Sent to Die in Berlin

The 300 men of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the Latvian 15th SS Division were sent into Berlin in late April 1945 by German commanders desperate to hold back the Red Army’s final offensive. Two weeks of chaos and hellish combat followed, and most of the Latvians were killed. The stories of the survivors are told in Sent to Die in Berlin for the first time in English, adding gripping, graphic eyewitness detail to the classic accounts of that battle.

As their numbers dwindled, the Reconnaissance Battalion fought at the Patent Office, BelleAlliance-Platz, Anhalter Bahnhof, Potsdamer Platz, the Gestapo HQ and the Aviation Ministry – the epicentre of Nazi evil. Through extensive research in archives, the post-war Latvian diaspora press and a folder of NKVD filtration reports in Riga, this book explains why these men were there and what happened to those who survived.

The author crosses modern Berlin, pinpointing the exact streets where the Latvians fought, matching eyewitness accounts from the combat eighty years ago to what is there now. From their base in Jägerstrasse, they fought alongside the Spanish Ezquerra Battalion, and the combat memories of their commander, Miguel Ezquerra, are also featured through collaboration with Spanish historian Eduardo Gil Martinez.

Sent to Die in Berlin brings the voices of men forgotten by history into the story of Hitler’s last desperate days.