The Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance against the Nazis and Soviets

Can I uh welcome you all here this evening we really delighted to see so many people here we’ve had a very large registration um I’m just going to say two or three things before introducing my colleague donatus kupunas who in turn will introduce our speaker and author um

First point this is all being videoed and recorded it’s not going out live it’s not a live feed but it will will go up onto our website in the next two or 3 days and I just want to alert you to that to be aware of it uh if you’re

Contributing asking questions or whatever so you know that that is the case secondly I want to give thanks to the Lithuanian embassy for funding some of this event this evening including some of the excellent product that I hope we’ll consume uh after the talk and

It’s very good of them to do so we’ve had good relations with a number of the Baltic country embassies and it is important important to us that they’ve been able to help us in things of this type the third thing I want to say is entirely personal um I got involved in

All of this uh because my wife’s mother was Estonian uh she fled Estonia in September 1944 in front of the Russians her uncle a man called ulo Maramar uh was a campaigner against uh the Soviets and for Estonian Independence and he’s in fact mentioned in this book on page

37 which I didn’t know until I read it but he tried to organize an Estonian resistance against the Soviet invasion uh they tried to put up candidates in the fake elections which the Soviets then held and won unanimously but as a result he was he and his group were arrested by the KGB

And he was then shot in early 1941 and it’s an incredible story of what happens what led me to understand the importance of this part of the world somebody who knew very little about it other than through my relationship with my wife and I’m so delighted that one of

The reasons that led me to get involved in setting up the Baltic geopolitics program here at Cambridge and I’m so delighted that Dan has written this extraordinary book uh I think the most substantial book in English on the forest Brotherhood again one of my uh wife’s Mother’s um sister’s husband was

A Lutheran priest and a forest brother over this period And so I’m really looking looking forward to this talk our Baltic geopolitics program in the center of geopolitics here at cam university has been going since January 2021 uh we’d absolutely welcome the involvement of any of you uh in it on

The website which you registered and we’re trying to build understanding and awareness of what is the importance of the baly of course we set it up in January 2021 but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the whole subject obviously took on a massively increased salience and there

Has been a wide degree of Interest we do a lot of activities around the world we had an event in Copenhagen last week uh for example and we’re really delighted you’ve come this evening so thank you for coming and it gives me great pleasure to introduce the nunas who’s

Going to conduct Affairs this evening thank you Charles good evening everyone um I’m donatas I’m a Baltic fellow at the center for geopolitics um I’m a historian I’m a modernist but I’m not specialist in anti Soviet or anti resistance and I guess my expertise uh tonight stems from the fact

That I come from the region itself and these stories that uh Dan will be um speaking about tonight there’s something that’s really familiar U to anyone who comes from that part of the world when I first um saw Dan’s book I thought hm that’s interesting you know

Uh and American poll writing a history about the forest Brothers you know that doesn’t happen too often and then it just dawned on me that actually the surname kashetta can also be read as kashetta which is like a proper Lithuanian um surname and there there was even nmp in Lithia yes my second

Exactly and I was going to tell a joke about him but then I talked to Dan and and then I realized he his relative so I’ll do that later yeah but uh uh so essentially uh what you’re going to have tonight is is two lithuanians discussing this very um

Complex U this very uh controversial and I must say this very painful um chapter of Baltic history um every family has stories to tell about that every family uh in the Baltic and uh just you know to to tell something about my personal experience uh my uh wife’s uncle was a

Partisan he was killed somewhere in the end of the 40s or in the beginning of the 50s and the Soviets let his body uh to decompose on the market square they wouldn’t let you know the relatives to pick it up and to bury it so they they they they it stayed for

Like two weeks there and then the relatives somehow the grandma of my mother my uh wife uh that she managed to to take that body somehow and and she managed to bury it in the Jewish cemetery so they made a deal with a Jewish shopkeeper who was somehow still alive after the Holocaust

Because leanian cemeteries were off limits for these guys for for the partisans and and then and then so it’s it’s it’s very ironic actually um so without further Ado uh just two two things that I’d like to say in the beginning um so first of all this

Event is being filmed uh and it will be available at on our uh YouTube channel uh shortly the second thing I want to tell is that um after the session you’ll be able to ask questions and if you ask clever questions and if you buy Dan’s

Book then uh Dan will be able to sign it so without further Ado Dan over to you well thank you thank you for the kind introduction and uh thank you for having me here Charles to uh Cambridge uh a long way for a Lithuanian American who grew up in Arizona to come

Here to speak at Cambridge but uh and I also want to thank uh my publisher HST Publishers uh we have a representative from HST Publishers here R who will be glad to take your money for one of my books also publisher of Charles’s uh book understanding the Baltic

States now the first thing I will tell you is I’m not actually a historian of the Baltic states I grew up with this as a part of the family folklore family history and interest I I’ve spent most of my career as a specialist in chemical and biological terrorism and and that

Led me to sort of evolve into the military historian of record on that subject uh but then of course we have a we have a land war in Eastern Europe for the first time in a while at least first time since the the Balkan conflict and

My publisher says well we really need to get book more books on this area out so have you got a book in you and I said well what about these Baltic partisans and Michael DWI who is the head of H says is that really a thing I said it’s

Very much a thing is it important it’s very important and so my chat tonight and the purpose of my book is to explain that yes indeed uh it was a thing and it was important and for reasons that not everybody necessarily understands unless you start

To really sort of get your grips into it and so I think the best thing I could do is really just sort of launch into I think if you’re if you’ve made it this far you probably know that where these countries are we’re talking about we’re talking about three countries on the eastern

Shore of the Baltic uh Estonia on the top lvia uh in the middle Lithuania on the bottom it is only by matter of sort of modern convention that we don’t refer to Finland as a Baltic State we probably could it shares much of its history and culture with Estonia uh it shares some

Of the same same history in a lot of ways and it struggled to uh Escape Soviet domination Str earlier struggles to escape uh the Zar Empire uh but for whatever reason we refer to the Baltic states as the three these three three countries uh they’re all quite different

From each other there’s a tendency to try to sort of lump them together as those Baltic places and it’s a it’s a quite interesting feedback I find from sort of Travelers or you know uh you know Americans or British people or Western Europeans who go there for the

First time and do a sort of tour amongst them there’s a lot of things in common and there’s a lot of things that are actually quite separate I’m going to give you a tiny little sort of strike through history I’m going to give you about 90 seconds of potted uh back

History uh what you see on the left is the sort of high Watermark of what I would call the Lithuanian Empire it was really well the grand duy uh the in the in the in the Middle Ages the uh the grand duy of Lithuania was a big thing

Okay and much of what we now call belus uh much of what we call Ukraine was under domination under Lithuanian uh you know domination and Lithuanian Nobles uh there was a rapid expansion uh but the lithuanians have this vast uh back history that they looked at with some Grandeur you know uh people

People grow up in Lithuania with names of old Grand Dukes you know vus gonus Al alus you know it’s very common to name your son after one of these one of these Grand Dukes out of out of History uh and the lithuanians the lithuanians um for a variety of reasons mostly

Geographic uh were quite isolated from the rest of Europe it comes as a shock to many people that the lithuanians uh were the last people in last major pocket of paganism in Europe uh the lithuanians converted to pag uh from to Christianity from paganism only in the

1380s uh arguably much later in some other parts of Lithuania where it sort of held out in the Backwoods uh uh and so it converted to Catholicism a good 400 years after the neighboring poles had uh and this a shared a shared religion and a shared enemy the tonic Knights the

Crusading order of the uh of of Germanic Knights gave Lithuania a very co-mingled and complicated history with the poles we could have an entire night on talking about the Polish the Polish Lithuanian common wealth Confederation uh joint Kingdom whatever you want to call it I highly recommend

Melvin Braggs in your time episode on that from about four years ago he did a very good one hour on the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth uh lat uh Lans and estonians uh their their history is a little bit different you can one way you can look at the Lans and estonians as

They were early victims of German colonialism the crusading tonic Knights effectively colonized and christianized uh the areas that we now call uh Lithuania and lvia they had a number of different names including Leonia or corand uh and as you can see from that map on the right

Uh a lot of these were basically ecclesiastical States under under under Bishops and archbishops and large Estates run by crusading orders of knights it’s it’s interesting that you say Crusades everybody thinks about the middle a uh the mdle ages Crusades going to the Holy Land there’s this whole thing called the northern Crusades

