"Dueling Diasporas: Latvians and Jews in the Aftermath of the Holocaust"

Harry Merritt, Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Holocaust Studies, University of Vermont

During World War II, Latvia was alternatingly occupied by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. These occupying powers committed many atrocities, most notably a Soviet mass deportation of political opponents and supposed “socially harmful elements” to Siberia and the Nazi mass murder of Latvian Jews in the Holocaust. After the war, many ethnic Latvian refugees and Jewish Latvian survivors both found themselves in the United States, where these diasporas entered into an acrimonious relationship over history, politics, and conflicting ideas of postwar justice, climaxing with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) campaign to denaturalize and deport accused Latvian Nazi collaborators in the 1980s. Fundamentally, each group saw themselves as victims and the other as perpetrators. This talk explores the origins of these beliefs, analyzes the persistence of tropes such as Judeo-Bolshevism and narratives of competitive victimhood, and points to the necessity for historical contextualization as necessary for both justice and reconciliation.

Harry C. Merritt is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of History and Miller Center for Holocaust Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2020. His book, Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Harry’s work has also been published in the Journal of Modern European History and the Journal of Baltic Studies, as well as a chapter in the 2022 book, Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics (Central European University Press).