Blood in the Forest: The End of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket
Vincent Hunt
May 2017 · Helion and Company
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About this ebook
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.
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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About the author
Vincent Hunt is a documentary journalist and award-winning BBC producer. Crossing Latvia interviewing people who suffered at the hands of the KGB or fought against their system of totalitarian control he sets the political and social context of what Communism actually meant in this Baltic state: interrogation, surveillance, deportation and often death. This is his second book about Latvia’s recent history, following on from Blood in the Forest - the end of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket (Helion 2017) which detailed the six desperate battles by German and Latvian forces to halt the Red Army advance into Latvia. His work explores pan-generational trauma, forgiveness and legacy, with the journey to see the landscape now an important part of understanding sorrow, loss and memorial for those left behind. His first book Fire and Ice (The History Press, 2014) was a journey across Arctic Norway meeting people affected by the Nazi scorched earth retreat of 1944 and the forced evacuation of the region. Along the way he discovered the shocking stories of 13,700 Soviet prisoners worked to death in sub-zero conditions or murdered by their Nazi captors.
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