Because it wasn’t logistically feasible this is a bit of a you know simplification I’m not a Crusades historian uh but there was a there was a period a time where it wasn’t logistically feasible to go to the Middle East to go to the Holy Land in Israel to Palestine to uh to Crusade

Their entire decades where that wasn’t possible uh but there was this whole infrastructure built to raising armies and raising funds for CR Crusades and a pope said several popes said H we have pagans still in Europe let’s go let’s go skew some of those pagans in Europe so you had these Baltic

Crusades uh interestingly enough Henry IV King of England on his sort of he had sort of a crusading gap year he’s a bit Infamous in in in Lithuania as having burnt villus so don’t mention Henry IV which is embarrassing for my wife who is a descendant of Henry IV don’t mention

That here it’s not the city to do that um but this you you have a largely Germanic influence on on Estonia and laia and that what that meant is when the Protestant Reformation comes they become largely Lutheran uh Lutheranism swept through Lithuania but then almost immediately a Counter Reformation by Jesuits sweeps

Through and they become Rec catholici so what you have is you have different countries with different cultural backstories and I’ll be happy to take questions later on on that I I am working on a longer presentation the whole history of the Baltic states because I’m doing a one-day course on it

In in March at at gladston library if anybody’s really interested and dedicated enough to go to North Wales on a Saturday um but what happened well one thing happened was I’m gonna I’m going to go back a little bit by 1795 all this had disappeared off

The map and have been subsumed into the Zar Empire the Zars of Russia had at various points uh taken taken over basically everything in Poland Lithuania laia Estonia and Finland uh had taken it off of Poland Poland itself was dismembered and went off the map uh Lithuania as part of the Polish

Lithuanian Commonwealth was salami sliced several times and then ended up in 1795 fully in the last partition of Poland uh Estonian and laia had been taken one in Warfare off of the swedes uh same thing with Finland so these places all disappeared off the map but

Then got back on the map after the first world war Estonia lvia Lithuania all achieved Independence uh in the Treaty of Versailles on on paper they achieved Independence in Practical matters as a matter of basically fighting their own Wars of Independence which are effectively backstory running in the

Midst of two Russian revolutions that went on 1917 1918 uh the period of time is extremely complex uh all three of them fought against against uh bolik Red Army attempts to basically keep them as part of a yeah Russian Soviet you know polity uh but they they achieved their

Independence uh all three of them had quite optimistic Democratic constitutions uh one could argue that they had a surfit of of democracy uh the there were huge numbers of political parties uh particularly in lvia and Estonia uh I which led to nobody having clearcut majorities uh lots of fragile coalitions

Lots of lots of shifts in power uh and this is a the point where these countries have to be building their economies uh these are still quite poor places uh so what you get in the 1920s and 1930s is an event eventually the same thing was happening across pretty

Much most of Central and Eastern Europe was a backsliding into authoritarianism and so what you had and by 1939 uh you can’t classify any of these Baltic states as as Democratic societies uh you can’t characterize them as fascist dictatorships either um they were largely one party rule uh but by

Largely one man ruled by their individual you know dictators Anon matona in in Lithuania uh um Manus in uh in in laia and Constantine pots in in Estonia none of them were fascists they didn’t have this sort of fascist ideology behind them in fact all three of them consider themselves Democrats

Trying to safeguard the country until they could sort of transition it back to more democratic stuff uh they all considered the actual fascist movements which did exist in all three to be rather dangerous far more dangerous than than than Communists communism didn’t have much Sway in the 20s and 30s in

These countries uh you you could fit the entire Lithuanian you know you could fit the entire Lithuanian Communist party in 1928 in basically into a bus um but what happens in 1939 you have this the second world war breaks out and the the the the most immediate proximal

Cause of the second world war breaking out exactly when it did is this nefarious treaty between Hitler and Stalin the the so-called Molotov ribbon trop pact whereby uh East and yeah the they have a non-aggression Packa which is of course a treaty of really sort of convenience between the

Two uh but there’s a lot of there’s a lot of subsidiary agreements to this there’s a lot of Economic and Military cooperation uh this was wasn’t just each one trying to cheat the other it really was a proper Alliance in a lot of ways and more importantly uh there’s a protocol to

This you know one of the appendices to this treaty uh on August 23rd 1939 is a partition of Eastern Europe now this goes this goes against the all the tenants of international law generally speaking international law you can’t apply a treaty to a country that hasn’t signed it uh and that’s just a

Fundamental basis of intern National Juris Prudence well uh Hitler and Stalin applied a treaty to Poland uh Romania laia Lithuania Estonia and Finland uh and basically partitioned and came up with this idea to divide up Eastern Europe seven days eight days after they signed this treaty Hitler invades Hitler

Invades Poland uh 17 days later Stalin invades Poland from the East uh a second world war is fully on the go and what you get is this is more or less the dividing this is what was agreed as the dividing a dividing uh line also Finland

Was written over to to sort of uh to um Soviet occupation as well uh now these countries don’t know this is going on I mean Poland knows it because it’s happening in real time all right and Poland is being invaded from both ends uh the West is very confused by this um

And it’s sort of a western fallacy that we have that you know the Soviet Union was always our Ally it wasn’t for the first 662 days of the second world war in Europe the Soviet Union was on the other side okay they were uh and it wasn’t just them just happening to be

That way they were actively helping the Germans uots were based in uh OTS were based in the Soviet Union the the Soviet Union is providing literally the explosives and uh and and aviation fuel for the blitz uh yeah so it’s a quite active collaboration now the Baltic states think that rather optimistically

That if they behave themselves keep quiet they’re going to end up like I don’t know Sweden going to ride this thing out as neutral countries uh that doesn’t really last because Stalin puts the screws to to the three countries and really that uh in a variety of mechanisms uh first in 1939

For ing Bas military base uh agreements so Soviet troops are actually quartered in these three countries okay under under under specific treaties and you know rules and procedures but all of a sudden there there are more Soviet troops in these countries now than than their local militaries are their local

Economies are not very good so it’s not like they can really even afford uh to build up much much of a military defense and so when in June 1940 various ultimatums get issued to the Baltic states and the Baltic states are in no position to physically resist anymore because there’s literally you

Know tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers garrisoned in each of these countries uh so it and it all happens very quickly and it happens at an exact point where the rest of the world is very very distracted what’s what’s going on in the rest of the world in June 1940

Dunkirk uh Hitler is promenading down the shamps Le um you know so if you if you were knocked on the head in and in a in a car accident in vilnus in 19 in uh in the end of May 1940 and woke up a month later uh you woke up in a

Different world entirely and so with a stroke of a pen uh you know the they lose their independence I’m going to actually come back to this slide so what happens is in 19 1940 um you had a very very brutal occupation and so you get you get what what we have is

Basically we talk about the occupation of Baltic states there’s actually three periods of occupation and uh you have effectively a Nazi occupation that was sandwiched between two very harsh Soviet occupations and I’m going to talk through this this whole period quite in some some some detail here because I tried to unpack

This a bit in the in the book and explain why people behaved the way they they did uh and so what happened in 1940 is elections were forced new elections were forced these new elections were very very rigged uh they rigged it so that it was largely one candidate per

Constituency uh the Soviet Union the Soviet authorities uh who by this way still weren’t officially the occupiers yet uh push through these elections very very very quickly uh using uh using all every dirty election tactic on the books you know old versions of the Electoral role uh ballots were be

Registration was registration documents for anybody who wasn’t their candidate got lost things like that uh there’s suspiciously High turnover uh a turnout there was some constituencies where it was 120% turnout so highly Democratic obviously um and so people’s governments is what they were called people’s governments

Were in you know elected in all three of these countries and these governments basically met once uh they met once and they voted to ask to be annexed to the Soviet Union that’s what happened okay now people didn’t like this okay this this is not you know Soviet historiography tries to

Write this out as a you know popular revolution there wasn’t a revolution you know there wasn’t a popular upwelling of of of pro-communist you know workers and peasants you know desire to join the the the the fraternity of Nations that is the Soviet Union um no it was a it was a

It was um well the Germans have a perfectly good word for this it was an Asus uh not disimilar what happened in you know Austria uh and so there were a lot the the background here is that this there’s a lot of fertile ground for resistance to come up

All right and so I mean the first great question is you know eventually armed resistance does happen doesn’t happen right away but why what are the conditions that made it possible for resistance to happen what made it what made it a a good place for resistance to happen well again there’s

