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The Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance Against the Nazis and Soviets

The Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance Against the Nazis and Soviets

By Dan Kaszeta
Hurst, 2023, 272 pp.
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Reviewed by Lawrence D. Freedman

March/April 2024Published on
In This Review
The Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance Against the Nazis and Soviets

The Forest Brotherhood: Baltic Resistance Against the Nazis and Soviets

By Dan Kaszeta

Hurst, 2023, 272 pp.
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Kaszeta explores little-known campaigns waged by patriots from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania against the invading Nazis during World War II and then against the returning Soviets. They fought the forcible incorporation of their territories into the Soviet Union after World War II, a resistance that continued well into the Cold War even in the face of severe repression. Scholars have struggled to find primary source materials about these struggles and been dissuaded from studying them by often credible Soviet claims that these movements were ultranationalist and collaborated with the Nazis. Kaszeta has done a remarkable job in telling the story, separating myth from fact and providing a rounded picture of the Forest Brotherhood, so called because these rebels tended to hide in forests. Kaszeta shows how these patriots moved from waging haphazard guerrilla warfare to publishing clandestine literature and keeping the idea of nationhood alive until it became real after the collapse of the Soviet Union.


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