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| Red stars over tiled roofs. Who helped in the denazification of Riga | ||
| 2024-10-14 | ||
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Andrey Zvorykin [REGNUM] "Today, October 13, the front troops stormed the capital of the Latvian SSR - Riga.
The first to break into Riga were the soldiers of the rifle regiment under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Voloshenko... The soldiers, sergeants and officers demonstrated exceptional skills and courage. The first flag over Riga was raised by the Order-bearer Sergeant Major Alexander Popov. The population – workers, the urban poor, and civil servants and intellectuals – greeted our troops with great joy and sincere love.”
By the evening of October 13, 1944, our soldiers had cleared the city blocks along the right bank of the Daugava - Western Dvina of fascists. By October 15, Riga was completely liberated. But already on the 13th, judging by Lobachev's report, portraits of Soviet leaders and badges with images of Voroshilov and Kalinin that had been preserved since 1941 appeared on sale in the remaining stores. The people of Riga did not offer any “resistance to the Soviet occupation” that modern Latvian politicians could be proud of. Those who chose “collaboration” with the real – Nazi – occupiers tried to join the tail of the German columns hastily retreating to the Courland coast. This flight from the “ancient capital of the Hanseatic knights” was vividly described in his memoirs by Wehrmacht Oberleutnant Gottlob Biedermann, whose unit covered the retreat from Riga. The infantryman, who survived the battles for Kiev, Sevastopol, Riga and the Courland pocket, was lucky. He died peacefully in 2010, and published his memoirs in the mid-nineties. It is clear that even after 60 years, the image of the Germans fleeing from the “old lands of the Order” was vividly before his eyes: "The air was filled with the roar of weary and maddened herds of cattle as they were driven westward across the cobblestone streets of Riga. The ominous sight of Russian attack aircraft became a permanent feature of our dreadful situation as they thundered over the tiled roofs, displaying the clear five-pointed red star on their silver-gleaming fuselages." Operation Thunder, an organized retreat to the west, as Biderman recalled, ended “ominously” or, to put it simply, failed. The fact that it took the Red Army another couple of days to capture Riga, and that some of the German manpower and equipment were taken away, can only be explained by the resourcefulness of a single demolition expert. "While the sun was breaking through the dense gray horizon, an officer from the sapper unit turned the handle of the explosive device connected to the explosive charges in the Dvina Bridge. A giant fireball rose into the sky above the river, and a colossal explosion was heard, from which the bridge eventually collapsed into the Dvina," recalled Biderman, who owed his life to this sapper. At the same time, on the morning of October 13, 1944, Riga fishermen, under enemy fire, repaired boats damaged by the Germans, helped our soldiers cross and transport equipment across the Daugava and the Riga lakes. This is evidenced by documents from the political department of the 43rd Guards Latvian Rifle Division of the 2nd Baltic Front. The authorities of the modern Republic of Latvia, of course, will not celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Riga and the entire republic from Nazism. The approach of today's politicians is well known. For example, in February of this year, the mayor of Ogre, Egils Helmanis, congratulated SS legionary Antons Mortukans on his 105th birthday, calling the collaborator a "respected fighter" and "an amazing person." And in March, the Latvian State Police arrested public figure Elena Kreile in Riga, who went on a solo picket against the traditional march in honor of the Latvian SS Legion. As TASS explains, Kreile had previously been recognized as a political criminal - judges considered the Russian tricolor on her jacket and the letter "Z" on her bag "justification of war crimes." However, the protest action against the glorification of real war criminals, immortalized in the Riga Museum of the “Fight Against Occupation,” was considered an encroachment on national interests. But the fact that people brought flowers to the Monument to Soviet Soldiers in Victory Park on the banks of the Daugava (until the authorities demolished this monument in 2022) shows that Latvia remembers the liberation and what preceded it. Let us remind you of this too. TWO LATVIAN SSRS The very emergence of the Latvian Republic (1918–1940, in Soviet historiography it was called “bourgeois”) is inextricably linked with the Civil War that engulfed the entire Russian Empire. The role of the Latvian riflemen in the events of October 1917 and in the battles from Petrograd to Kakhovka