Watch the surrender footage of the Janums Battle Group in Calbe, 27 April 1945
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During the writing of Escape from Berlin, I discovered US Army newsreel footage of the Latvian 15th Division Janums Battle Group the morning after they surrendered to the Americans on the Elbe on 27.04.1945.
The film was in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and I showed it during my book launch at the Latvian War Museum in Riga eighty years to the week after this happened.
15 April 2025 - Publication day! Escape from Berlin is now available, and at a special launch price...
It's the dramatic story of 850 men who choose surrender over death and abandon their positions defending Berlin in April 1945. In a seven day march through forests and swamps south of Berlin, dodging Red Army tanks and German gendarmerie patrols, they make contact with the Americans at the Elbe. I follow their route in a Fiat 500, guided by their adjutant's diary translated into English. The Americans tell them they have to surrender on the night of 26-27 April 1945 - but one last German position stands in their way...
As part of the research for this book, I discovered US Army footage of the Latvians being loaded into trucks to be taken to holding camps. I'll show that at my book launch in Riga later this month and also post it here. If you can identify any of the men in the picture - a still from that film - then please get in touch with me.
NEW BOOK FOR MARCH 2025! ESCAPE FROM BERLIN - the story of the incredible journey of the Janums Battle Group

COMING SOON! The dramatic escape of the Latvian 15th SS Janums Battle Group south of Berlin to surrender to the Americans on the Elbe saved 900 men from a pointless death slowing the Red Army assault on Berlin in 1945. Unable to return to a homeland occupied by the Soviet Union, many veterans came to the UK to work, and stayed. Their stories add to the sharp observations and vivid descriptions of Battle Group adjutant Edvīns Bušmanis, who kept a detailed diary of what happened. This lay unpublished in the archive of the War Museum in Riga for many years until it was passed to the author as part of his research into the 15th Division.
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Translated into English for this book, Hunt retraces the footsteps of the Latvians through forests and across swamps – and his journey opens up new aspects of German experience at the end of the Second World War and later.
Fourteen maps and 78 pictures illustrate the journey of the Janums Battle Group through the suburbs of Berlin and the swamps, forests and villages of Brandenburg as they evade German patrols and Red Army advance units alike in their march to safety and survival. Plus: the research for this book uncovered long-forgotten US Army footage of the Latvians in American captivity the morning of their surrender. Coming soon!

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Available here to pre-order now. Publication date 15 March 2025 from Helion.

Also by this author:
The Road of Slaughter - the Latvian 15th SS Division in Pomerania, January to March 1945 (Helion, 2023)
Up Against the Wall: the KGB and Latvia (Helion, 2019)
Blood in the Forest - the end of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket (Helion, 2017)
Fire and Ice - the Nazis' scorched earth campaign in Norway (The History Press, 2014)

A new book from Vincent Hunt ... The Road of Slaughter... OUT NOW

The Road of Slaughter: The Latvian 15th SS Division in Pomerania, January-March 1945

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

Vincent Hunt 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 defences 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. 

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. 
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Buy online at Helion.co.uk

Journalist, author and media consultant

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Photography: Jim Donnelly, Anaxa Images
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Biography

My fourth book The Road of Slaughter was published in October 2023 by Helion. It tells the story of a group of soldiers facing a desperate battle for survival amid the brutality of the Eastern Front.

I began writing long-form documentary journalism in 2014, with a trip across northern Norway gathering memories of the burning of Finnmark by the Nazis in 1944 which became Fire and Ice: the Nazis' scorched earth campaign in Norway (The History Press, 2014). I found plenty of dark stories in a beautiful landscape. 
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Next, I crossed western Latvia finding people who'd been involved in the six cataclysmic battles between the Red Army and German and Latvian forces in the Courland Pocket, a little-known period of Second World War history. That came out through Helion in 2017 as Blood in the Forest: the end of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket.
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The stories I heard about the secret police - the 'Cheka', officially known as the NKVD and later KGB - formed the basis of Up Against the Wall: the KGB and Latvia  (2019) charting the 100-year relationship between Latvians and the Soviet secret police.
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My books are bestsellers in Latvian, and Blood in the Forest has been translated into Lithuanian.
If you'd like to contact me, please email me below.

    Contact Vincent Hunt

AUTHOR RETURNS ‘LOST LEGION’ STORIES TO LATVIA – WITH NEW EVIDENCE OF MASSACRE RESPONSIBILITY

Having spent six years collecting stories about the Latvian Legion’s 15th Division in Pomerania and Germany in 1945, the author returned to Latvia to launch his latest book – The Road of Slaughter – at the War Museum in Riga.
The launch was part of an historical analysis of the journey of the division across what is now Poland between January and March 1945 alongside Latvian historians Jānis Tomaševskis and Valdis Kuzmins, with Aivars Sinka from the veterans’ association Daugavas Vanagi. The event was introduced by the deputy director of the War Museum, Juris Ciganovs.
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The author launches The Road of Slaughter at the Latvian War Museum in Riga. Juris Ciganovs, deputy director at the Latvian War Museum (left) translator Anda, Vince Hunt, Aivars Sinka, Jānis Tomaševskis and Valdis Kuzmins. Pictures: Valters Lācis.
The author presented excerpts from the memories of survivors with new details that have emerged which shed new light on the most controversial episode of the Latvian experience in Pomerania – the massacre of 32 Polish prisoners at Flederborn, now Podgaje, on 3rd February 1945. New evidence adds even greater weight to the theory that the killings 78 years ago were carried out by the German-Dutch 48th SS and not the Latvians.
“A soldier who was there and later came to the UK told his son that the prisoners were machine-gunned on an icy pond in Flederborn,” the author told the hall. “His story was consistent each time. They were killed by the German-Dutch 48th SS.”
Tens of thousands of Latvians were drafted into the 15th SS Division during 1944 to rebuild the unit, badly mauled in the Soviet summer offensive that year. Under-trained and short of weapons, they were thrown into battle to stop the Soviet Vistula-Oder offensive, ending up in a chaotic and bloody seven-week retreat to the Oder and then into Germany. Most of the men never returned home, becoming the 'Lost Legion'.
During the research for the book, Hunt assembled a chronology of events on the road between Jastrow and Landeck (Jastrowie and Ledyczek) which suggests that between 3,500 and 5,000 Latvians may have died along a 15km stretch of road.
The Road of Slaughter is the first instalment of that journey to the West, and is available to buy from Helion at https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/the-road-of-slaughter-the-latvian-15th-ss-division-in-pomerania-january-march-1945.php