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Paula Oppermann, "Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, my name is Roland Clark and I'm here today on the New Books Network talking to Paola Opperman about her new book, Thunder Cross, fascist antisemitism in 20th century Latvia. Paola is a researcher at the Historische Commissionsuberlin and her work has appeared in Simon Peripheral Histories, Quest and elsewhere. Thanks. Welcome to the program, Paola.
- [01:30]
C
Hi, Roland. Thank you so much for inviting me.
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B
Paola. This book's about a movement called the Thunder Cross and the subtitle describes it as Fascist antisemitism. But that's not how they describe themselves, is it? Before we get into the story of the movement, can you situate them a bit vis a vis what we know about European fascism in the 1930s? How would they have described themselves?
- [01:53]
C
Yeah, so Thunder Cross was founded actually as an organization that was called Firecross in 1932. So 1932, obviously, is maybe what we can call a peak of fascist movements at the time. I mean, if you look at Italy, where Mussolini has been in power for 10 years, you have Germany, where the Nazi party is shortly before taking power in Germany. But then you also have many other countries from smaller ones like Finland, where you already have a quite long established, if you want to call it fascist movement, of course. Also Romania, where you have a fascist Also really anti Semitic organization. So it is something that, although maybe in detail, all these organizations are different. They share quite a lot of commonalities and particularly they terrorize the streets of Europe. Right. So this is the setting that we have in 1932 when these men gather to found the Latvian fascist organization. But then this organization also has its own roots in earlier movements in Latvia. It is kind of a unification, maybe you can say, of these splinter groups, which before I think they were never really able to organize in one big group. But also these really early radical right wing movements that you have in latvia in the 1920s, they are already really strongly influenced and also really impressed, I would say, by particularly Italian fascism. So if you read their newspapers, you can see they love the style. They really admire the school that the Italians are building around Mussolini. They really like the architecture and this authorian order that they see that is being established in Italy. They also love these pseudo ancient symbols and of course the violence that is happening there. And what they also are, I think, really influenced by is maybe something that you can call a fascist ideology. So I mean, I don't really want to get into this question of what fascism is too deeply, because I mean there are numbers of books and we could probably make a podcast about this on our own, but maybe we can put the theory about all this to the Latvian example. And I guess one of the most important features is this core fascism where you have this idea and demand to create what they call the new man. So this idea that you had once an ancient very tribe that then was destroyed by modernity, you know, all these nasty things that modernity brought, capitalism, feminism, liberalism, this is all something that, that the fascists absolutely abhorred and they wanted to, to reemerge or go back to these, yeah, ancient glorified tribes that they, that they thought were, were just pure and, and, and, and good. And then they wanted to create, based on this, a new society that would be based on everything, that modernity was not so absolutely anti liberal sexist being ruled by a dictatorship. And all this was something that Thunder Cross absolutely embraced. So they really thought that once there was this pure ancient Latvian tribes and these were destroyed also by, by mixing with other races, particularly with Jews and to. To kind of revive this pure Latvian ness, you had to create a revolution. You had to, you had to go into war. Like they really glorified war and violence and to then come back to this and then to create of course, a dictatorship, because only a dictator could unite the people. And this people was not Like a nation as you would find it in 1920s-30s Latvia as it was, but it was supposed to be a homogenous community. So Thundercross slogan was also Latvia for Latvians. And excuse me, and this brings us to this other kind of paradoxical thing that you noted, that they claimed they were not fascists. And I think why that was, I think you have to go into the kind of demographic situation that you have in latvia in the 1930s that might not be so familiar to Everybody. So in 1932, when Thunder Cross was established, as I noted, the Nazi party in Germany was really quite powerful. And all these features that Thunder Cross emerged or embraced, like the leadership cult and the uniforms and the violence, the racism. Of course, all these people in Latvia knew from the German Nazis, but Germans were extremely unpopular in Latvia at the time. And this is because the region of what we today know as Latvia and also Estonia, it was since the Middle Ages ruled by various powers. And all this time there had been a German speaking upper class that dominated the majority society. So the Latvian speaking people, who were mostly peasants, and then in 1918, Latvia declared independence. But this German speaking group, which we can refer to as the Baltic Germans, they remained really influential and a lot of Latvians did not like that. So I think this environment that we have in Latvia in the early 1930s is very anti German. So it would not have been really practical for the fascists, for the Latvian fascists to look like a junior partner of Hitler and his movement. So there was actually this one Latvian fascist party who tried this and tried to kind of propagate cooperation with Nazi Germany, and they failed miserably. So it just wasn't a thing that worked with Latvian society. So there was the one thing that they kind of propagated to the society. But of course, like internally, they were absolutely impressed with the Nazis and also with Mussolini. And they clearly saw themselves as part of this bigger movement of fascists that was emerging all over Europe at the time. So I think this is why they embraced all these visual features like the uniforms and the violence and all these things, but also the fascist ideology. And maybe at a last point to make this visible is the Thunder Cross symbol that they had on their flag, for example. So it's a version of two crosses, let's say, which are both symbols of the Latvian folklore. But one of them is also the swastika. It's the fire cross, but it is also clearly a swastika. And I am absolutely sure that this was not no coincidence that they had this symbol that was absolutely clearly referred to to be the symbol of the German Nazis in their own symbol as well.