This national identity and language you know and people are relatively fresh and new in that in 1940 uh textbooks in Estonian had only been really published for about 20 years you know you really only have one generation of people who grew up as estonians as opposed to fairly oppressed residents of the Russian

Empire um so you have 20 years of of of nationalism and National and patriotic identity all three of those countries had been run by you know authoritarians who were really trying to appeal to national identity uh but also you get a historical dislike of the Russian

Occupier this goes back all the way back to the you know 1600s 1700s um in these countries the you know you Moscow uh musy is is an ancient enemy okay uh and in 1940 you had a lot of people still alive that remember the the Zar era and

Didn’t remember it very fondly in many cases uh as a practical matter there’s lots of forests and swamps and it’s good these and quite dense forest and quite impenetrable swamps these make good good places to to hide uh lots of small holder farms uh more so in Lithuania than in laia and

Estonia uh but in all three countries Land Reform had broken up old zaris era Estates and so there were a lot of smaller peasants a dispersed small holder Farm economy can easily support partisan resistance because Fighters have to eat uh lots of military veterans a lot

Of people who are veterans of the first World War uh all all three of the countries had conscription at various points during their their period of Independence their militaries weren’t very large in 1940 but an awful lot of people had sort of rotated through military service uh all three countries had

Strong par military reservice type movements uh in in in Lithuania it was the rifleman’s Union uh there was an organization called the kelit which sort of means self-defense league in uh in Estonia and the isari which really means the guards uh all three of these were government sanctioned quasi governmental

Paramilitary movements that were meant to be an auxiliary ring of the a Home Guard if you will uh The Scouting movement was quite active and The Scouting movement ends up being well represented in the uh in in the resistance later on out of the basic principle that these are still rural

Economies and you know the scouting movement teaches you how to live in the woods and these are these are groups that end up living the woods and and particularly in Lithuania a little bit of sort of a Southeast corner of ltia the Catholic church plays a role in the

Resistance too because it has a hierarchical parish structure um and is a and a a very very very philosophically anti-communist philosophy that has been anti-communist as long as communism has been around uh and contacts to overseas you know contacts to a broader Church hierarchy outside the country and so

That that played a role now in 1940 1941 the initial shock and surprise of this didn’t really allow for much resistance to happen right away uh there was rapid oppression by by 1940 the Soviet Secret Police knew how to do oppression okay they knew how to

Run an enus like this uh they’ve done it in other places uh in 1940 they were fresh off of doing this to Eastern Poland and area that they call babia that we now call mdova um they rapidly effectively hijacked the three existing Baltic militaries they did what they could to disarm all those

Paramilitary groups uh uh one thing that there was a rapid sovietization of the economy dispossession of dispossession of uh of large and mediumsized Enterprises collectivization of Agriculture started but didn’t get very far because they it would take years to do that uh but one of the things that didn’t happen really

Was preparation for an invasion by the Germans the you know this the the Soviet historiography you know would tell you that the Hitler Molotov the molotov ribbon trop packed was really stalen buying time to prepare for war with Germany well in actual practical terms he wasn’t doing a lot to prepare for war

War with Germany uh and so there was not a lot of military preparation for an invasion not only that we get the exact we have this exact timing becomes important some of these things uh you get this 1941 wave of deportations uh there is this plan basically to

Either arrest or Deport now in Soviet in so Soviet terminology when we say Deport we’re not saying just chucked out of the country we’re saying internal Exile effectively uh to places like Kazakhstan and Siberia there was a plan to basically either a at formally arrest and charge or just administratively

Exile and Deport 10% of the population okay so we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people and this this wave of deportation started literally literally about 10 days before the German invasion of course nobody knew that at the time except the Germans uh so what you get is this German invasion

Happens in the end of June 1941 as literally train carriages of of estonians Lans and lithuanians are being taken to Siberia many of whom will never come back now as a fundamental irony of all this there’s a lot of ironies and weird coincidences and things built in

This story I mean one of the ironies is those poor deportations in 1941 saved Jewish culture because there were enough lavian Estonian Lithuanian Jews who were being deported to Siberia that they survived in Siberia and you know the north of Russia to come back

And provide a little bit of a r a a fragment after the Holocaust I will talk about the Holocaust by the way so I’m but that’s one of the ironies of all this another irony is uh the Soviet partition of Eastern Europe is what gave vilus to the lithuanians because vilus

Had been occupied by the poles so we have this odd irony in that resistance during this particular period was very fragmented and very amateurish it was things like student groups uh not terribly meeting terribly clandestinely uh issuing student newspapers things like that very easily found and arrested and locked up uh and

There was there were numerous movements to try to develop a nucleus resistance because rather a lot of people felt that the you know the contradictions between fascist nazi ideology and and Soviet communism were were going to eventually end up in a war I don’t think anybody really

Realized how quickly that was going to happen uh but there were plans for uprisings in the event uh and in particular the lithuanians were ready to go with an uprising there was this group called the Lithuanian activist front uh the laf uh it was and this is one of your

Sort of embarrassing points although I I knew a i new on embarrassing point it was helped Along by German intelligence uh because the Germans you know saw this movement and there was a guy named Kazi skira who had was uh had been a Lithuanian Diplomat in Berlin

Sort of at loose ends now that Lithuania is occupied he starts sort of gathering up Lithuanian Exiles in his apartment in Berlin uh of course it’s a police state so the gestapo and SS and the German intelligence all know this is going on and he’s he’s cooperating with German intelligence

Now he’s actually cooperating with the avvar which is the military intelligence service at exactly the point the avar is starting to plot against Hitler but so this is a funny Nuance is he cool so yeah yeah where where do you go with this from a historical perspective but

Regardless of that there are a bunch of uprisings in 1941 I think I have a slide about that yeah before the first before sun sets on the first day of the invasion uh cus in Lithuania is up in arms literally the the this Lithuanian activist front has come out of the

Woodwork has seized control of of CIS has liberating prisoners out of the KGB has taken control of the radio station and is declaring a provisional government uh uprisings take a little bit longer to come up in lvia and Estonia uh but they do happen more scattershot and there’s these attempts

To try to present the Germans with a feta compy all right fine we’ve got our country back move on go fight the Russians we get we’re okay here um that turned out to be rather idealistic uh I the the German the German manipulation of these groups was

Really just meant to be an annoyance to the Soviets there was not a German plan that allowed for reestablishment of Baltic Independence and so by the time the German Army turns up and count us a few days later it pretty much says no guys this is no no thanks for your help

But no you’re disbanded uh there are some Troublesome incidents uh one of a particularly bad wave of anti-jewish violence happens here because then we’re going to get into the whole subject the of of the Holocaust because uh and I I forget the guy’s name I name I named some names in

The book A a SS guy turns up in Lithuania and basically starts to preach you know anti-semitic bills to these these Rebels Who Rose up and gets together basically a brute Squad of them and starts massacring Jews and this is so this becomes a sort of dark spot in

The Lithuanian resistance so this 1941 Uprising because some elements of it did engage in prgrams and burnt the synagogue and then shot a bunch of people it’s it’s kind of a dark chapter uh and some people will take that dark chapter and try to apply it to the whole

Movement uh you know lithuanians in Exile in 1950s sort of tried to do the other thing sort of not right about that at all pretend it didn’t happen uh and these sort of arguments get still debated today uh a huge question you know every every time a partisan is commemorated in

Uh in Lithuania in particular question is well exactly what was he doing in 1941 okay and that does come up and there are there are vicious arguments you know and so much so that there has to be a lot of int introspection on this and I I’ll talk about this in a little

Bit more detail so you get this whole Nazi occupation the initial optimism was de dashed okay there’s this idea that you know that the arriving Germans were greeted with buckets of milk and you know and honey and bread and salt and all that there are instances of that

Happening uh I I’ve got several things to say for that first of all the German invasion disrupted the the planned deportation of 10% of the population so this Soviet oppression was halted okay and so people are obviously relieved about that and the other thing is the a lot of people remember yeah

Everybody everybody above a certain age remember the first world war all three of these countries were under German occupation at various points in the first world war under under under the Kaiser and actually they viewed that as a good thing um all three of the countries managed to achieve some degree of self-rule

And uh and get their act together so that they had a a AB ility to really you know declare the independence in 1918 that happened because of German occupation okay uh they so you can’t fault somebody for thinking well it’s 1915 again okay that wasn’t so bad they

