Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
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In Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service (Oxford University Press, 2026), Harry C. Merritt explores the wartime experiences and postwar legacies of the almost 200,000 Latvian residents who fought on either side of the ideological divide. To mark its recent publication, Peripheral Histories? editor Siobhán Hearne spoke with Harry about researching and writing Latvian wartime history.
PH: What motivated you to write this book?
HM: Ever since I first arrived in Latvia during a study abroad experience as an undergraduate student, I was fascinated by how present World War II remained for the population, continuing to shape Latvia’s national identity, politics, and culture in the twenty-first century. Every family had a story about the war, the Nazi and/or Soviet occupations, and their effects on themselves, their parents, or their grandparents. Competing memory cultures were prominent in public spaces; as a product of Latvia’s occupation, whereby Latvians fought under the flags of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the stories of Latvian soldiers are told in strikingly divergent ways. Latvians on one side are typically cast as noble heroes or tragic victims while Latvians on the other side are presented as national traitors and/or war criminals.
Some competent, comprehensive military histories of the Soviet Union’s 130th Latvian Rifle Corps and Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS Latvian Legion have been published, but in many cases, these were written by veterans themselves: in the West, the Latvian Legion veterans’ organization Daugavas Vanagi (“Hawks of the Daugava [River]) published an 11-volume history of Latvian soldiers in World War II (focused almost entirely on the German side); conversely, in the Latvian SSR, former Soviet Latvian partisans and former Latvian Riflemen published historical scholarship on the Latvian Rifle Corps and Soviet Latvian Partisan movement. Though valuable, these were products of the Cold War, adhering to particular ideological frameworks and lacking access to certain archives; they were also focused overwhelmingly on “their” side, seeking to vindicate those soldiers and their cause. A few high-quality academic histories have been published, for example, Ilze Jermacāne’s 2021 Strēlnieku dzīvība sarkanā (“The Life of [Latvian] Riflemen in Red”); interesting research has also been published by Uldis Neiburgs and Vita Zelče. Yet these publications tend to lack either the scope or the depth of a comprehensive study. My goal was to consider formations on both sides as legitimate objects of study and to pursue this topic through the methods of social and cultural history, rather than writing more traditional military history. I also took the story into the postwar era, historicizing veterans and their endeavors at crafting narratives of the war.
In the book’s introduction, you discuss your choice to study Latvia as a microcosm of Europe’s wartime borderlands, rather than just one part of the continent’s undifferentiated ‘bloodlands’ or as an incomparable nation-state in terms of wartime experience. Could you tell us why you chose this approach, as well as about the importance of placing small states like Latvia at the centre of the history of the Second World War?
On the one hand, I appreciate the efforts of scholars like Timothy Snyder to bring attention to Central and Eastern Europe during World War II. On the other hand, I believe that the “bloodlands” framework is ultimately flattening, obscuring the agency and actions of the diverse residents of this vast space that stretches from Estonia on the Gulf of Finland to Ukraine on the Black Sea and from the Don River in Russia to the Warta River in Poland. To me, this constitutes the traditional Western gaze on this region in an updated form, even if it seeks to empathize with the victims of war and occupation. Conversely, especially on World War II, Latvian historians can also be a bit parochial, resistant to comparison with other cases and reluctant to incorporating certain historiographical approaches. I understand the frustration of Latvian scholars who repeatedly encounter dated frameworks on this topic, or when scholars only use German- or Russian-language sources to write about Latvia, but this has also produced a defensive approach that emphasizes Latvia’s uniqueness and incomprehensibility to outsiders. This defensiveness, exacerbated by international disputes between Latvia and the Russian Federation (and its contemporary weaponization of history), can also lead to a limited, legalistic approach to this history, especially in outward-facing publications (i.e. those translated into English, German, Russian, etc.).
Latvia is the perfect place to investigate World War II and its impacts. As borderlands country with a ethno-linguistically and religiously diverse population, subjected to occupation by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, it can help us to address big questions: how concepts like nationalism could endure and evolve under foreign occupation, how the official ideologies of the great powers (fascism/National Socialism and Communism) were received and interpreted locally, how dynamics of collaboration and resistance manifested and developed, and how narratives of war can be constructed, reinterpreted, and transferred across space and time. There is also a relative symmetry of Latvian participation in the war—around 10% of the prewar Latvian population participated in foreign military formations, ultimately concentrated in two corps-sized national formations consisting of two combat divisions each. The fact that the 201st Latvian Rifle Division was the first new national unit authorized by the Soviet Union and became a model for similar formations and that the Latvian Legion was also a pioneering non-Germanic formation in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS (though not the first—the Estonian Legion predated the Latvian Legion) and grew to be the largest non-Germanic formation in the Waffen-SS make Latvia stand out in a way deserving of study.