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B
But then there's still deniability because, oh, it's a Latvian cross.
- [08:55]
C
Exactly. Yes.
- [08:57]
B
And alongside fascism, you've got the anti Semitism. So Latvia declared independence in 1920, then 1918, then they fought a war of independence from 1918 to 1920, and it adopts its constitution in 1922. But you argue that antisemitism was already intimately mixed up with Latvian nationalism by this point, is that right?
- [09:21]
C
Yes, I would say so. I mean, if we compare Latvia to other parts of Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe at the time, of course, the level of antisemitism is a completely different one. So if we look back into the 19th century or earlier, there was no large scale physical violence in the region of like today, Latvia and Estonia, as you, for example, see in today's Ukraine. So the level is absolutely different. But I would still emphasize that antisemitism was not absent. And I tried to kind of figure out where the roots are and what it then meant for 1920s, 30s Latvia. And I think one of the important points is that the roots are in the Latvian nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century. I mean, the 19th century is the century of nationalism in various European countries. And most of the Latvian nationalists at that time were not explicitly antisemitic or not anti Semitic at all. But it is important that the Latvian form of nationalism was specific. For example, in France, at least in theory, and ideally, the nation was more defined by the territory that people shared. And with Latvian nationalism, similar, a little bit like the German one, everything was much more focused on ethnic belonging. And this, from the very beginning, I think, created this differentiation between the groups that all shared their country, but not the ethnicity. And this of course distinguished also between Jews and non Jews. And this then opened the door for those who saw Jews not only different, but as enemies. And what in the Latvian case is really important is that these men, I think, at least in the beginning, they were only men who spread this really anti Semitic propaganda. Early on, like around the turn of the century, they were really respected public figures. Even if not everybody agreed with them, they were not, let's say, outsiders in their environment. And then if we then look at this specific context that I was talking about, about the Baltic Germans that you have in Latvia, this is something that also plays into this whole debate, because these early anti Semites that you have in Latvia at the turn of the century, they already made quite an interesting distinction, I think. So of course, they didn't like the Germans, mostly for economic reasons, because they were so powerful and they were seen to kind of exploit the poor Latin peasants. But then the Jews, they saw from the very beginning kind of more as an existential threat to the whole Latvian culture. And then after World War I and the Russian Revolution, things got even more heated because then Jews were blamed for communism and the bloodshed of revolution. And this particular image of Jews as Bolsheviks was really essential for the Latvian politicians at the time, and then later on also for Thunder Cross members. And as I said, these guys, they didn't work like in a. In a vacuum, because there were actually quite a lot of politicians also, I don't know if you can call them media magnates maybe, and public intellectuals who gave the floor to these radical voices. So, for example, they hired them as journalists so that they then could write articles and spread it all over the country in newspapers. And I think these enablers, as you may want to call them, are quite important because they show that maybe really strong antisemitism was not something that. That was a mainstream opinion, but it was accepted by the mainstream. And. And this is, this is the first, I think, important thing to kind of remember. And then it goes on and this whole antisemitism becomes not only a theoretical debates among politicians, but then you also have radical right wing organizations that actually engage in antisemitic street violence, for example, already in 1922. So we have this Latvian National Club, which is a rather, really small organization, but it was very, very anti Semitic. And its violence got as far that at some point one person was killed. And this is the organization where many future Thundercross men gained their first political experience.
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B
But it's not only activists and politicians who are anti Semites at this time, though, is it? What role does anti Semitism play in the universities?