Threw the Russians out last time and we actually made good out of it uh so yeah uh but those hopes were quickly dashed uh the whole area that is now bellarus Lithuania laia Estonia was the German province of oand uh it was meant to be an economic a

Zone of economic exploitation and a source of Labor it was meant to be a source of food because this is a largely agrarian place a source of Natural Resources particularly oil shale in Estonia uh timber in uh in lvia and Lithuania food from all three uh there wasn’t the equivalent of a vichi

Government or you know like that there were there was local Administration that that were effectively collaborators but you know there wasn’t National regimes that were you know at least nomally and paper you know independent it wasn’t like you know Croatia or or Slovakia for example uh I gu say collaboration I’m going to

I’m going to talk about collaboration in a little bit more depth because it runs both ways because you had because you you have basically countries that are stuck between two large Waring countries both of which have occupied the place you have this mess of people who are effectively collaborating with both s

Either or both sides During the period of this conflict much of it conscripted I want talk about that Holocaust yeah um yeah I have a whole slide on the Holocaust next uh but also you have this um rise of because of the Holocaust you have a rise of some Jewish resistance

Movements uh are quite sizable particularly in in in villous and cus uh and so there so any any story of this particular period of time has to talk about uh Jewish partisan groups too uh there’s some an excellent book from the 1970s on it that mentioned in my book I

Talk a little bit about it in there uh very much a thing in Lithuania not so much in laia not at all in Estonia the pre-war Jewish population in Estonia was probably only big enough to fit in this college um uh and various resistance starts to form that 1941 res existance

That had that Rebellion uh half roughly half of them Fade Away into the woods the other half get sort of co-opted by the Germans into various battalions police units uh in some cases even SS Legions of which desertion is Rife so you so you get this

You know mix of so so the Germans try to create military forces in these places uh a SS Le was recruited in in in laia and another one was recruited in Estonia uh they weren’t called that at first they were just called you know literally that the

Laian legion uh Estonian Legion they got retrofitted oh you’re in the SS now like okay uh the lithuanians managed to boycott an SS Legion there was a a quite detailed effort to do that uh and what you get during this World War II period of occupation is 19

1941 people think well these Germans have done it they’re going to defeat the Soviets we better figure out what we’re going to do uh 1942 the war could go either way by 1943 even the even sort of the the thickest of the thick start to see this

Is not going the way the Germans wanted to go uh and so the formation of resistance units is largely plotting large l ly plotting for a Soviet return so you know this War’s going to be over the Soviets are going to come back and that’s when we’re going

To have to really carry the fight on uh so there’s a lot of that uh there are what we call Soviet or red partisan unit active uh much more so in other parts of the of the Soviet Union not so much these are these are actual you know you

Communist communist units uh the nucleus of the origin of them was uh fragments of Red Army units who were left behind in the retreat and coales into resistance units uh followed up by infiltrators from Over the lines from Moscow they didn’t get much purchase really in the in the Baltic states but

It’s important to mention that they do happen they they figure more prominently in the written record than the actual record if you see what I mean because history was written by The Victors um and you sort of have to raise the question is this a three-way conflict

And it kind of is uh the this whole this whole idea that the uh the second world war is a uh is a is a is a just a binary conflict with good guys and bad guys um it gets kind of messy uh it gets messy

In other parts of the world too it gets really messy in China I mean yeah you could you could you could argue that the Second World War in China was about a five-way conflict um the Holocaust uh you know you don’t read anything think about the Holocaust

And and and and and some of the Soviet books uh some of the Soviet books in there are sort of just talk about the murder of Soviet citizens uh what what you had was a complete destruction of of Jewish life uh because because of the because of the the way that

The grand duy Lithuania evolved in the in the Middle Ages it was a multiethnic multi multi religious Pol and it had freedom of religion and so a lot of Jewish people in the Middle Ages settled in what was now called The Pale of settlement and a lot of that and sort of

The north end of that the very very North End of This Old pale of Jewish settlement was in Lithuania and a tiny sort of Southeastern corner of of lvia uh and what you get is a very rapid eradication of this now and if you start looking through the statistics of what

Happened in in in in the Baltic states and in in the in the war in the Holocaust you get this odd phenomena that actually more Jews died in the in the Holocaust in Lithuania LA and Estonia then lived in it lived there before the war because actually a a

Number of camps were set up and and Jews from elsewhere were also brought in and murdered or worked to death as well too uh vilus had been a great Center of Jewish learning had a you at one point sort of a third of the population of it was Jewish possibly

Mar depending on which census you look at uh that’s all gone lots of synagogues went a true eradication of Jewish culture there had not been much of a Jewish community in Estonia for for historic reasons uh but it was almost all gone um I should also mention that

Nobody talks about the Romany the gypsies uh their their eradication was even more total in the Baltic states than uh than that of Jew uh Judaism uh and it’s something we don’t talk about so much but it was it’s very much a thing I mean you won’t find a

Lithuanian Roma anymore they’re yeah that just excised off the map and that’s that’s a that’s a sad thing too and there was collaboration with the local people you don’t you don’t achieve this sort of genocide without collaboration uh and the Germans were very good propagandists they weaponized uh existing anti-semitic

Feelings also did a lot to conflate Judaism with Communism uh didn’t help that they could point to certain officials of the Soviet Union who were Jewish including in the secret police and so yeah and this runs both ways though because there were tremendous efforts to actually help save Jews uh you know

Uh in laia and in Lithuania in particular you know lots of people really you know many people lost their lives saving Jews and a lot of people barely survived imprisonment because of it uh and thousands of Jews were actually saved because of of of the efforts of very very brave

People uh and so it’s it’s it’s it’s a it’s a mixed Legacy and it’s a mixed Legacy because I had to develop this sort of spectrum of collaboration is a collaboration is it cooperation coercion co-option and so uh if somebody did something to help the Germans you know well what is it

They did and how did they how did they come to it so and I submit to you that there’s sort of there is a there’s a mix of things you know uh if somebody was literally dragged off the street and conscripted and taken to Germany and put

To work in a in an ammunition Factory uh they’re helping the German war effort but we’re not calling them a collaborator okay uh so Spectrum starts there you know and if somebody if somebody joins the SS Legion and immediately deserts after his first paycheck with six hand grenades a rifle

And 400 rounds of ammunition and it and a will coat because that did happen um that’s not collaboration that’s that’s uh in fact that’s sort of the opposite of collaboration that’s sabotaging the war effort um and that to happen uh rather a lot of these military units uh

Were sort of 80% conscript uh so people who were conscripted and coer in the service um and some of this conscription was well theoretically voluntary enlistment but it was enlistment with harsh options enlist or we lock your family up enlist or you could go work in slave conditions

In Germany uh you so gee I’m going going to take the paid job where I have a chance or the unpaid job behind the wire it’s not much of a choice for some people uh we also sometimes forget how effective Nazi propag end it was uh particularly when you sort of if

You’re if you’re trying to say bad things about the Soviet Union uh in 1942 in the Baltic states you’re kind of pushing on an open door it’s like you got unfinished business boy why don’t you had Jacob rifle we go kill some Russians and that that’s a that’s a sort

Of thing appeal that would you know if if you’d lost family in that deportation effort you know you might see joining the German Army as as a way to maybe get your family back so I’m not saying this is right this is a mix of right and

Wrong here and there’s a mix of people impos in impossible positions having to make impossible choices so a common Trope about the Baltic states is oh they’re all German collaborators uh and I but I also say you know you get voluntary list during uh due to opportunism there’s Wars flush out the opportunists

I’m sure we’re seeing that right now in Gaza and Israel we’re seeing it in Ukraine every war flushes out an opportunist the Soldier of Fortune the the the adventure junkie the guy who doesn’t want to sit on the farm picking potatoes would rather go out and do something interesting um and then yeah

We really do have fascists all right there really are people with farri views who are if not Nazi sort of Nazi adjacent um it’s funny that the the German Germans really didn’t trust them very much they feeled them as sort of almost like some sort of deviant like you guys

Don’t really you guys must be thick we’re gonna we’re GNA get rid of you guys surely you know that right uh and so there but there were the the the German war effort was a convenient uh was a convenient U use of employment for uh for people I also say

You throw the Spectrum around if it’s if it’s July 1941 and it’s the Soviets retreating from retreating from Estonia it’s the same thing there is collaboration with the Soviet authorities and when the Soviet authorities come back in 1944 1945 there’s absolutely everything there’s people getting locked up and sent to a

