On April 30, 1945, Hitler took his own life in Berlin. The capital surrendered on May 2nd. Breslau fell to the Red Army on May 6th after a brutal three-month siege. On May 7th, German General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel repeated the ceremony in Berlin the next day.
And yet, in a remote pocket of land on the Baltic coast, nearly 190,000 German soldiers did not surrender until May 10th. This is the story of Hitler’s forgotten army and the battle for Courland. The region, known in Latvian as Kurzeme, had been part of independent Latvia after World War I. In 1940, the Soviets occupied and annexed it.
In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany drove them out, and Latvia became part of the German-occupied Reichskommissariat Ostland. The war returned to Latvia in July 1944 with Operation Bagration, a massive Soviet offensive aimed at reaching the Baltic Sea and cutting off the entire German Army Group North. The plan unfolded quickly. Vilnius fell on July 13th.
By July 19th, Soviet troops crossed into eastern Latvia near Daugavpils. Then, on July 30th, Soviet forces reached the coast near Tukums. If that gap held, it would be disaster for the Germans. Their land connection to the Reich would be severed, and their forces would lose access to vital ports like Liepāja and Ventspils.
The Germans launched a frantic counterattack and retook Tukums, but its brief fall had already revealed a grim truth. During the short Soviet occupation, civilians were shot, women were assaulted, and anyone suspected of collaborating with the Germans was executed without mercy. The people of Latvia now knew exactly what awaited them if the Red Army returned for good. Fighting raged across the region.
Latvian units fought fiercely alongside the Germans, reinforced by new recruits, holding the line step by step as they retreated toward their final stronghold: Courland. By September 26th, with the Red Army less than 50 kilometers from Riga, German General Ferdinand Schörner ordered an evacuation. Equipment and installations were hastily moved west into Kurzeme. But Soviet pressure never stopped.
In a brutal assault on Klaipėda, known as Memel, they tried again to reach the coast. On October 10th, the decisive moment came. The Red Army reached the Baltic Sea near Palanga. The land connection to Germany was severed for good.
Stalin announced the achievement that same day and declared the final offensive on Riga underway. Rather than fight to the last man for the capital, the Germans chose to withdraw. On October 12th, retreating units blew up the two main bridges over the Daugava River in a massive explosion. It delayed the Soviets, but it also sealed the fate of tens of thousands of Latvian civilians who were left with no escape route as they fled the advancing Red Army.
The German forces were now trapped on the western coast of Kurzeme, still holding the vital ports of Liepāja and Ventspils. Hitler declared the region an impregnable fortress: Festung Kurland. With their backs to the icy waters of the Baltic and a frontline stretching roughly 170 kilometers, the defenders dug in across forests, marshlands, and cities. They built layered defensive positions across an area of about 14,200 square kilometers.
Inside the pocket were around 400,000 German, Latvian, and foreign troops, along with 230,000 civilians and approximately 150,000 refugees. Their only connection to the outside world ran through the ports. Across the front lines stood roughly 429,000 Soviet soldiers. German command initially planned to hold out while evacuating as many troops and officials as possible by sea to Königsberg and Danzig.
But Hitler intervened with a far more ambitious plan. He wanted Courland to serve as a launchpad for a new offensive, an Ardennes-style operation on the Eastern Front. It was pure illusion. Germany no longer had the resources.
Defending Courland was all that remained. And defend it they did. Between October 1944 and March 1945, the Soviets launched six major offensives against the pocket. The third, in December 1944, was the most devastating.
Stalin had expected victory within weeks, but German resistance proved far tougher than anticipated. Soviet losses mounted, and a strict news blackout was imposed to protect morale. Only after the final collapse in May 1945 did the world learn what had happened there. The German forces in Courland were not alone.
Around 10,000 Latvian troops of the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS fought alongside them, as well as volunteers from Scandinavia and ethnic Germans from across Europe. But tensions grew. Unlike the Germans, many Latvians were fighting for their homeland. They had joined the Germans out of hatred for Soviet rule, but they soon realized independence would never come under Nazi domination.
Latvia itself was slated for German colonization. On both sides of the front, Latvians faced each other in battle. In some sectors, fighting simply stopped. Desertion and refusal to fight became increasingly common.
Life for civilians varied dramatically. In rural areas, survival was possible. Near the front, it was total devastation. In the ports, supplies still arrived, but so did bombs.
Refugees flooded the cities, and aid organizations collapsed under the strain. For many, escape was the only hope: after the war, small fishing boats bound for Sweden. The Germans held out for over six months. Not just because of their position, but because many of these soldiers had been fighting since 1941.
They believed they were buying time, holding back the Soviet forces from Germany itself. As the Red Army pushed into Germany, units were gradually evacuated from Courland. But by the spring of 1945, even the evacuation routes collapsed as key ports fell. The end came with Germany’s surrender on May 8th.
But Courland, cut off from communication, did not receive the orders until May 10th. It became one of the last German formations to surrender in Europe. The cost was staggering. Around 117,000 German and 90,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.
Nearly 189,000 Germans were taken prisoner. Many would not return home until the early 1950s, some not until 1955. Even after the surrender, fighting continued in the forests. German stragglers and anti-Soviet resistance fighters, known as the Forest Brothers, carried on guerrilla warfare for years.
For them, the war did not end in 1945. For the German soldiers who surrendered in the pocket, the end of the war marked the beginning of a long ordeal. While many German POWs in the west returned home relatively quickly, the Courland fighters disappeared into the Soviet system. They were marched east or transported in overcrowded freight trains to labor camps.
Many ended up in the infamous Gulag. Forced into brutal labor in mines, forests, and construction projects, they faced starvation, disease, and exhaustion. Many did not survive the first winters. Repatriation was slow.
The first group returned around 1947–1948, but most only came home in the early 1950s. The last survivors were not released until 1955, following a diplomatic visit by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Moscow. A notable moment of surrender had already taken place earlier. On May 4th, 1945, at Lüneburg Heath, the first major regional capitulation had been signed, paving the way for Germany’s final surrender.
I visited that site in Germany a few years ago and made a video about it. But the story of Courland remains one of the strangest of the war: an isolated fortress that held long after everything else had fallen, a forgotten army that only learned of the end two days late.