- [13:54]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think anti Semitism was really present in various spheres of society. Again, if you look at it, the climate was not like in Poland or Ukraine at the time. But for example, when you listen to interviews with Jewish survivors of the Shoah who grew up in Latvia in the interwar period, nearly all of them mentioned some kind of experience with antisemitism. So sometimes it was harassment on the way to school, they were being called names, they were ordered to go to Palestine because Jews were not loyal to the Latvian state, things like that. So it was prevalent in various spheres. But then, yes, there was this one group where antisemitic ideas kind of resonated particularly well, and those were the universities and the University students. And the driving factor here were the fraternities, which have a lot of influence at the University of Latvia at the time. The fraternities are interesting because they are actually older than the University of Latvia itself. So you had Latvian students before the foundation of the Latvian state, who would study, let's say, in Russia and St. Petersburg, or they studied in Dorpat, which is today Tattoo, in Estonia. And they were organized in these fraternities, which were organized along these ethnic lines that I mentioned earlier. So again, ethnic belonging was a really strong kind of feature of identification for these members. And then once the University of Latvia was created, you have these fraternities for German members, you have Jewish fraternities, and you have Latvian fraternities. And, yeah, this nationalism was really important for them. For example, you also had Latvian sororities, so fraternities for women, if you want to say it like this. And some of them even prohibited their members from marrying Jews. So you see how embedded this is already. I mean, not all of the fraternities were anti Semitic. There were also those that were not. But this was the overall tone, if you want to call it like this. And then they even went further. So it was not just an internal thing to say, yeah, tell your members not to marry Jews, but also kind of external. And the best example is December 1922, when suddenly large groups of students started to block Jewish students from entering the university buildings. And then they were singing all these anti Semitic songs, and they harassed them and actually attacked the Jewish students. And these riots went on and on for weeks and actually months. And then the next year, you had a march that was organized by the fraternities of 3,000 people who demonstrated against Jews on campus. So that's quite a number, right? You also had fraternity members who wrote letters to the university council demanding, like, a quota for Jewish students, so to limit the number of Jewish students at the university. And they collected signatures for that, and they actually got quite a lot of signatures. So this is also something where you can see how prevalent this whole topic was at the university. And what is interesting about this 1922 incident is that it was not limited to the Latvian university, but actually in that same year, there were anti Semitic riots at universities all over Europe. So in a sense, it is like. Like a domino effect, maybe. And in fact, I think there was one of the. I think he was the organizer or one definitely, he participated in the riots in. In Jasi, I hope I pronounced that correctly, in Romania. And then he wrote an article for a Latvian student magazine. So you see, it's not only the ideas that travel, but also the people within it. They influence each other beyond boundaries. I think that's really fascinating.
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B
Yeah, it's really interesting. The first big fascist movement in Latvia, the Fire Cross that you mentioned, is founded by a man named Gustav Zelmins, who had been one of these antisemitic student activists that you're talking about. Why does he decide to establish the Fire Cross?
- [18:03]
C
Well, I think there were several factors. Maybe we can understand them better if we look into his biography. So Zeminsch was born in Riga in 1899. He came from a quite well of family. His father was really active in the Lutheran Church. And Szeminch fought then in this Latvian War of Independence that you mentioned. After World War I, he studied philosophy and economics at the University of Latvia. He was, of course, a fraternity member. He also joined veterans organizations, so veterans of this War of independence. So he had kind of his foot into many doors, so to say. And one was also one of the quite, well, yeah, reactionary nationalist parties that were active in latvia in the 1920s. The Nationala Abweniba, the National Union. And this party was at the time really home to all the leading nationalists, but it was not very successful in elections. And this is, I think, the turning point where Semin at some point realizes, okay, we don't get very far with this party, and I want to create a mass movement maybe also influenced by what was happening in the rest of Europe, seeing that other fascists were actually creating this, that he thought, okay, we have to address other parts than just the intellectual circles. And this is then why he and about 50 other men gathered in 1932 and then established this cultural organization that they called Ugenskrust, which means Fire Cross. But initially he was not foreseen as being the leader. So when they gathered, it wasn't clear yet, but I still haven't figured out why exactly. But it seems he really had some qualities to convince people that he was the right person to be a leader. He must have had really good talking skills, because he really convinced people that he was the right person to do this also later in his life. And they even established quite a cult around his person in the following years. So this is how he then became the leader.
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B
So one of their main propaganda outlets is a magazine called Ugunkrust. What sorts of articles appear in this magazine?
