Vincent Hunt Books

A hard-hitting history of the Soviet security police in totalitarian Latvia - with Latvians as both oppressors and oppressed.

With chilling echoes of the 2022 war in Ukraine, 40,000 Latvian soldiers of the 15th SS Division - a mix of Russian Front veterans and teenage conscripts - faced the Red Army in Pomerania during harsh Arctic blizzards from January to March 1945. One in three perished, becoming known as the lost Legion. The author interviews the last surviving Latvian Legionnaires who settled in the UK after the war, tracing their steps across modern Poland and revealing many stories from Latvian archives in English for the first time. Thrown into the fray as Nazi defenses crumbled, the Latvians were constantly encircled and outgunned, forced to fight back against merciless T-34 tanks. After intense battles, they retreated to Jastrow, attempting to hold a crucial bridge over the Gwda River. A harrowing four-day period, dubbed 'the 15th Division's Golgotha,' marked a slaughter on the roads of Polish countryside. At Podgaje-Flederborn, their column was trapped with refugees, becoming easy targets for Red Army gunners, resulting in thousands of deaths. This exhausting seven-week retreat from certain doom is chronicled through new interviews, translated diaries, and extracts from the 15th Division's war diary, revealing chaos and carnage. Eyewitness accounts and memoirs provide vivid testimony to the events, culminating in a dramatic escape across the river Oder into Germany, with further details from Latvians who later settled abroad.