Latvian Soldiers of World War II tells the parallel histories of Latvians who fought in military divisions that were under the command of the Waffen-SS and the Red Army. Were there any commonalities of experience across these two groups despite their participation in very different armies?
In approaching this topic, my goal was not to write about two separate cases in the form of a comparative study; rather, I consider both the Latvian Legion and the Latvian Rifle Corps as parts of a single, cohesive story, with many connections, parallel developments, and convergences. The story of these units is a generational one, with the officer cohort of each formation staffed to a significant degree by veterans of World War I (i.e. they had been the Imperial Russian Army’s Latvian Riflemen), then the Latvian War of Independence and Russian Civil War, and the enlisted soldiers on both sides composed in substantial part by the first generation raised in the Republic of Latvia during the interwar period. In short, there is a common context from which many of them emerged, along with shared concepts and investment in ongoing struggles (e.g. based on which side they had fought during the Latvian War of Independence and which directions their political commitments and grievances took them from World War I through the interwar period). The war sharpened existing divisions and created new ones within these generational cohorts (including brothers serving on opposing sides), leaving wounds and divisions that have still not fully healed.
I remain impressed by the degree to which soldiers on both sides rhetorically centered Latvia. First, the symbolic national concessions made by the Soviet and German occupations to these military formations were embraced by their soldiers, who took things farther than occupation authorities imagined at the time. Soldiers on both sides (selectively) drew examples from Latvian history to justify their service, cherished Latvian symbols (though with some key differences on each side), officially celebrated the Midsummer holiday in parallel, and saw their mission as either “defending” Latvia from Soviet re-occupation or “liberating” Latvia from Nazi occupation. Over time, I argue that soldiers became brutalized through the intense and barbarous nature of combat on the Eastern Front. Drawing from existing stereotypes and narratives of Germany and Russia as traditional national enemies of Latvia, soldiers on each side relatively readily absorbed Soviet and Nazi propaganda on the opposing side and intensified their hatred and contempt for opposing forces—i.e. “negative” motivations (what they fought against, rather than for) assumed similar importance. In short, nationalism was a major convergence, expressed in distinct yet ultimately similar ways in the ranks.
One of the many strengths of the book is your exploration of the competing visions of national identity and homeland that circulated across political, ethnic, and class divides. Can you tell us about some of these competing visions of Latvia and Latvian national identity in the context of wartime?
At the start of the twentieth century, rising Latvian nationalism was complemented with a growing socialist movement; these worked largely in tandem but World War I led to a parting of ways between nationalists and socialists. Once a Latvian state was established in 1918, the question remained, should Latvia be a civic or an ethnic nation (i.e. constituted “of the Latvian people” [latviešu tauta] and be defined by language, ethnicity, and culture [and possibly race], or constituted by all those from Latvia [Latvijas tauta], with a shared civic identity across ethnicities)? These identities and frameworks remained in flux through the war, though ideas of the homeland (dzimtene) remained central. Both sides claimed to fight “for the homeland”; Latvian Riflemen accused the Latvian Legion of serving the German fatherland (rendered in Latvian as “fāterlande”) while Latvian Legionnaires believed that the Latvian Rifle Corps betrayed Latvia for the Soviet motherland.