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C
Yeah, I think the magazine is really a great source to understand the fascists, how they tried to sell their ideology. And it was one, one of the main Sources that I used for, for my book, maybe, maybe to kind of situate it in, in. In the whole thing. It had between 8,000 and 15,000 subscribers. And this is I think an important number because we don't have membership numbers of Ugunskrust. So this number gives us an idea of how big the follower the group of followers was or the group of supporters. And if you look at it, 15,000 people. Even for a country like Latvia, where you have 2 million inhabitants, it's really not much. So you can see Siemens really wanted to create this mass movement, but it didn't become a mass movement. And still they managed to really shape the debates and politics and in society. And I think it was particularly with the help of this magazine. And so the magazine was published weekly and it always kind of had the same structure. So first of all there were always really long treaties on ideological questions which were I think most of the time extremely boring and very complicated. And I read somewhere that people just didn't really understand much of this. But yeah, just read on. It is interesting. We don't know who wrote these articles because none of them were signed, but it's pretty sure that same INS had a hand in this. But then there is another section that is interesting about local activities of firecross members all over Latvia. And this was really important for me because the organization was founded in Riga and the founding members mostly all came from urban, more or less intellectual circles. But then really quickly you have branches all over the country. So even if these branches sometimes only are like two to three people, but they are active all over the country. And these, these reports in the newspaper really show what they were doing so that they went hunting together or that they held some sports events and things like that. So this is what you can read in the, in the paper as well. And then you have reports about domestic and foreign politics. And these, you can really see those about Latvia. It's mostly accusations against Jews having done something terrible to Latvians, like Jewish shop owners who weren't really nice to the people who worked there. Or then there was like orders to Latvian women not to buy in Jewish shops and things like that. And then the stuff about the, the events outside of Latvia was also mostly either about Jews, like about anti Jewish demonstrations somewhere in Ukraine, or then you also have information about anti Semitic parties that for example, were opened in Argentina or something. So quite sometimes a bit random it feels. But so whenever there was something that was going on in the world of anti Semite, so to say, then the magazine would report about it. So when I read the periodical, I felt like, okay, nearly everything here is about Jews. And now that we are speaking about the book, it doesn't sound very surprising. But while I was doing the research, there was quite some literature about Thunder Cross that argued that because of this historical background that I was talking about, that the Latvian fascists actually really hated the Germans more than they hated the Jews. So thinking about this, I conducted a quantitative analysis of the articles and it was as I said, in fact, that the absolute majority of articles was explicitly about Jews, and actually only a handful was about Baltic Germans. So I found that really quite interesting. And then what I also could trace with this analysis was not that just Jews were presented in a bad way, obviously, but also how they were presented. And I think this really shows something about the image that the Thunder Cross members had of Jews. So when we think about how Jews are presented, like in the last centuries, there's this idea that Jews silently rule the world, right? And that they own all the media and that they are rich and influential. And then after the Russian Revolution, there's this idea that they are behind communism, they are behind the revolution. And this is exactly something that you see in the Ugonskrust magazine. So this, on the one hand, you have the image of a Jew as a rich factory owner who exploits Latvians. And this is the image that was really common in Latvian society. So this is something that they, they wrote obviously to attract the Latvian readership. But then the, the analysis really showed that also from the very beginning, they even more depicted Jews as the face of communism or the face of the Soviet Union. And this is important, I think, because there is this idea that antisemitism was imported to Latvia in 1940 when the Soviets came. And I mean, of course it wasn't, but these statistics really show it that this idea of the Jew as the Bolshevik was very present in latvia long before 1940.
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B
So the far Cross doesn't just use magazines, though, they also use violence quite often. Can you tell us about the pogrom at the football stadium in 1932?