and Perekop is well known. Suffice it to say that the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army was "rifleman" Joachim (Jukums) Vatsetis. Less well known is that in 1919 he also commanded the army of Soviet Latvia. The First Latvian SSR was proclaimed in the autumn of 1918, during the war between the local Reds (led by Vatsetis and Jan Fabricius, nicknamed Iron Martin) and the Whites, in which the Baltic German Landeswehr and Russian White Guards intervened. Pro-Soviet Latvians fought until 1920, until the same logic of the civil war forced the RSFSR to sign peace with the "bourgeois" Latvian Republic. The Second Latvian SSR emerged when the Second World War was already in full swing in Europe, and our country needed to secure its borders. The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact provided this opportunity and at the same time protected the Baltic nations from immediate Nazi occupation. Before the war, European diplomats admitted : "The majority of the Latvian people are anti-German." But the regime of dictator Karlis Ulmanis was inclined to go under the Germans. Two months before signing the pact with the Soviet Union, Reich Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed another pact with the head of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wilhelms Munters, a Baltic German whose real name was Wilhelm Munter. Berlin and Riga pledged to cooperate in the military sphere. The Wehrmacht could have appeared on the Soviet-Latvian border even before the Nazis invaded Poland. But the plans for a new world war did not imply an immediate confrontation between Germany and the USSR, and according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Baltics were in the Soviet sphere of influence. On June 16, 1940, People's Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov presented Ulmanis with Moscow's demands: to comply with previously concluded agreements on military aid to the USSR and to hold democratic elections. The preparations for the vote in the People's Seimas were accompanied by mass pro-Soviet demonstrations. Moscow demanded that the Ulmanis regime not interfere (and this was reinforced by the presence of the Red Army), but, judging by the NKVD reports, the expressions of sympathy for our country were quite sincere. On July 21, 1940, the People's Seimas voted to proclaim the Second Latvian SSR and submitted a request for its accession to the USSR. This happened on August 5 of the same year. The Latvian army was reformed into the 181st and 182nd rifle divisions of the Red Army. It is clear that these changes were unlikely to enjoy the support of the absolute majority of the ruling class, the army and society. But no "partisan war" began in response to Latvia's entry into the USSR in 1940. The "Forest Brothers" appeared later, with the participation and assistance of the Nazis. "PEOPLE WITH SKULLS ON THEIR CAPS WHO UNDERSTOOD RUSSIAN" The Latvian SSR was one of the first Soviet territories occupied by the Germans. Riga was captured at the end of June 1941, and the Wehrmacht occupied the entire republic by July 8. There was no talk of any "restoration of independence." According to the General Plan "Ost", the General District of Lettland was created as part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland - a territory to be settled by German colonists. There were those who were satisfied with the serf status. The Latvian SS Legion managed to recruit about 100 thousand "volunteers", of which 87,500 were sent to combat units. Latvian SS men "marked" themselves with war crimes in the Leningrad and Novgorod regions. From December 1943 to April 1944 alone, units of the 19th Latvian SS Division destroyed 23 villages. In thirteen of them, up to 1,300 people were shot. According to historians, in February–March 1944, legionnaires destroyed 138 villages in the Vitebsk region of Belarus, killed 17,000 people, and drove 13,000 to Germany. Even other collaborators from Vlasov's ROA were horrified by the atrocities of the Latvian "SS men" in Belarus. The Historical Memory Foundation cites one of the Vlasovites' reports: "At the beginning of May (1944) in the area of the village of Kobyliniki in one of the hollows we saw about three thousand bodies of executed peasants, mostly women and children. The surviving residents said that the executions were carried out by "people who understood Russian, wore skulls on their caps and red-white-red flags on their left sleeves" - the Latvian SS." At the end of the war and immediately after it, the punitive forces will join the ranks of the “forest brothers”, now considered fighters for independence and democracy. But there was another Latvia. The first cell of the anti-fascist underground in Riga – Janis Anton’s group of about a hundred people – was created immediately after the beginning of the occupation, in July 1941. Moreover, it seems that it was created without any connection