Defending Latvia or collaborating with the USSR/Germany? The local participants of the battles for Liepāja (June 1941) and Bauska (August-September 1944)

• In Event: Latvia in World War II: History, Memory and Conditionality

Abstract

During the World War II, almost 200 000 Latvian citizens took part in the armed formations of the USSR and Nazi Germany. Many of them had been forcibly conscripted in violation of the 1907 Hague Convention, which prohibited the mobilization of the population of conquered territories. However, there were also volunteers who, for various reasons, joined the war on the side of the USSR or Germany. The most striking such cases were the participation of the Liepāja Workers' Guard and Komsomol Youth units together with the Soviet troops in the battles for Liepaja on June 22-29, 1941, and the participation of the Bauska volunteer battalion and other Latvian legion and police units together with the German army in the battles for Bauska in August-September 1944. Nowadays, the soldiers of these units are often considered contradictory - as defenders of their homeland and as supporters of the military and political goals of the occupying powers as well, including indicating the earlier involvement of some of the participants of these battles in the implementation of Soviet deportations or Nazi holocaust and other repressive actions. Significant changes have also taken place in the politics of post-war memory. The monument erected in 1960 to the glorified defenders of Liepāja during the Soviet era was dismantled in 2022 by the law adopted by the Parliament of Latvia "On the prohibition of exhibiting objects glorifying the Soviet and Nazi regimes and their dismantling in the territory of the Republic of Latvia". The memory of the defenders of Bauska, who had been in oblivion for a long time, despite the objections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and Belarus and the local Russian-language mass media, was actualized in 2012 when a monument to the defenders of Bauska was brought up after private and municipal initiative. The report will evaluate the involvement of the residents of Liepāja and Bauska in war activities on the side of the USSR and Germany; it will also reveal their socio-political portrait, motivation, and the evaluation of struggles in the space of post-war and contemporary collective memory and public history.

Authors

• Uldis Neiburgs, University of Latvia

• Kaspars Zellis, University of Latvia