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Valdis Lumans provides an authoritative, balanced, and comprehensive account of one of the most complex, and conflicted, arenas of the Second World War.
Struggling against both Germany and the Soviet Union, Latvia emerged as an independent nation state after the First World War. In 1940, the Soviets occupied neutral Latvia, deporting or executing more than 30,000 Latvians before the Nazis invaded in 1941 and installed a puppet regime. The Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and reincorporated Latvia as a Soviet Republic. By the end of the war, an estimated 180,000 Latvians fled to the West. The Soviets would deport at least another 100,000.
Drawing on a wide range of sources—many brought together here for the first time—Lumans synthesizes political, military, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural history. He moves carefully through traditional sources, many of them partisan, to scholarship emerging since the end of the Cold War, to confront such issues as political loyalties, military collaboration, resistance, capitulation, the Soviet occupation, anti-Semitism, and the Latvian role in the Holocaust.
Discusses the Soviet invasion of Latvia in 1940, the mass deportations and executions that followed, and the further violence of Nazi occupation beginning in 1941.
Latvia in World War II is a masterly synthesis of one of the most traumatic and contested periods in Latvia's history. Lumans writes a clear and balanced account that simultaneously places World War II within Latvia's history and the Latvian experience into the larger scholarhsip on World War II.---—Aldis Purs, coauthor of Latvia: The Challenges of Change
In clear and eloquent prose, Lumans deals sympathetically but firmly with the mixed interpretations of these horrible events; writes a chilling chapter on the Holocaust in Latvia; and describes many of the human tragedies that underlay the statistics. Amply documented. Highly recommended.
This exceptional and comprehensive work of synthesis outdistances the existing and more narrowly conceived studies of Latvia in World War II period (1939–45) and will remain a basic reference for a long time.
Highly readable and accessible, the book will indeed be a useful source of reference for students and the general reader, and yet both would be well advised to handle with care, and to cross-reference Lumans's findings to some of the more recent books in the field.
. . .An instructive history to Latvia and the wider community.
Marked by thoughtful and fair balance on such subjects as collaboration, resistance, and the Holocaust, Latvia in World War II will long stand as a comprehensive survey of events in a strategically important portion of Europe.---—Gerhard L. Weinberg, author of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II