Factory there’s there’s the opportunist who flip sides uh there are people say oh you know maybe if I join the Red Army my my Village won’t get destroyed uh conscription because in 1944 when the Soviets come back they view all these people as Soviet citizens guess what you’re behind on your military service

Off you go uh voluntary enlistment opportunists and you know gee three years of living under a under fascism might make somebody into a communist so the Paradigm Works in both ways and so you start adding up the number of people who fought from the Baltic states who fought on each side about equivalent

Equival roughly equivalent numbers of people fought for the Soviet Union or for the Soviets and and so what you get is you get a really really mixed bag of legacies and every single one of those people has got a different story to tell at a different angle and so you can put

Another you can put another sort of axis on this chart if you will what did somebody do all right so you ended up joining up joining the Germans well the spectrum of what you what you got the work you got put to to do for the

Ger is R ranged from you know you know literally shooting shooting Jewish people in a ninat grouping or you know locking up your neighbors or running a prison camp uh all the way down to some of these guys in SS units they they were traffic C they were

Literally traffic cops and fire brigades you know uh and so there and you know most people were somewhere in the middle the majority of these units were basically Canon f for fighting conventional war on the front and so you’ve got to take everybody’s every everybody who is anybody you have to

Take if somebody was if somebody if somebody was involved in that war you got to look at their story and you going to say what was their motive and what did they end up doing before you start say this guy was a Nazi this guy was a

Communist uh in fact there was and the factor in all this because all of this stuff desertion is rampant there are people that flip sides there are people that join up and quit and join up again and quit uh and so you get a huge mess trying to figure this out

Retrospectively so the Soviets come back the Soviets come back not all at once it’s a gradual movement of the front um and partisan Warfare starts in Earnest and I say gradual movement of the front um in EST in Estonia the Germans basically bug out leaving sort of estonians defend for themselves uh

But the Soviets aren’t really ready to take advantage of that so there’s about a 6- week period of time where the estonians are really trying to basically trying to run their own Affairs uh and it’s a huge window for people to leave over the water to

Finland or or Sweden and so a lot of people flee uh in ltia the advance of the Soviets moves very slowly from the west of lvia to the east sorry east of laia to the West uh by the end of the war Western laia is still in German hands uh and a German

Army uh is is there trapped starving surrounded and gives up um in Lithuania you get formations of you get you get large battles actually well not large Battles by World War II standards but large Battles by standard of partisan conflict as as the Soviets turn up you

Get company siiz units units of 100 120 people uh fighting fighting large amounts of Soviets usually getting massacred uh and so you get this um you get you you get these very very quick switch in partisan tactics uh from larger units the small units because several things happened

First of all people realized that this war is going to drag on uh there was an understanding from people that you know that the war was just going to go into a different phase that clearly the Russians were just going to end up fighting the the Americans and the

British and there was going to be this war was just going to go on and so we have to be the sort of democratic resistance from when the Americans and the British turn up well that never happened okay uh and so the first winter 1945 and 1946 people are getting awfully

Hungry because it’s hard to feed 120 people in a swamp uh but it’s not hard to feed 10 or 15 people scattered around with access to small farms so you get a very fractal resistance movement in all three and the postwar Insurgency uh drags on for a lot of time

This you know basically what you see from 1945 to about 1955 about a 10year period of time uh there is a partisan resistance in all three countries uh and you get well I’ll talk I’ll talk through it here in Estonia well if you look at the

Look the peak was about 14 to 15,000 active partisans uh that’s significant because this 1% of the population at the time 1% this 1 person in 100 is part of this movement uh the peak was in about 1947 uh they for they finally gradually formed a national movement the rvl but

By the time they formed the rvl it was and got really organized uh it was a bit late it was 48 4950 uh and uh they they were really really behind lvia never really emerged as a National Organization which is confusing looking at all these groups it’s forgive the

Monty Python joke it was a little bit people’s front of Judea um there but there’s all these different National fronts and National Union and National this none of them were National okay uh the Lan the laian resistance had suffered some early setbacks uh and never really organized the lithuanians

Had a a series of three National organizations uh and quite we’re larger now again that 30,000 Fighters is again about 1% of the population uh and so they had de facto control of much of rural Lithuania at least by night uh until 1948 1949 so this is It’s it becomes a classic

Insurgency in that there are area there are denied there are areas where the Soviet state cannot operate uh or can only operate in large large number uh and there is there is a national movement the the national movement was repeatedly infiltrated by by by KGB

Spies uh so that’s why you have a series of three different movements the first one got quite heavily infiltrated sort of had to reorganize SEC same thing with the second one and then the third one really did organize and had provincial and District uh you know command structure cells it had a cell

Structure leading to basically every part of the country uh the last of these groups really kind of were busted up by about 1956 I mean by by by the 1952 we’re talking hundreds of people not thousands so yeah uh it’s hard to gauge the numbers I I do make an attempt in the

Book uh then there’s a really good book called the Soviet counter surg a Soviet counter Insurgency in the western Borderlands that does a good job of trying to track the numbers on this partisan tactics uh it’s interesting uh uh the there’s there’s there’s a there’s a great scholar the Great British

Scholar of Lithuanian stuff Francis young I don’t know if anybody know him sort of says that the partisans were you know P armed Publishers because one of the big one one particularly in Lithuania yeah particularly in Lithuania the idea is you I am I am running short on time I’m sorry

Yeah running news papers okay uh this is not a this is not the Viet Kong okay this is not a a a partisan band this is a low intensity conflict uh a partisan band is basically trying to survive trying to make it its uh existence known uh and trying to do things like

Survive and stay off the grid and stay out of control of this of of of the Soviet Union uh so a lot of the activity is trying to protect Farmers trying to uh you conduct reprisals against particularly notorious Soviet Secret Police officials deny labor to Red Army

And Industry uh and help prepare for World War II which unfortunately never happens uh lots of construction of underground bunkers that’s how you keep your movement alive against an enemy that has air cover you know who can fly over and see where you are uh so extensive networks of underground

Bunkers all over the all three three Baltic states there is some interaction with the West um another occasional Trope is that this whole thing was just a front from MI6 and the CIA it was a pre-existing phenomena but of course in this early Cold War era the intelligence

Services in the west and I should say also in Sweden and Finland who are very interested in what’s going on in their near abroad uh try to affect Le liazon with these units uh not so much to keep the Insurgency going they view these they view these organizations as a good

Conduit from information obviously eyes behind the Iron Curtain are good if you want to see if there’s a Soviet mobilization if World War II is coming you know uh so there wasn’t a lot of support in terms of you know arms and material it was really agents and radio

Sets to try to stay in touch with these guys I’d say because of a guy named Kim philby um associated with this with this University I should say part of the Cambridge 5 um yeah Kim philby was very involved in the British part of this operation and sort of betrayed the whole

Thing uh John Harvey Jones though did a lot of work late of uh late of ICI industry and what was that TV show troubleshooter yeah yeah yeah no his MBE was for something called the Baltic British Baltic Fisheries Protection Service whereby he was running speedboats and infil trading agents into into into the

Baltic states uh alas a lot of those agents were betrayed some of them indeed were were double agents uh a whole whole story there the Soviets eventually crushed the life out of this uh this was largely not a battle against the Red Army the Soviets tried to keep the Red

Army itself for war fighting also the Red Army is a conscript outfit uh some of these guys who are conscripts in the Red Army might feel a little bit of sympathy with these lithuanians uh you know some guy from Kazakhstan might say they doing to these guys what it did to my

Family so the primary the primary competence on the Soviet side were the depending on the year the nkvd which then became the MGB and then the KGB uh they had internal troops that were organized and equipped just like the army so uh also secret police and domestic intelligence collection

Informant secret agents the classic all your secret police stuff uh because the Baltic states do border on the west or at least onto the Baltic uh border troops are important there’s also these outfits called the Easter beti these were local auxiliaries these were brute squads of I mean literally the drgs of society

Uh prison you know petty petty thieves prison prisoners you know criminals opportunists uh in some cases mental patients uh were were basically round it up and give it a choice like you guys can go to Siberia or you can become the local brute Squad and you know uh yeah

And they had they have a bad reputation these these these these units and some of the worst atrocities were these very ill disciplined Easter beti which means sort of destroyer in Russian uh the Red Army was brought in for really big operations or as a back stop and then

Conventional policing plays a role in this and I am almost done uh the Soviets win uh there’s there’s attrition they win the war of attrition part dead partisans can barely um can barely replace themselves but there’s a practically infinite supply of Soviet Manpower these are small countries in a large incorporated

