Baltic Studies | The Latvian Lost Cause: How Waffen-SS Latvian Legionnaires Turned Defeat into Victory

How can defeat be overcome? This question was especially pressing for former personnel of the Waffen-SS Latvian Legion, a national military unit of Latvians that fought under German command in World War II. During the war, Latvia had been alternatingly occupied by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, with each recruiting Latvians into military service. At the war’s end, Latvian Legionnaires had suffered a major defeat in military terms (their units had dissolved and most became prisoners of war), political terms (Latvia had been reoccupied by the Soviet Union with the tacit assent of the Western Allies), and moral terms (the Axis powers had been discredited, their ideologies and collaborators vilified, and the Waffen-SS deemed a proscribed criminal organization).

Yet former Latvian Legionnaires captured by the Western Allies quickly left POW camps and immigrated to various Western countries, assumed leadership roles in the newly expanded Latvian diaspora, and sought to continue their struggle against the Soviet occupation by other means. Forms of commemoration of the Latvian Legion have since proliferated among the Latvian diaspora as well as in restored independent Latvia. While the government of Latvia approved the demolition of numerous monuments associated with the Soviet Red Army in 2022, it had strongly condemned the removal of a monument to the Latvian Legion in Belgium in a process that concluded that same year. Latvian Legionnaires had thus lost the armed conflict yet won the memory wars that followed.

This talk draws on other examples of historical defeat—primarily the body of scholarship on the Lost Cause of the Confederacy that emerged after the American Civil War—to better understand this process of transforming defeat into victory. In doing so, it seeks to offer an alternative framework to the official Latvian position of representing the Legionnaires as freedom fighters and/or victims of foreign occupation and the official Russian position of presenting any commemoration of the Legion as the revival of Nazism. This framework has utility in addressing the recurring scandals involving other non-Germanic Waffen-SS personnel (including Ukrainians and Estonians) in North America, such as the incident with Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian House of Commons in September 2023.

Harry C. Merritt is a Postdoctoral Associate in History and Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. He received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University. As a historian, Harry is interested in nationalism, the dynamics of occupation, interethnic relations, and the impact of war on society. Harry is currently in the process of publishing a book on the origins, wartime experiences, and legacies of Latvian national units on both sides of World War II. His most recent publication is a chapter in Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics (Central European University Press, 2022).