Latvia in World War II [Hardcover]

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 sourcesmany brought together here for the first timeLumans 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.

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.A comprehensive history of Latvia from 1934...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.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.Latvia in World War II is a masterly synthesis of one of the most traumatic and contested perlã¶