Into a bigger country all the classic Counter Intelligence and counter Insurgency tools are put to work arrest torture infiltration betrayal uh also conscription into the Red Army just denies these guys of Manpower um deportation you know yeah somebody who’s banged up in a camp in vuda can’t be a

Partisan or so you think um also in a lot of cases just omnipresence there were there were situations where there was a 30 to1 ratio between Soviet garrisons and partisans and so if you can achieve and maintain that overwhelming ratio against an Insurgency you tend to win and that’s one of the

Reasons why the French never won in you know Algeria the America never won in Vietnam you can’t you know you you those countries couldn’t maintain that sort of sort of you know ratio also I should say amnesties uh the KGB more or less honored its amnesties they viewed amnesties as a valid

Tool uh in fact they were more worried about Petty criminals faking themselves to be partisan so they would interrogate you quite severely to make sure you really were a partisan before they gave you an amnesty uh and sometimes amnesties got reneged on but actually there’s disciplinary records in the Soviet Union

Of you know local commanders who were actually harshly disciplined because they went back on an amnesty so the am amnesties are a valid Comm Insurgency tactic the death of Stalin took some of the impetus out of this the eventual lack of a World War II I you know the

The partisans who were still around listening to the shortwave radios were really excited when the Korean War happened figuring it was all going to kick off no and the biggest thing the collectivization of food uh food supply taking the small holder farms and collectivizing them into uh State Farms

And Collective Farms cut off the food supply so instead of farmers voluntarily helping out the partisans you had to engage in stealth and deception to steal the food and that was much harder and that really took the took the wind out of it um a lot of partisans end up in

The goog they ended up instrumental in GOOG uprisings all right so you could argue that the great Gulag uprisings many of who you’ve never heard of in places like veruda norilsk and kengar in sort of 1953 1954 um lithuanians latians estonians I should also say ukrainians and Poes as

Well uh played a very large role in these uh these uprisings these uprisings themselves had a tremendous effect in the years after the end of Stalin in actually liberalizing the regime in the Pres in the prison system in the Soviet Union so there’s some impact there and

Again I’m almost at the I I I I’ve exceeded my remit here uh but did it matter I’d say it did matter because for a period of time it delayed the uh collectivization of Agriculture by delaying the collectivization of Agriculture and controlling the rural areas for a while it reduced the ability

Of the Soviet Union to change the demographics and import a lot of uh non- Baltic ethnic population into the area and so it partic it’s one of the Reon the partisan resistance is the reason why Lithuania is still 80% Lithuanian you know uh and the the slightly diminished resistance and also

Somewhat more urbanized and industrialized population in Estonia and laia is one of the reasons why in those countries more Russians were ethnic Russians were brought in because it was easier to bring them into City areas as opposed to rural areas uh the partisan units particularly in lfia and Estonia

Allowed people to leave it gave a window of time for people to leave and allowed a diaspora in the west to keep fragile small cultures alive uh it tied down significant amounts of resources during the early Cold War uh saved some lives some some really really really bad people who were going

To kill a lots of lithuanians ended up at the end of a rope or on the receiving end of a bullet uh it reduced the available Manpower for conscription into the Soviet Army and delayed some of the harshest russification efforts until after the death of Stalin when there wasn’t the

Willpower to do it and as I said exported uh experience and combat you know combat experience into the gulag system where it became useful in uprisings uh and finally it gave it gave a symbol the forest brothers and they were all three of these countries they were called the forest Brothers hence

The name of my book The Forest Brotherhood gave powerful symbols to these these countries uh powerful symbols to this day uh the the the main characters in these these these movements are national heroes they are household names uh and so it’s part of national identity uh and so symbols are important

When you’re trying to reestablish your nationhood which is what happened in 1980s 1980s you get independence movements again in the 1980s a lot of these former partisans are still alive and then you get glasnost and parista and people can start to tell their stories again they weren’t allowed to until that point

So this is it matters I mean I’d say we have we have we have the center for Baltic geopolitics here uh and the Baltic states are a thing and they’re they they are a thing largely because well not entirely but you know the partisan movements and there resistance

Movements and I should just throw a lot of credit to the nonviolent resistance movement too that existed well well after the end of the partisan resistance resistance kept the idea of Lithuania idea of Estonia idea of laia alive and so that’s why it’s important on that note I will take questions or discussion

Or comments or complaints or you I’m near enough to the window so you know uh you know you know uh I don’t think I could fall out of any of these windows so thank you thank you so much Dan for for such a fascinating and I will say comprehensive

Treatment of this uh difficult subject I’m sure we’ll get loads of questions but I I’ll abuse my position as a chair and ask the first two ones I guess I’ll start with the easier one okay uh Dan you’re a true man of Renaissance I mean when I look at your biography you know

You started as a student in political science and Russian language in Texas then were commissioned as an officer in the US Army chemical corpse then you did extensive training in US Army chemical School uh then you worked as a disaster preparedness adviser at the White House military office where he had

Responsibility for training the Office of the President I suppose that was Clinton um then Us Secret Service where you worked as a at the team protecting Clinton and the White House from chemical and biological threats and your last book before this one was actually called toxic a history

Of nerve agents and it’s for sale on the back too really yes so my question is you know this this is all this is like a James Bond material and and how did this all experience and expertise help you navigate this particular subject in particular in terms of selection of sources uh

Treatment of sources and perhaps connections who led you to some of the sources or just you know General Outlook well I don’t know I mean I’ve had a broad and diverse career where I’ve had spent much of my time explaining complicated things to an audience that didn’t get it you know nobody cares

About chemical weapons until they do uh and so I you know I don’t know how to answer your question I really don’t um I’ve done a lot of interesting things but the the the things that sound the most interesting there are probably the most boring in in in real life terms say yo

Yes you work for the Secret Service yeah I spent a lot of time doing 12-hour shifts in the back of a van and you end up doing an a spend an awful lot of time in airport lounges and so you spend an awful time awful lot of

Time reading so I you know I read everything I could find on the Baltic SK because I was interested and my first time I visit did uh Lithuania was in 2002 with George Bush you know it’s the only time in my life I could ever play

The race card and say you got to send me on this trip boss I’m your guy I know I know 12 words of Lithuanian so you know it all helped I guess so it’s not like it’s on TV I guess no no it’s terribly dull my second question is a bit more difficult

Uh the history of of this whole resistance is I think a history of moral dilemmas yes and uh this is a very painful and charged subject from all the sides and I just want to start with the two sort of examples from real life the first I I’ve

Learned about it in the sources and the second I’ve learned about it uh from my grandfather Yeah uh who was there at the time the first one is a 16-year-old girl mhm who joins kamol the Communist youth right she never held a weapon in her arms yeah she never betrayed

Anyone and there come the forest Brothers at night and shoot her yeah the Second Story I mean is it you know the Dilemma is is this just is this heroic is this right and is this something to you know write home about the second the second dilemma is is

Which I’ve heard from my grandpa I don’t know how real is is this but you know he was pretty consistent in telling it so I suppose there is at least a grain of Truth in that um basically he had a a neighbor of or someone from the village

Who was harassing him right the guy broke his windows he was like uh threatening his his wife and stuff like that just just out of control and my grandpa was on good terms with the Forest Brooks so he went to the forest and he told them you know this

Things are just not working between me and this guy now can you you know and they said we’ll be done and that guy was shot in in two weeks and my grandpa was so proud of it so again you know the context of it is passions running High the misery of

The immediate postor postor War II uh you know everyone is hungry everyone is angry everyone is insecure and your book fundamentally is is you know it’s critical but it’s a positive appraisal of all this so my question finally is um what ti the scales for you you

Know to in favor of a positive appraisal where what were those moments and and what were those moral dilemas perhaps that you were having when doing this um the biggest moment of moral Clarity I had uh was when I discovered the Deport database in Lithuania where rather painstaking rather painstakingly

Over the last 30 years archists in Lithuania have looked through old Soviet records and tried to document every single person who was arrested or executed or deported some people some people had all three some people got deported and came back and then were arrested and then

Shot so some people but you know there’s a database and I have a very exotic Lithuanian surname that’s tied to a very specific Village in the poorest bit of Southern Lithuania okay the village has never had more than 75 people all right and so my

My my name ties me to a specific bit of very poor farmland and so I stuck my surname in this database and I found 87 people with my surname either shot only I think two of them were shot uh the rest were either arrested or deported uh the