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C
Yes, sure. I think this is one of the events. Like when you come across them, as a historian, you think, why did I not know about this earlier? Or why is it not much more known in general? Because I think it is really something that tells you something about the Latvian society at the time. So what happened? It was 11th of September 1932, and there was a football match in Riga between the football club Hakua. It was the second most popular Jewish team at the time next to Maccabi. And on the other hand, there was the sports club of the university. And this sports club of the university actually consisted of quite a lot of fraternity members. And they were known to be, well, let's say, not necessarily friends of Jews. So this was already kind of a heated thing that these two clubs met. They actually had held previous games that season because they were playing on a very equal level. And the match on that day was to decide whether they would or who would enter the next level in the league. So there was really something to fight for. And already before, there had been violent encounters between the fans of the two teams. And on that day, the police were so aware that the atmosphere was so heated that they stationed extra personnel around the stadium and in the stadium. And then already during the match, things got really turbulent. So several times there were fans who entered the pitch and attacked the Jewish players. And then Hakua won 2 to 1. And then the chaos really began. So it really. People jumped on the pitch, and the police had to escort the Jewish players to the changing rooms because. Yeah, because they were just being threatened. And then at the same time, you have a group of approximately 500 people who gather in front of the stadium and then march to the city center. And they march, they. They sing antisemitic songs, they threaten people on the street. They actually smashed shop windows. And if you think about it, 500 people is not a small crowd. So imagining that in the center of a European capital on a. I think it was a Sunday afternoon in broad daylight. So this must have made quite an impression, both on people who were onlookers, but of course, also on the Jewish inhabitants of the city. And the mob was really quite aggressive, and it took the police a long time to dissolve them. So this is, I think, in itself a quite important incident. But what was, for me, interesting was that some of the sources mention that several of these, well, demonstrators or rioters, they waived copies of the Ugunsklust magazine that we've just been talking about. So I checked that particular issue of the magazine, and it had several articles about Jews in sports, and it basically called for violence against Jewish sportsmen. So I think it is quite an impressive example of how words actually can turn into action, and that the Latvian fascists were really involved in this. And then maybe. Maybe to give you another example of how they applied violence, because they also did not only apply physical violence, but also something that maybe you can call psychological violence. So there was this one week in April 1934, where they organized something that they called the Week of Assault. That. And it was like really an orchestrated action where you had, all over Latvia, Thunder Cross men who gathered at night, disseminated leaflets, but also wrote huge, large slogans on pavements and houses, specifically at synagogues or at houses where they knew that there were Jews living. And they wrote things like death to the Jews or we want to cleanse our village from the Jews. And this really must have been quite threatening for the people living there. And actually, I found some interviews, interviews with survivors of the Shoah, and they actually recalled these slogans that were written in front of their houses in the 1930s. So you can see that there were kind of various kinds of violence that the fascists used against their victims at the time.
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B
Yeah, it makes sense that the Fire Cross was banned at the beginning of 1933, after actually not very long. How did some INS respond to that?
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C
Yeah, so at the time, as you noted, Latvia was a liberal democracy. So obviously, with actions like this pogrom and all this aggressive propaganda, they really were threatening the democratic order. They also constantly attacked parliamentarism and said that it wasn't working and things like that. So this is why they were banned. But Semin kind of had been prepared for this, and he was. I mean, he was a smart guy. So they used loopholes in the legal system, and he simply registered a new organization. It was a political party that he registered this time. So before, Ugensklos had been a cultural organization. Now he registered a party and called it Perkonkrust. So Thunder Cross. So, I mean, even the name was very similar. And actually everything else also remained the same. So the leadership remained exactly the same. They gathered at the same places. Also, their magazine continued to be published just now under the name Thunder Cross, but it was absolutely the same thing. And of course, the authorities also were not stupid. They knew exactly what was going on. But for the time being, they couldn't really stop it. And all they could do is to continue and monitor the fascists. And this is, in a way, our luck today as historians, because we have a lot of surveillance reports from the police which we can use today.
- [32:12]
B
These sound like pretty horrible guys. Did most people in Latvia disapprove of the Thunder Cross, or were they seen as a fairly respectable movement?
- [32:22]
C
Well, on the one hand, there was certainly a lot of disapproval, particularly, of course, from the political left. So Social Democratic politicians, for example, they really fiercely argued in parliament sessions and argued that the fascists should be banned and limited in their activities. So this was Really a big debate. And then also particularly young socialists were fighting with the Thunderclass members in the streets, and things got pretty violent. So there were a lot of attacks against or between these two groups. So there was definitely a lot of disapproval then. I'm sure there were also people who, as you always have them, right? People who disliked the fascists but didn't really give them much thought. And then there were those who rather supported them openly, like these intellectuals I was talking about, who gave these guys jobs or funded the organization. One important figure was also the lawyer who represented them in court sessions. Right? He was a really prominent public figure, and he chose to represent the fascists. But this is kind of. These are individual, prominent examples. But I think also in the broader society, I think there was at least some acknowledgment because, for example, there was this popular cafe in Riga downtown, which was sometimes even called something like Thundercross second headquarters. And Siemens would go there nearly every day, and he had his designated table, and he sat there and drank coffee, read newspapers and held audiences, so to say. And the owner of that restaurant, for example, gave special prizes to members of the Thunder Cross. And they met there in public without anyone objecting, also after the organization was banned. So they definitely did not have to hide.
