Sent to Die in Berlin is the untold story of 300 Latvian soldiers ordered into the German capital in late April 1945 in a futile attempt to hold back the Red Army. Very few survived, and until now the stories of the veterans who escaped have been in Latvian. Translated into English for the first time, the book adds extensive eyewitness accounts of the final battles for the German capital to the classic texts. The book covers the defence of key locations in the southern sector of the city, from Belle-Alliance-Platz, Gestapo headquarters and the Aviation Ministry to the Fuhrerbunker itself, through the eyes of the men of the Latvian 15th SS Reconnaissance Battalion. Drawing from diaries, articles and archive testimony, the author constructs a street-by-street chronology as ? alongside the Spanish Ezquerra Battalion ? the 300 Latvians try to slow the Soviet advance. In pitched battles from the Landwehr Canal up Saarlandstrasse to the Anhalter Bahnhof and Potsdamer Platz, the Latvians become the last line of defence of Hitler's Reich, with orders not to concede an inch of ground. They are at key moments in the battle: Lieutenant Atis Neilands acts as translator in the surrender negotiations and the Latvians are left holding the front line when the Germans slip away to break out at the Weidendammer Bridge on 1 May. By then there are very few Latvians surviving, but some escape and some return after years in Soviet labour camps to tell their stories much later in life. Through extensive archival research, painstaking translation and the author's street-by-street reconstruction of the battle through Latvian eyes, these vivid personal stories add valuable and dramatic insight to the classic accounts of the Fall of Berlin. AUTHOR: Vincent Hunt's work delves deep into the personal experience of war and its after effects, specialising in gathering eyewitness accounts to create vivid reconstructions of what actually happened. From the scorched earth destruction of northern Norway in late 1944 through the harrowing events of the Eastern Front in Latvia, Pomerania and Berlin, Hunt presents war through the eyes of those who were there. His fifth book for Helion adds extensive testimony from Latvian veterans to classic histories of the Battle for Berlin, lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs of key locations, both then and now. Hunt's journalistic willingness to revisit history through the eyes of survivors reveals important new details about where and how the Latvians fought in Berlin, and his theoretical model of historical discovery journalism constructed from this method has led to the award of a PhD. 110 b/w photos, 20 b/w maps, 1 table