Oldest well into their 90s the youngest age two and this is from this is this practically my entire gene pool I just sat there in the British Library where I had you know and I just was stunned for an hour at that it’s like okay so for

And I I said well let’s look at some other families so what you get is you get for if you were a lavian or Lithuanian or an Estonian I submit to you right now also so if you were honestly in Gaza or a Ukrainian in the eastern half of Ukraine this is an

Existential this is an existential crisis in a way that you know Americans and British people aren’t used to having okay Britain’s not used to this because it’s an island it’s got water on every direction and it’s not it’s not been invaded a lot it’s been

Invaded a bit you know uh but been a while and those invasions were changes in management they weren’t you know existential threats to everybody and so all of a sudden I realize every family in lithuania’s got these stories okay and so when you got the Germans on one side

The Soviets on the other you unless you’re lucky enough to live next to a guy with a boat and you can go to Sweden you might have a third way up you’ve got a you’ve got a lot of choices and these are and and and the choices are a range of choices

That none of them are good choices you have a and you don’t and doing nothing is also a choice but that’s not necessarily the choice that’s going to be the least bad of your choices so and and and you get these recriminations you get you know in in my grandmother’s

Family the bit of the family that stayed back there was a guy who ended up as a policeman in the Soviet Union he was a traffic cop working for the GI which was the traffic police in in Soviet Lithuania died before independence well before independence because he died age 57 of

Lung cancer because this you know this Soviet cigarettes got to him um but he was never mentioned because he was considered a traitor you know but I say you know he’s he’s a guy who made a decision and you know you know uh there’s there’s one guy in the family I

Can I can point to who probably was a Nazi collaborator but I got another ancestor who was Jewish it was Pro it was massacred by the AAS troop and so this is everybody’s got these messed up family backstories I’m sure you do you just touched on just a little

Bit of it I’m sure if you talked to everybody you know it’s it’s a real mess it’s a uh and so when you have a polarizing mess like that things come out of it and one of the things that came out of it is this Forest Brotherhood movement with all its

Warts and good and bad and everything so and it’s a thing that people in the west don’t know much about and I just felt that it just it’s a story that needs to be told I don’t know it is thank you okay let’s open up the floor four questions I

Was just wondering how an amateur historian could research this themselves online and to what extent is Russia controlling the archive oh okay that’s that’s a good question uh that’s that’s a very that’s a very good question um and the answer the the answer is it’s easier in Lithuania than in laia

And Estonia for the for the precise purpose that rather more KGB documentation got um captured intact in 1990 1991 when these countries uh although the situation is not bad in Estonia and and and laa but also there was this Golden Era in the early 1990s where Western

Historians could go and and look in the Russian archives the yel andar weren’t bad for that so there’s a lot of interesting books written by that uh uh so you it’s hard to go back and do the primary research on that stuff now but there’s a lot of secondary stuff that

Had a good glimpse into that okay and some of that stuff is in libraries and all that you’re up against the language barrier in a lot of cases but I also say the online trans translation stuff is much easier now than even was a year or

Two ago uh you know yeah shoving a you can you there are computer programs where you can shove a PDF in in Estonian in and get a reasonable effect simbly out of it in English and it’s it’s not bad in getting better by the day we also don’t forget I mean the estonians

Invented Skype it’s a techy place I mean they and and and these are three countries that realize that their languages are not very accessible to foreigners uh so there there are there there are a lot of tools out there the problem I had the problem I had I had too much Lithuanian

Stuff and not enough laan and Estonian stuff and I I I and I I still feel a little bit guilty about giving some short shrift to the lvans in estonians some of that was a language barrier it was a contact barrier and a lot of it was just documentation barrier and just

Some of that documentation isn’t as online I mean lithuanians have done a very very good job of shoving this stuff online uh uh and they they’ve done things like a lot of books that were written by former partisans that only written in Lithuanian are now out there as

Downloadable PDFs you know for free on their archive site and so you can you can access a lot more of this um the intelligence service stuff uh the CIA dumped a lot of stuff under Freedom of Information Act on their their their efforts to to to Lia with the uh with

Particularly with the Lithuanian uh underground uh there it was an informal division of labor and that the British were dealing with the lafans and estonians because they could get to them by SE uh the Lithuanian coastline is quite small so the Americans were using c47 aircraft and parachutes uh but

There’s a the British documentation very hard to get the American stuff I’ve got thousands of pages of it now I’ve got a whole other book on that coming at some point probably 5 years from now so I mean there’s uh and the other the other thing is because we’re talking about stuff

That happened in the 40s and 50s a lot of these people were alive in the 1990s and a lot of these people told their stories and got written down now a lot of that is in Niche Publications in Lithuanian laan and Estonian but that

Stuff is there if you want to go dig for it right yes thank you you touched upon it briefly uh sorts of ties between West the west and the forest Brothers but I was wondering um if you could if you could go into more detail concerning

That was it like a sort of equivalent of operation gladio uh in preparation of any S no uh different a sort of a different Beast than operation gladio and for by means of by means of uh reference operation gladio which I’m not even sure if that was actually its name

Or one of a number of names or it was plots by Western intelligence services in Western Europe to have sort of pre-baked resistance movements ready to go in case the Soviet Union occupied Western Europe now because this was a different thing because there were already resistance groups on the go as

Opposed to trying to set up one from scratch uh and so the typical thing was basically trying to find lithuanians Lans and estonians usually in displaced persons camps usually in West Germany and recruit them and train them and infiltrate them back in uh but there were also guys who got out through

Usually through Sweden and then made contact with the West with Western intelligence services and I should say this Swedish intelligence service officially neutral in all this was a very good sort of middleman in this uh you know sort of funling guys the right the right context uh so but both of those methods

Of operation were prone to infiltration you know some guy turns up literally on a boat in Sweden and says hey I just escaped esap from this this the I just escaped from laia you know I’m here from my band of you know Brothers over here

And you know CIA or MI6 would lap that right up and you know give the guy six months of training and radio set and perish him right back in and he’ sort of betray the whole thing and that happened a lot uh it was largely meant for liazon

Uh an intelligence collection uh in fact I think the CIA was a little bit I mean the one great success was this guy uh he go this LCA uh he became quite a heroic leader of the resistance after having he was already a heroic leader of the

Resistance he got out made contact First with French intelligence and then and then and then the CIA got parachuted back in he’s the one great success story the rest of the rest of it is all basically crap okay uh and I think the CI the CIA is there’s two interesting documents

That are after action reports of how it went wrong and how he eventually got betrayed and all that they’re a bit stunned that it actually kind of worked because if most the rest of it hadn’t worked yes yes sir thank you um I guess this may be

Beyond the scope of your your book but um why do you think that um Finland largely escaped from the kind of Soviet occupation that uh Estonia lvia and Lithuania experience um one guy Marshall Manheim I should say there’s an excellent biography of Marshall Manheim out by my

Publisher um I’d say it’s 80% him uh but also they they fought they fought hard and had uh they had a bigger army they they they actually fought as opposed to rolling over um could I just say for information that we next event actually In This Very Room

Uh with Henrik mander the author ofing yeah and you can find on our website the event where the author described the of man yes so yes I give a lot of credit to Manheim yes sir oh uh thank you I’m still grappling in my mind as to whether these Forest

Brothers are sort of romantic resistance Heroes and and you know Freedom loving partisans or whether they’re actually just a bunch of of Bandits and former Nazi Collaborators so I’m still not quite clear who they are and what they represent okay um i’ I’d say I I’d say that you know maybe

For my next time I do this slide I could I could do a I could probably do a spectrum of the forest brother in the same way I did as a spectrum of the collaborator because yes you have former Nazi fighters in the movement not as many as necessarily are people led to

Believe because rather a lot of them bugged out to the west and by the time we get to the peak movement here the demogra the a the age of the the age of the the movement is such that you know if you’re 20 in 1950 you were too young

To have been anything in you were 11 in 1941 okay uh the some serious work on the actual demographics who these people were uh has been done in more detail in Lithuania than in laia and Estonia um the average the average brother uh was not was not a city dweller was was was

Was usually came out of a a town or town or Countryside uh background uh the the average the the average Forest brother recruit was somebody evading Soviet conscription or evading the deportation of their farm so it’s it’s it’s a oh the Soviets are coming either to

Take me off to the Army or they got to take us all off to Siberia I’m going to run off to the woods so it’s uh it’s not necessarily an ideological decision it’s a survival decision and so you get this Crosscut of of rural population now