Commonly, the story of the Latvian Rifle Corps is Russification, but ego-documents complicate this, whereby a specifically Latvian identity was maintained (contrasted against “Russian,” i.e. non-national Red Army units). In this environment, Latvians were forced to learn Russian, yet Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and others also celebrated Latvian holidays, sang Latvian songs, and even learned the Latvian language. The experience of Jews in the Latvian Rifle Corps highlights these tensions especially well, with inclusion matched with prejudice and ostracization. Ethnonationalism was the standard framework for the Latvian Legion, which boosted morale and cohesion. Yet Nazi racial ideology meant that Latvians had to prove themselves worthy before regular combat divisions were formed; racial chauvinism contributed to tensions between Latvian Legionnaires and German SS personnel. But even the Latvian Legion ended up recruiting thousands of Russians from Latvia, many of whom were deployed to specially designated auxiliary police battalions, yet some ended up in the 15th and 19th Waffen Grenadier Divisions. Thus, some ethnic Russians fought “against Russia” (as the Soviet Union was commonly called in the Legion) and “for Latvia.” Social class also mapped onto membership with one or the other formation, with the Latvian Rifle Corps much more likely to incorporate members of the urban working class and farmers from the eastern province of Latgallia and the Latvian Legion drawing more from the middle classes and farmers from Latvia’s other provinces.
In Latvian Soldiers of World War II, you draw on an impressive multilingual source base comprised of archival materials from Germany, Latvia, Russia, and the United States. Why was transnational archival research so central to this project?
Archives reflect power relationships; in the case of a borderlands country like Latvia, many key documents were historically stored (and some still remain) in imperial centres, like Moscow, rather than in the “periphery,” like Riga. Readers of Peripheral Histories? have probably encountered this in other cases. The chaos of World War II scattered these documents further through seizure by the victorious Allied Powers and smuggling by the defeated Latvian Legionnaires. German occupation documents and Latvian Legion military records are held in: Riga; Freiburg, Germany; Washington, DC; and Stanford, CA. This all meant that the book project required a lengthy research process and funding to support it (some supplied by a grant from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies as well as from my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont, for which I am grateful). It was daunting but ultimately fulfilling to navigate these archives and retrieve so many materials from them.
Your book brings together social history and military history, drawing on a plethora of ego-documents including memoires, diaries, letters, and interviews. How did you go about selecting materials and navigating the challenges of working with these kinds of sources?
The Latvian historian Inesis Feldmanis has argued that ego-documents are “very subjective and incomplete historical sources…not conducive to coming closer to historical truth” in the context of World War II. By contrast, I started with the premise that ego-documents, or first-person primary sources, are valuable for understanding history, especially periods of war and occupation. My Ph.D. advisor, Omer Bartov, inspired me to consider these documents as valid forms of documentation; to rely only on official records housed in state archives would be to condemn various historical events to oblivion. I think that this applies not just to the Holocaust, about which Bartov was originally making his point, but more broadly. Furthermore, because I am interested in subjective questions such as identity and motivation, these documents are essential to my project.
Though there is a rough symmetry between the two sets of national formations, the primary sources available were varied. The Soviet Union’s Commission for the History of the Great Patriotic War (Mints Commission) conducted scores of interviews with Latvian Riflemen from 1942 to 1946. The historian Jochen Hellbeck, one of the first to work with and publish on these Mints Commission interviews, argues that they “give three-dimensional shape to the emotions, motives, and actions of individual soldiers”; what was shocking to me as I began my research was how few historians had looked at these interviews (located both in the State Archives of Latvia and the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The historian Oleg Budnitskii has cautioned about their use—noting, for example, that the transcripts provide the interviewees’ answers but not the interviewers’ questions—but I encountered an unanticipated level of honesty and heterodoxy within them, directly discussing topics considered by many historians to be taboo. Oral history interviews with Latvian Legionnaires were conducted from the 1990s onward, with many conducted by the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia and the National Oral History Project at the University of Latvia. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview two veterans from each side, aged 91 to 99 when I met them; they have all since passed away. I was also able to gather some unpublished diaries, memoirs, and letters from soldiers on both sides, in addition to drawing from published collections of these (very much a product of the ongoing memory boom in Latvia on this topic). Published memoirs are perhaps the most problematic type of ego-document, yet they express the feelings of the writer and speak both to the past events that they cover as well as the context in which they were published. I found Latvian Legionnaire memoirs as fertile ground for analysis—they were often issued in small print runs intended only for the Latvian diaspora. Whenever possible, I contextualized and corroborated claims, but I think that my book would not be the same if I had left out all the small and evocative (but ultimately unverifiable) details from ego-documents that allow for a kind of Alltagsgeschichte of the war.
The history of Latvia in the Second World War is a politically contested topic and this has had a major impact upon post-war commemoration and contemporary representations of Latvian wartime experiences. How does your book contribute to debates around war memory in the Latvian context (and beyond)?