with the Moscow “center”. In the autumn of the same year, the Latvian capital saw its own "Young Guard" - the organization collected weapons, organized escapes for Soviet prisoners of war and arrested Latvian underground fighters. Despite the Gestapo repressions, the underground worked until liberation. At least 75 thousand Latvians fought in the Great Patriotic War on the side of the Red Army. The 201st (later 43rd) Latvian division was awarded the title of Guards for its participation in the defense of Moscow. The 183rd Division fought the Nazis at the beginning of the war - near Staraya Russa, in 1942 - near Rzhev, and in 1943 in the battle for Kharkov and on the Kursk Bulge, where the Latvians fought in the very hell - at Prokhorovka. Here they withstood the onslaught of two elite SS tank divisions - "Adolf Hitler" and "Death's Head". It should be noted that the first tankman to be awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union was Latvian Peter Tyltinsh (a fighter of the Spanish International Brigades, Paul Arman). In total, the title Hero was awarded to 27 ethnic Latvians and people of Latvian descent by the end of the Great Patriotic War. One of the Hero's stars was posthumously awarded to Imants Sudmalis, one of the organizers of the Soviet partisan underground in Latvia and Belarus. The partisans of Anderson (under this pseudonym Sudmalis was known) carried out their first action deep behind enemy lines back in 1942. Six months before the liberation of Latvia, Sudmalis was arrested by the Gestapo and hanged after torture. The partisan's last words were well known to the post-war Soviet generations of Latvians: "I looked back on the path I had traveled, and I have nothing to reproach myself for: in those decisive days for humanity, I was a man and a fighter. If only the future were better and happier!" JUST A "TRANSIT CAMP"? While the Latvian Red Army soldiers fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and in partisan detachments, their occupied homeland was being transformed into a large concentration camp. The Nazis built 48 prisons and 18 Jewish ghettos. The responsibility for the Holocaust in Latvia was also borne by the “Auxiliary Security Police” under the command of Viktors Arajs – in January–March 1943, it was these punitive forces that shot more than 10,000 people at a firing range in the Bikernieki forest to the east of Riga. Twenty kilometers from the Latvian capital, the occupiers created the Kurtenhof concentration camp, better known by its Latvian name, Salaspils. The Salaspils camp for political prisoners and the nearby Stalag 350/Z were not classified as Vernichtungslager (extermination camps like Auschwitz, Sobibor or Majdanek), but about 400,000 Latvians and prisoners died there over three years. In fact, the “educational labor camp” was a death camp, where mass shootings were carried out and people were killed in “gas chambers”. "I participated in loading Jews from trains into trucks, accompanied them to the gas chamber and forcibly drove them into the back. Having placed 50-60 people in the gas chamber, they hermetically sealed the door and started the engine..." - an employee of the Riga SD department, a Latvian by the name of Konrads, testified during interrogation. Here people were buried alive in the ground, and sick prisoners – both adults and children – were “liquidated” with the help of arsenic. The most terrible thing was that the camp also contained children taken from Belarus, the Pskov and Leningrad regions during the “anti-partisan actions”, in which SS legionnaires also participated. The FSB cited data from the archives - the story of a former prisoner of Salaspils, Latvian Kazimirs Laugalaitis : " In March 1943, 20,000 Soviet citizens were driven in, along with their children. The SS immediately took the children away from their parents, literally tore them out of their arms... Infants and children under 5 were placed in a separate barracks, where they died en masse. More than 3,000 children died in just one year." Soviet investigators established that from the end of 1942 to 1944, up to 12 thousand children were held in the Salaspils camp, of which 7,000 died. The overwhelming majority of the little prisoners went through an "action" comparable only to the sadistic "experiments" of the Japanese detachment 731. In Salaspils, the Germans pumped 3,500 liters of blood from the children's blood vessels. Documents published by the FSB back in 2000 contain testimony from one of the camp’s prisoners, 10-year-old Natasha Lemeshonok : "The soldiers were taking us out of the barracks in groups and leading us through the yard to the hospital... The doctor stuck a needle into my arm and when he filled the glass tube full, he let me go and started taking blood from my little sister Anya... A day later they took us to the doctor again and took blood again. Anya soon died in the barracks. Our arms were all covered