In that you get so but then you get who are the leaders the leaders tend to be school teachers and Scout leaders and uh not necessar there are some priests but sort of uh Parish committee members I mean you know uh the equivalent of the equivalent of church wardens um so you

Get you get this you know you um you get some former military guys as Leaders not terribly senior ones they had been sort of Sergeants or lieutenants in the pre-war Army uh mostly because the senior more senior guys just didn’t make it that far they’re already offer some

Somebody or somebody else’s Camp uh and you get unlikely Heroes you get Scoundrels uh when you when the organizations start to sort of solidify you get this more in Estonia and and Lithuania uh as opposed to laia where the movement is more fragmented you start to get you start to get more rigid

Disciplinary uh structures and the idea that you know what it’s bad for the movement to have Scoundrels it’s bad for the UN so it’s bad for us to have drunkards so let’s not we’re declaring our bunker on alcohol-free Zone uh there’s the sort of thing you

Know the oh I’m going to rat out my neighbor and the partisans are going to kill him uh in 1946 that was probably if that was I don’t know if in 1946 that sort of thing was much more common then that would have been about 1948 1949

Because all of a sudden there’s there’s rules there’s procedures there’s a disciplinary committee that will call you up for doing something like that and you might you know get thrown out of the movement uh which is practically a death sentence or at least a deportation sentence you know uh so yeah it’s you

Know it’s like like like any movement it’s a mov that it its height is pulling in 1% of the population so it’s going to get a cross cut of everything so all that stuff the heroes are there if you want to find them the villains are there

If you want to find them and I suspect that you know it’s a normal distribution you know and I think the mo most of the people are in the middle but also the people in the middle are not well documented on this the the the heroes and villains get written about the guys

Who sit for three or four years in a bunker you know and nobody writes about them very much they don’t get a look in in the in in the historiography of this and it’s one of the reasons that makes it actually quite hard to write about

This from my encyclopedic or sort of you know chronological matter because there’s an awful lot of nothing going on it’s a bit like you know you know the structure of an atom an atom is mostly empty space there’s an awful lot of nothing happening then something happens

And then nothing happening uh this is a this this stuff moves at a glacial pace and also it’s very fragmented so it’s just like yes we know there were partisans there and nobody knows what they did because they all died and nobody wrote about it so there’s a lot of unknown and when

There’s a lot of unknown you can project either the villain or the or the hero onto that unknown and there’s a lot of that that goes on depending on which sort of you know facet of the diamond you want to look at uh if you look at 1950s you know igra literature in

America and some of is awful it’s very much he geography yeah the lithuanians can do no wrong yeah second world war we not to talk about that you know this story starts in 1945 like wait a minute you know um and there’s awful lot of laundering of of of of bad history on

That but also you know six 1960s Soviet historiography is like they’re all Bandits I I kind of address both of these in book you know and and in the case of the Soviets they’re all Bandits thing well by definition if you weren’t working for for the Soviet state

You were you were you were illegal so you by definition you were a bandit so it’s sort of a the the the it’s a self-licking ice cream cone you know it’s it’s it’s a definition of course by the standards of the Soviet state they were abanded because if you

Weren’t in the system you were abandoned so uh and I’d also say there’s a lot of banditry on the Soviet side too and throw it all in together because this is a dirty war there are outrages that appear to have been perpetrated by partisan units but one of the Soviet

Tactics was to make fake partisan units get some guys and go burn a village and rape some women and steal some stuff and therefore blaming it on the partisans write it up as a partisan outrage and all that so that sort of thing if you want to use that is a yeah

That can sort of poison the data pool if you see what I mean uh so it’s it’s it’s a it’s a hard mess it’s it’s a hot mess to deal with you know thank you I’m afraid we’re running out of time so we’ll collect just three really short questions and three really short

Answers thanks very much for your presentation very quick question uh you sort of touched on the role of German propaganda in anti-Semitism in Lithuania I wonder if you can briefly talk about pre-existing anti-Semitism and the role of the Catholic Church oh just let’s collect the the batch and then anyone

Else who would like to ask a short yes the lady at the back yeah yeah okay okay let’s start here okay anti-Semitism yeah yeah thank you you briefly mentioned in your presentation that the legacy of forest Brotherhood was used in the democratic transition in the ’90s can

You please tell me more about how it was received uh among the population and uh how exactly it was used okay good question and I at the back there okay thank you very much for your presentation I wanted to ask about the role of women where their Forest sisters

Maybe yes okay uh I’m going to I’m I’m I’m going to take that in reverse order uh yes there were Forest sisters uh there was a splendid article about them in lvia uh not a lot written about it in Estonia but they did exist extensive involvement of women in Lithuania uh

For they were crucial to the movement as liazon because a single man of military age walking around is very easily you know assumed to be a partisan in certain periods of time and and attracts attention uh you know a a woman of same age carrying a bask carrying a basket of

Potatoes from one Farm to another you know flies under the radar so women were extensively used for communication liazon there are cases where women became you know quite active partisans uh more than that there was also situations where women were you know uh there’s one case one

Particular case of a woman who was actually an infiltrator into the Soviet bureaucracy uh you know getting things like blank passports you know things like that so yes uh I think in some of the older partisan literature they don’t get the as typically the case with wartime literature the women don’t NE

Necessarily get the uh get the praise that they should uh but it’s very much the thing yes uh okay anti-Semitism yes uh anti-Semitism existed has always existed in Eastern Europe and it comes and goes it sort of it’s it’s there if you want to push on it and it’s and

It’s I I’d say the this the the the situation in the 1920s and 1930s uh and we’re in in in laia and Lithuania was pretty actually pretty good uh was a pretty good period by historical standards for the Jewish Community uh because they were not under the they

Were not under the same restrictions that they had been under the Zar so there was in fact a blossoming of uh there’s a blossoming of political movements there’s an economic blossoming there’s uh you know there’s they have rights that they can vote now so there’s there’s they they’re more able to attend

University those things were all strictly circumscribed under the under the Zar um so the tenden the tendency of anti-Semitism was was going down in the inter War period uh but yes you’re right the the the the particularly the Catholic church has got a problematic Legacy in Eastern Europe on this as does

The Orthodox Church um as do the Lutheran churches in uh you know in in L Estonia so it’s a it’s a it is a mixed Legacy so when you get somebody coming pushing hard in the anti-Semitism sort of lever and combining it with a secular anti-bolshevism anti-soviet lever and

Trying to combine and conflate the two yeah there are people that fall for that you know and in a in a in a situation where the new over overlords control the media you know it becomes difficult it’s it’s a it’s a problem and sorry your question

Was oh yes okay so what you what you get in the early 1990s I mean you get all of a sudden in a Renaissance you can start commemorating this stuff uh you can actually have Museum displays and you can start writing books about this and

And all of a sudden the people who are still alive can talk about it again they didn’t feel that they could so you get this mushrooming and some of it I’d say it was 90% good 10% a little bit exaggerated all of a sudden everybody had a partisan if you

Felt left out if you didn’t have a partisan and some people I think there I think some of these accounts are you there’s a lot of people sort of you know not quite necessarily making things up but embellishing their stories because all us is the popular thing oh yeah yeah

Was back of the day yeah so there’s a little bit of that that goes on but the visible thing is you start to get monuments and you start to get cemeteries okay so all of a sudden you know these you these remains of partisans in secret Graves and a few

People know where they are can get reinterred in proper cemeteries and that’s a big thing in Lithuania and uh it’s happening in fact this week I think there’s another uh there’s another partisan who’s been discovered is being buried with military honors in vilus so it’s

It’s I because it is a it gets grasp on as a as as a as as a legacy of the time that we were fighting the guys that we just got rid of so it becomes a valuable part of the of the of the political context now it becomes Troublesome in a

Couple of situations because there’s a couple characters who get commemorated and then say well what did he do in 1944 um so there are a few characters who are and I I I do name some names in the book so uh there are a few Troublesome characters in this so some

People who probably shouldn’t have been so commemorated get sort of swept along with it and that becomes not helpful because that becomes a symb that something that can be latched on to say you know Russian propaganda does make a lot of use out of picking on some of these guys with Troublesome

Records thank you so so much Dan I’m afraid this is all we have time for tonight um thank you the audience great lecture great questions uh Don’t Run Away buy dance book get dance signature and let’s continue the discussion afterwards big round of applause

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