The losers of the war were the Latvian Legionnaires, who not only were defeated and found themselves in POW camps operated by the Western Allies and filtration and Gulag camps operated by the Soviet Union, but were also tarred by their past affiliation with the SS, which was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg (Baltic Waffen-SS formations received carve-outs from Western Allied officials). The activities of Legion veterans have been presented in diametrically opposed ways—as “freedom fighters” continuing the struggle against Communism and for Latvia through the Cold War (their own self-image) or as part of a secret Nazi network of unpunished war criminals (in Soviet propaganda from the 1960s onward). I reject both positions, instead describing their worldview and postwar activities as constituting a lost cause ideology. Similarly to Confederate veterans in the postbellum U.S. South, these veterans organized themselves, crafted narratives that reframed themselves as noble soldiers in a righteous cause defeated only by the overwhelming numbers and resources of their enemy, and cultivated a cult of martyrdom and sacrifice (including the creation of Latvian Legionnaire Day in 1952) that demanded deference from the wider Latvian diaspora. After the Cold War, these ideas were implanted in Latvia starting in the late 1980s, carried forward by memory activists and defended by the restored Latvian state. Their imprint on the memorial landscape in Latvia has continued to grow, with new monuments and place names honoring them, including the large memorial complex at Lestene. They lost the shooting war but won the memory war.
The winners of the war were the Latvian Riflemen, who succeeded in “liberating” their homeland an served in the Red Army, as part of the victorious Allied forces. But their victory was incomplete, in that Stalinist norms and repressions were renewed rather than renegotiated. Veteran Latvian Riflemen assumed important roles in the Latvian Communist Party, civil administration, and cultural institutions, but encountered limits to their influence, as when the “National Communist” faction (led by veteran Latvian Rifleman Eduards Berklavs) failed to renegotiate center-periphery relations in the Soviet Union. Some former Latvian Riflemen seized on glasnost’ and perestroika to reassess the meaning of their wartime struggles and advocate for Latvian autonomy or independence in the 1980s (including Berklavs, reemerging as an anti-Communist nationalist), but since the restoration of Latvian independence in 1991, they have found themselves totally marginalized, generally considered to be collaborators with the longer, more recent, and more anathemized Soviet occupation. Monuments and place names honoring the Red Army Latvian Riflemen functionally only exist now in Russia. The winners of the war became the losers of history.
I thought that these narratives and the memory activists and entrepreneurs that shaped them desperately needed contextualization and critical analysis. I found it important to include the voices of Legion officers such as Ādolfs Blāķis and Ēriks Pārups, both committed Latvian patriots yet also postwar critics of the Latvian Legion and its myths. I also amplified the voices of those who became doubly marginalized in history, Latvian Jewish Red Army soldiers. This includes Mavriks Vulfsons, whose efforts toward restoring Latvian independence in the 1980s include being the first person to publicly leak the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact within the Soviet Union; his reputation in Latvia still remains quite mixed and with many more detractors than admirers in the Latvian diaspora. My interventions have not been without controversy. In 2021, I was asked to serve on an expert panel to evaluate a monument to the Latvian Legion at a former POW site in Zedelgem, Belgium; our panel concluded that the monument’s location on public land was inappropriate, its informational plaque was oversimplified, and that the complex history of Latvian involvement in Nazi Germany’s armed forces needed proper context. For these conclusions, the panel was accused by Latvia’s cabinet of ministers and by diaspora organizations of offending the Latvian people, “political correctness,” “rewriting of history,” and “Russian disinformation.” Ironically, I am told that my work is unpublishable in Russia, due to its memory laws, which prohibit equating the actions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the “rehabilitation of Nazism,” a concept interpreted rather broadly. The Zedelgem controversy frames the book’s conclusion, while I feel that the latter point makes for a good postscript. I hope that my readers recognize that the book expresses empathy for Latvian soldiers on both sides, while challenging war myths present not only in Latvia, but also in Russia and in the West.
Harry C. Merritt is Assistant Professor of History at Rhode Island College. From 2023 to 2025, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. In 2023, he received an Emerging Scholars Grant from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. Harry’s book, Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service, was published by Oxford University Press in 2026. His work has also been published in Nationalities Papers, The Journal of Modern European History, American Historical Review, and the Journal of Baltic Studies. You can find him on Bluesky: @harrymerritt.bsky.social