The Road to Slaughter

With chilling echoes of the 2022 war in Ukraine, 40,000 Latvian soldiers of the 15th SS Division – some Russian Front veterans, most raw teenage conscripts – faced the Red Army in Pomerania in Arctic blizzards between January and March 1945. One in three died: the majority never returned home. They became the lost Legion.

The author interviews the last remaining Latvian Legionnaires who came to the UK after the war, then follows their footsteps across modern Poland, adding many stories from Latvian archives in English for the first time. Thrown in to strengthen Nazi defenses as the German forces collapsed, the Latvians are constantly encircled and outgunned, outrunning the merciless T-34 tanks. It’s kill or be killed: even the priests have Panzerfausts.

After battles at Nakel, Immenheim, Vandsburg, Dorotheenhof and Flatow the Latvians retreat to Jastrow, trying to hold a vital bridge across the river Gwda [Kuddow]. Then comes a four-day period known to the Latvians as ‘the 15th Division’s Golgotha’ – the road of slaughter in the Polish countryside between Jastrow and Landeck.

At Podgaje-Flederborn their column is trapped with refugees and the wounded on a single road, sitting ducks for Red Army gunners. Thousands of Latvians are killed here but no-one is sure of the exact figure even now. What is certain, from these eyewitness accounts, is that it was appalling.

From Danzig to the Oder, this is an exhausting seven-week retreat from certain death along roads choked with refugees, with danger lurking around every bend. Through new interviews, translated personal diaries and extracts from the 15th Division war diary – only found in 2006 and never before published – the harrowing stories of the Latvians in Pomerania can now be told.

English translations of the memoirs of Colonel Vilis Janums, Major Jūlijs Ķīlītis, chaplain Kazimirs Ručs (later Monsignor) and many others bring vivid and often-shocking eyewitness testimony to events at Podgaje-Flederborn and Landeck-Ledyczek. The original orders from the ‘Road of Slaughter’ are reproduced from the War Diary in the National Archives in Riga revealing a catalogue of chaos, confusion and carnage. The casualty lists make for sombre reading, as do accounts of disturbing incidents that warrant further investigation.

This is an exhausting, blood-soaked seven-week journey across Pomerania to the Baltic Coast, culminating in a dramatic escape across the river Oder into Germany. Memoirs and autobiographies from Latvians who subsequently settled in Australia, Canada and the USA add new detail to this horrifying chapter.

The story of what happened once the Latvians crossed into Germany continues in a forthcoming companion volume, The Lost Legion.