Latvia in World War II

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.

Author: Valdis O. Lumans
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 06/15/2006
Pages: 560
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.97lbs
Size: 8.92h x 6.38w x 1.56d
ISBN: 9780823226276

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2006 pg. 39
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2007 pg. 1 - Recommended/Regional General

About the Author
Valdis O. Lumans is the Cleora Toole Murray Professor of History at the University of South Carolina Aiken. He is the author of Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933-1945.