In March 2017 the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Arenberg Foundation organised a seminar on “Armed Resistance in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1956” at the Karl von Vogelsang Institute in Vienna.
In my view this was the first time that so many researchers from so many countries of the former so called Eastern Bloc had lectured together on this subject. The conference provided the Republic of Austria with yet another opportunity to play its traditional role as a bridge.
Thanks to the exemplary commitment of Professor Michael Gehler and Dr. David Schriffl we have now succeeded, after three years of hard work, in producing an anthology of almost all the contributions to the seminar. The result is a book with 471 printed pages and 16 maps.
This publication documents the dramatic fate of the resistance movements in Eastern Europe.
In the West, 1945 signified the end of a terrible global conflict, which caused at least sixty million deaths.
In the East, 1945 signified the beginning of armed resistance against Soviet oppression, wherever such resistance was possible.
In the Ukraine, the vast forests, the looting of Soviet weapons during the retreat of the Red Army in 1941 and the support of the Germans enabled Ukrainian nationalists to deploy immediately and continue their bloody struggle, which only came to an end with the arrest of the final partisans in 1960.
Poland was home to the “cursed soldiers”, who continued their hopeless fight against Soviet supremacy into the 1960s.
In the Baltic Countries and, in particular, Latvia, many Balts fought alongside the Germans and were integrated into such units as the Latvian Division of the Waffen SS.
After the capitulation of the Courland Pocket on 8th May 1945, the nationalists refused to give up the fight and hid in the huge forests, where they waged a terrible and merciless partisan war with unbelievable courage to the bitter end, initially in larger units and then, from the 1950s, in smaller groups of five to ten men.
August Sabbe, who was probably the final Estonian Forest Brother, died during an attempt by two KGB agents to arrest him on 27th September 1978.
In Romania, the anti-communist partisans primarily holed themselves up in the Carpathians, where the final resistance fighter was reportedly only shot dead in 1976.
In Bulgaria, the Goryani hid and fought in the Balkan and the Rhodope Mountains.
The most important questions that we asked ourselves were the following:
How was it possible that so many Western Europeans had absolutely no idea of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War?
Was the Iron Curtain responsible for this lack of knowledge?
Or was it simply a lack of interest in our Central and Eastern European cousins or, worse still, in human fate?
How was it possible for these freedom fighters/terrorists/rebels/heroes to hold out for so long against Soviet superiority without help from the Free World?
How did the logistics work?
How and why did they get support from the civil population for this long and hopeless struggle?
And last but not least, what is the reason for the Arenberg Foundation’s interest in this tragic chapter in the history of Central and Eastern Europe?
In the early 1990s I was travelling with an acquaintance in the City of Vilnius when we saw a large number of people in uniform standing in front of a building. Our curiosity had been awakened and we hurried inside. We established that the building, which had just been opened to the public, was a former KGB facility. To our astonishment we discovered lots of plastic bags containing torn up documents, a horrendous prison cell and a torture chamber with blood-spattered walls and many photographs.
These photographs attested to the fate suffered by the ‘Forest Brethren’ who fell into the hands of the henchmen of the KGB. Until the late 1950s, the partisans were hunted like game, shot and tortured. On top of this, their corpses were sometimes mutilated and photographed with pride, like hunting trophies.
At that moment I promised to myself that I would document the fate of these individuals and contribute to correcting the lack of knowledge in Western Europe about this episode.
Almost thirty years later this wish has become reality thanks to the excellent cooperation with the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research in Vienna. In this respect I am extremely grateful to Dr. Schriffl, who has brought this splendid project to a successful conclusion.
The Arenberg Foundation www.arenbergfoundation.eu is a completely independent foundation that stands for the promotion of history and culture, in a European spirit, in line with the maxim ‘they, who know nothing, must believe everything’.
In my opinion there are many more projects that we could realise together in order to offer Western Central and Eastern Europeans the opportunity to become better informed about, and to better appreciate, their respective histories, and each other.
Duke of Arenberg
Pully, 20th February 2020