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B
What role do women play in the movement? Is this all just a boys club?
- [34:17]
C
That is a very interesting question. So Tseminch apparently initially was absolutely not keen to have women in the organization. I mean, he was a pretty conservative person, and I think he wanted to see women mostly as mothers and housewives. And this is also the image that the fascists kind of portrayed in their propaganda, where they have this image of women as raising children, obviously producing a lot of Latvian children to kind of help the Latvian race to survive. And then, of course, these wives to be obedient and support their husbands. But the thing was that apparently there were quite a lot of women, despite this, I think, quite nasty image that the fascists propagated, wanted to be part of this movement. And so they founded a women's section. And most of the time, these female members, they kind of met for tea afternoons and rather, let's say, unpolitical activities. They, for example, prepared meals when Thundercross men had their meetings. But sometimes there were also Thunderclass leaders who came to these meetings of the women and gave lectures about ideological questions. So in that sense, the women were also being seen as part of this, well, maybe you can call it race war, something where they are aware that they are not just raising children to raise children. But that they are actually participating in creating this new Latvian race. And then there were also some individual women who were actually much more involved than just cooking or raising children. So some of them, for example, they smuggled notes from and to imprisoned members. When the leadership was imprisoned in 34, like afterwards, they would. Yeah, they would smuggle these notes. Some also gave refuge to members who were on the run from the police. And so in that sense, they really did much more than just cooking. So within the boundaries that they had within the fascist movement, they were quite involved.
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B
So you said the Fire Cross is banned fairly quickly, and then the Thunder Cross doesn't last long either, because they're banned in August 1933 as well. Why did that happen?
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C
Yeah, I mean, the reasons were quite similar as when they were banned in the first place, but this time the authorities were really more thorough and they didn't leave as many loopholes. So Tzemis then tried the same thing again and to re. Establish or establish a new organization. But this time it really wasn't as successful as with Thundercross. They also tried to hijack some veterans organization and sports clubs, but it definitely was much more difficult for them to gain ground. And I think this is also then, of course, because then you have May 1934 and the coup d', etat, and then particularly summer 1934, where most of the Thunder Cross leadership, including Samins, are arrested and imprisoned. And this, of course, makes any activity quite difficult at that point.
- [37:33]
B
So once they're illegal, how do Thunder Cross members do propaganda?
- [37:37]
C
Yeah, so, I mean, of course there was then no magazine anymore. They still disseminated leaflets. They also wrote some illegal newspapers, but of course they didn't have the same range of readers that they had before. But then they also found other ways. I mean, this week of assault that I talked about earlier, where they wrote these large slogans on the pavements, this was, of course, also a way to communicate to society, like, say, look, we're still here. You can't silence us. Actually, I found an interview with. With a former Thundercross man that he gave in the early 2000s, where he remembered that he had participated in this week of assault. And he remembered that at the morning people would go to work, and you still saw these pavement slogans everywhere. So this is also a way of communication, if you want to say. So then they continued to meet very openly in this cafe that I mentioned, and nobody really seemed to be trouble. And then there was another important connection, which was with the churches. So, as I said, Saeminch came from A Lutheran background. And actually Christianity was really important for him and also for many of his followers. And already when they were legal, the members would go to church services together. There were also priests who were members of Thunderclross. And this became then important when the organization was banned because some of those priests then open church premises where the fascists could meet in secrecy. Then there were also some who held services in honor of Thunder Cross leaders who were in prison. So basically the Lutheran Church provided the fascists with infrastructure and also in a sense, with prestige. And then there was next to the Christian church, there was also the neo pagan movement that was quite active in Latvia at the time it was founded in the 1920s. And some of the important figures in that movement were also really close to Zalminch. And then after Thunder Cross was banned, the followers also found refuge within these neo pagan circles. Actually, I found some sources which said that they supported them. For example, that they gave them a space where they can use a printing machine so that they could print their leaflets. It is quite interesting or quite important to note though that ideologically, or maybe that's not the right word, but when it comes to religion, the fascists were much closer to Lutheranism than they were to the neo pagan beliefs. You would think that because they had all these folkish ideas and they used all these like ancient symbols from Latvian folklore, that they would really embrace this neo pagan movement, but they actually didn't like, particularly for salmon, Christianity played a much more important role and particularly also then during and after World War II. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas. There's a song in every toast.
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C
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- [41:37]
B
So in 1934, the Prime Minister Carles Ulmanis, he abolishes democracy and rules as dictator until mid 1940. What was his attitude toward the Thunder Cross?