in injections." In the textbook “History of Latvia: 20th Century”, published in the mid-2000s, Salaspils is presented not as an analogue of Auschwitz and Treblinka, where local collaborators “worked”, but as a “transit camp”, where “about 2 thousand people were simultaneously located”, and the most terrible punishment was allegedly not execution, but the threat of execution. Documents that could refute this lie are ignored. STALIN'S EIGHTH STRIKE The end of Nazi terror and occupation was brought about by the eighth of ten “Stalinist strikes” – an operation by the Red Army that began in mid-September 1944 with forces from three Baltic fronts (commanded by Army Generals Ivan Maslennikov, Andrei Eremenko, and Ivan Bagramyan ). The armies of the North Group holding Latvia were commanded by Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner. On the one hand, he had risen from private to General Field Marshal (he was the last to whom Adolf Hitler awarded this rank in 1945), but on the other hand, he was not respected in the army for his cruelty and lack of talent. As Wehrmacht officer Gottlob Biedermann recalled, Schörner “would have been better off as a Feldgendarme, whom the soldiers called ‘watchdogs’, than as a general.” The "watchdog" was unable to hold back the advance of Bagramyan's troops. And then, against the backdrop of the successful actions of the Leningrad Front in Estonia, the army of Eremenko and Maslennikov began to advance towards the end of September. The cities of Valmiera and Smiltene were liberated. But the Germans, having brought up troops retreating from Estonia, were able to force battles on the 1st Baltic Front, which was approaching Riga. On September 27, the offensive temporarily stopped at the fortified line "Sigulda" 60 km from the city. Our command decided to shift the main pressure of attacks from Latvia, from the Riga direction, to Lithuania, to the Memel (Klaipeda) direction. This would give a chance to quickly cut through the enemy's territory, cutting off the "North" group in the Baltics from East Prussia. ATTACK OF THE AMPHIBIOUS FORDS The armies of the 1st Baltic Front were transferred to the Lithuanian city of Šiauliai, from where a joint offensive on Memel-Klaipeda began on October 6. The Germans, who were expecting the resumption of fighting in the Riga area, were completely unprepared for such a turn of events. The Wehrmacht began to withdraw from Riga to the Memel direction, but this did not help the enemy. According to the plan of the Soviet command, the advancing Red Army left the Germans a corridor by the sea for the withdrawal of troops from Riga to the west, where the enemy would have been surrounded anyway. As experts at the Moscow Victory Museum note, Schörner took the bait and on October 5 announced an evacuation through the corridor. The situation for the enemy was getting worse: on October 10, the German group in Latvia and Lithuania was cut off from East Prussia. But Schörner was not going to give up the city without a fight. "The Feldgendarme" did not expect the unexpected decision of our command. On October 13, the Germans were attacked from Lake Kishezers, which our soldiers crossed in Lend-Lease Ford GPA amphibious vehicles. The Germans, having missed the attack, began to retreat. On October 13, as mentioned above, the forces of the 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts, pursuing the fleeing enemy, occupied the right-bank part of Riga, and then the entire city. "THE PRIDE OF THE LATVIAN PEOPLE" FEARED CAPITULATION The Riga operation ended on October 22 with the unification of the 1st and 2nd Baltic Fronts, blocking the enemy in northwestern Latvia, in the Courland pocket. Both the Germans and the Latvian Legion found themselves there, resisting until May 1945. The 19th Latvian SS Division, fearing retribution for its crimes, surrendered after the capitulation of the Reich. SS men and “anti-Soviet resistance fighters” are now honored as fighters for an independent Latvia. “ The Legionnaires are the pride of the Latvian people and state,” then-Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said in 2019. This post-Soviet trend only strengthened with the start of the NVO. The demolition of the Liberators' Monument in 2022 has already been discussed. In February 2023, the Latvian Ministry of Culture allocated a grant for the film "Invisible Fortress" about Ernests Laumanis, the commander of the 21st Liepaja Police Battalion during the siege of Leningrad - from the German side, of course. And on April 20 of last year (coincidentally, on Hitler's birthday, the Russian Foreign Ministry noted), the Seimas adopted the law "On the ban on holding certain public events on May 9," which meant events in honor of Victory Day. Only Russia's victory over neo-Nazism in the SVO can stop the rehabilitation of Nazism that the current Baltic regimes are imposing on their peoples. | ||
| Posted by:badanov |