Blood in the Forest: The End of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket

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Blood in the Forest tells the brutal story of the forgotten battles of the final months of the Second World War. While the eyes of the world were on Hitler’s bunker, more than half a million men fought six cataclysmic battles along a front line of fields and forests in Western Latvia known as the Courland Pocket. Just an hour from the capital Riga, German forces bolstered by Latvian Legionnaires were cut off and trapped with their backs to the Baltic. The only way out was by sea: the only chance of survival to hold back the Red Army. 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, the author travels through the modern landscape gathering eye-witness accounts from seventy years before piecing together for the first time in English 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 and founder of Riga’s Jewish Museum, Margers Vestermanis has never spoken about his personal experiences. Here he gives details of the SS new world order planned in Kurzeme, his escape from a death march and subsequent survival in the forests with a Soviet partisan group - and a German deserter. With eyewitness accounts, detailed maps and expert contributions alongside rare newspaper archive, photographs from private collections and extracts from diaries translated into English from Latvian, German and Russian, the author assembles a ghastly picture of death and desperation in a tough, uncomfortable story of a nation both gripped by war and at war with itself. 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 Index BackCover