- [41:48]
C
Yeah, Ulman is an interesting character. So he had been one of the founding fathers of the independent state of Latvia. In 1918, he was the head of the Union of the Latvian Farmers, which was one of the biggest parties in the country. And you can call him a conservative, a nationalist certainly, but he was not a fascist, I would argue. But what was happening, particularly after 1929, was because of the world economic crisis and all that misery that then came with it, that people really started to become very unsatisfied with the political system. And they blamed also Ulmanis for them for that. And then Thunder Cross used this for their own kind of narrative and claimed that all these political debates and everything would simply slow down the process of decision making. So then there's Olmanis, who is in power and had been in power for quite some years and had been really popular in the Latvian society. But at this point this image kind of crumbles and he feels that he has to do something. And what he does is he jumps onto that wagon, in a sense of what the fascists are claiming, and also demands a stronger presidential position and to weaken parliament and things like that. So in a way, it's what you also can see today when you have these radical right voices and their narratives are being picked up by conservatives because they hope that in that way they can save the situation. And it clearly doesn't work. But here in May 1934, then Ulmanis decides to take it to the next step and conduct a coup. So did he conduct the coup because of Thunder Cross? I wouldn't say so. I mean, we already have discussed that Zeminsh, I mean, he could count on support from various strata of society. But still the fascists were a rather small group. They had never participated in elections, and the polls said that they would gain some ground, but they definitely wouldn't have won a majority. So this was certainly not the only reason. And what is interesting in that context is what happened then directly after the coup, because Ulman is then had several politicians arrested, but none of them were fascists. It was mostly social democrats. Actually, there were rumors that Ulmanis wanted to cooperate with Samin in the beginning, but Samminch as the person he was, he had no interest in that. And then after a couple of weeks, Seminch actually really turned his propaganda against Ulmanis and became really aggressive towards him. And this is then only when Ulmanis changes So to say changes his mind. And in summer 34 then arrested Zeminsch and a lot of the other Thunder Cross leaders.
- [44:43]
B
So Tilmins is eventually released from prison in 1937, and he immediately leaves the country on a tour of Europe. What sorts of people did he meet on his travels?
- [44:53]
C
Yeah, thank you for asking about this, because it was. While I did the research, I think this was one of my favorite parts because it's just so interesting where he travels and all the people that he meets. So yeah, he was obliged to leave Latvia in 1937 and his first destination was not Estonia or Lithuania, probably because they were also persecuting their own fascists. So it wasn't very attractive to go there. But actually he went to Italy and we talked about it in the beginning that actually Zemin had been quite impressed by the Italian fascists. So I guess this is why he thought that this was a good idea to go there. But he didn't simply move to Rome and then stay there and live a quiet life. But actually he went straight to the headquarters of the Fascist Party of Italy and demanded to speak to Mussolini. And I found his notes where he prepared for this meeting. And he created something that he called a new Europe, which was kind of the idea of creating a Europe that consisted of fascist states and that were all under the leadership of or guidance, that's maybe the better word of Mussolini. And Sze Minch himself then saw himself in the position of like the second man to Mussolini, which I think is quite interesting to say the least. So you have the exiled leader of a fascist party that is banned at home, and the country where he's from is also, well, not really a global player. And then this is what he envisions for himself. So yeah, he was quite convinced about himself. And then what a surprise. Mussolini had apparently absolutely no interest in Samin and he never met him. So Semin moved on and he traveled to Romania and there he was more successful. So he met with the leader of the Iron Guard, with Cornelius, and they really got on immediately. I mean, of course they shared quite a lot of their ideological worldview. They could probably go on and on about the Jewish world conspiracy, but they also apparently went skiing together. So they obviously had a really good time. And I think it is quite an interesting encounter for us as scholars, because we often talk about this idea of like transnational fascism and how all these movements influenced each other. But here you really have not only a theoretical influence, but actually, yeah, like, like a. An eye to eye interaction. So Samish also stayed in touch with the Romanian fascists. But then Kodrianu was executed shortly afterwards. So there didn't really. There wasn't really much that came out of that. And then Seminch was also torn into, okay, where to go next. Then he moved to Switzerland. I think it was more a pragmatic choice because he had acquaintances who lived in Switzerland and who were happy to accommodate him. But once he was there, he also immediately tried to establish contact with local fascists. And then he gave public lectures also where he talked about this idea of the new European. And the Swiss police was at some point so annoyed that they decided to throw him out. And then he made another interesting move, because then he went to Finland and I am actually not sure why he went there. He was always interested in that country. I mean, in the 1920s Finland was also regarded to be really close or like one of the Baltic countries. So maybe there was this closeness that he maybe was attracted by. So anyways, he moved there, he learned Finnish. He actually, I think, knew 12 languages by the time he died. So he was really a polyglot. And this served him well because then the Winter War began and he was actually one of the first foreigners to voluntarily enlist and he served as a translator there. And yeah, I am sure this really strong anti Bolshevism that we talked about was a really strong driving factor for him to do this.
