and vulnerable people.

Infants and their young mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers were murdered, mutilated and raped by Nazi and Red Army soldiers alike in a frenzy of bloodlust. Pro-Soviet partisans took revenge on local fathers for the bravery of their sons in a Nazi uniform. When a group of nationalist partisans, the Rubenis Battalion, killed 300 Nazi troops in a running battle through the forests and were fed and watered by people living in that area, German revenge squads slaughtered them all. The name of Zlēkas should rank alongside the worst brutalities of the Nazis. It’s sickening: babies, teenagers, the elderly – 160 civilians murdered. And there’s hardly a word about it.

These brutal episodes are a glimpse of the bloodlust, murder and crazed killing that visited this small region of western Latvia. They do not feature heavily in official histories but are remembered in great detail by the locals, recorded f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Language
• 1. Maybe it’s Easier to Forget
• 2. Leaving Riga
• 3. God, Thy Earth is Aflame
• 4. A Taste of What’s to Come
• 5. One Man’s War Museum
• 6. Now it’s Total War
• 7. The Men Who Fought for Hitler
• 8. From Refugee to President
• 9. Winter Joins the Fight
• 10. The Christmas Battles
• 11. A Morning with the Bomb Squad
• 12. Bunkers in the Snow
• 13. The Silent Stones of Zlēkas
• 14. Liepāja and its Troubled History
• 15. Karosta Prison and the Dunes at Šķēde
• 16. The Baltic Coast – North to Ventspils
• 17. The SS State in Dundaga
• 18. A Beautiful Beach where the Tanks Reached the Sea
• 19. If These Trees Could Tell Stories
• 20. The Last Resting Place of a Soldier
• 21. Even the Dead Were Bombed
• 22. Capitulation and Defeat
• 23. Peace, of a Sort
• 24. Escape from a Death Camp
• 25. Only the Memory of Victory Remains
• Appendix
• Bibliography