From the Latvian Legion to the French Foreign Legion: Postwar Latvians in Western Armed Forces

• In Event: Military Studies

Abstract

During the Second World War, around 100,000 Latvians served in Nazi German-organized military formations, primarily in the Waffen-SS Latvian Legion. At the end of the war, around 25,000 former Latvian Legionnaires were held in POW camps run by the Western Allies. Starting as early as 1945, Latvians (including former Latvian Legionnaires) entered military service in the American, British, Canadian, Australian, and French armed forces, serving in Cold War conflicts in Indochina, Korea, and beyond. Using a mixture of first-person (e.g. memoirs), periodical, and archival sources, this paper considers how Latvian veterans of German military formations (as well as Latvian DPs too young to have been recruited during World War II) responded to recruitment opportunities and how they narrated their service. While their status as exiles from Soviet-occupied Latvia and their service in Western militaries can be seen as a break with the past, this paper emphasizes historical continuities: anti-communism as the facilitator of transitions from German service to Western service; of the self-representation of this service as a continuation of the Latvian armed freedom struggle that began in 1918; and of the ongoing struggle to maintain a Latvian identity while in foreign uniform. This case constitutes an interesting and informative precursor to the restoration of independent Latvian armed forces and Latvia's integration into NATO in the 1990s as well as a domain of memory creation and identity formation with legacies to the present day.

Short Bio

Harry C. Merritt is currently a Post Doctoral Associate in History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. He received a Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2020. Harry's most recent publication is a chapter in the book, Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics (Central European University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a book project that considers the creation, wartime experience, and legacies of Latvian national military units that fought on opposite sides of World War II, in the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi German Waffen-SS. In 2023, Harry received an Emerging Scholars Grant from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

Author

• Harry Merritt, University of Vermont