- [49:25]
B
So after Zelmintis met all his friends. Stalin invades Latvia in June 1940 what does this mean for John Mich and Thunder Cross?
- [49:36]
C
Yeah, I mean, the movement was already really severely weakened after Zeminsch had left the country. Well, already after the leadership had been imprisoned. But then after 37, things became even more tricky when the leader was exiled. But still there was a core of members who really remained dedicated to the whole cause. And they also stayed in touch with Zeminsch and they wrote letters to each other and things like that. But then of course, the Soviet occupation was. Was a really strong blow. So immediately the Soviets, when the Soviets had occupied the country, they really arrested everyone they considered to be an anti communist or anti Soviet. And of course Thunderclas members were a really clear target. And for example, there were those Thunder Cross leaders who were still in prison because they had been imprisoned by Ulmanis. And now they were literally immediately shipped off to Siberia by the Soviets. So they were really among the first to suffer from the whole occupation. But then there were also people who not even had been really active Thunder Cross members, but who were also still now persecuted because they were in any way related to Thunder Cross members, for example, wives or sisters of Thunder Cross men. And the Soviet authorities had all the information about these people because of the surveillance material that the Latvian police had gathered in the previous years. So what happened was that they arrested all these people, they interrogated them, tortured them, very, very likely, and many of them received really harsh sentences. So, yeah, everybody who. It wasn't even whether someone had done anything terrible, so to say, but everybody who was involved in anything that the Soviets considered anti Soviet behavior was enough to be found guilty. But then there were some fascists who actually managed to go underground and to hide, and some even participated in an anti Soviet resistance movement. For example, then they contacted the German military and provided them with information about what was going on in Soviet Latvia. So they already had this network. And then when the Germans attacked in June 1941, these were the men were among the first who were actively fighting the retreating Red army troops.
- [52:06]
B
So as you said, the Red army doesn't last. They're retreating after 12 months and then Latvia is conquered by the Germans. Did Selmensch and the Thunder Cross work together with the Nazis? To what extent are these guys involved in the Holocaust?
- [52:22]
C
Yeah, well, this question has a lot of layers because there were so many different levels on which Thunder Cross members and the Nazis interacted. Maybe we start with Semin. So after the Finnish Winter War, he eventually moved to Germany. There were also not very many places left to go. So he moved to Germany. And then when the war against the Soviet Union began, he joined the Wehrmacht in what was called a Sonderfuhrer. So these were locals from the countries that the Wehrmacht was going to occupy, like, for example, Latvia. And they were loyal to the Germans and then served as translators and experts of the area. And in this role, Samins returned to Latvia. And then, like he had done in 37 in Italy, he probably thought that he would be greeted as a hero and receive like a really important post in the occupation apparatus by the Germans. And in the beginning, it actually looked like maybe Thundercross members would be treated as equal partners, because thundercross was the only or Latvian organization that the Germans allowed to operate after the occupation. And then there were national newspapers who called specifically Thunder Cross members to join the volunteer units of the German security police that were established. And those were the units that then would kill thousands of Latvian Jews. So there are quite a lot of post war sources that suggest that actually not very many of the men who had been Thunder Cross members in the 30s participated as shooters of Jews. So the problem here is that there are no membership lists of the 1930s, as I mentioned. So it is really tricky to go to the core of this question. There were certainly a lot of men and potentially also women, because they were included in the call for volunteers who enlisted at local thunderclass branches. Because these branches were exploding all over this country. They were established everywhere. And not all of those men and women who enlisted in 41 had been members in the 1930s. So it is tricky to really see who was a member and who wasn't. But it's also the question, if it's really that important, if you had like a membership tag or not. What I did find were several sources where there were local Thunder Cross men who prepared everything in their local villages before the actual killing units arrived. So you have them arrest the local Jews, imprison them in synagogues, hold them there for days. They took all their belongings and then they forced them to the killing pits or the killing sites. And then the killing units arrived. So there's absolutely direct involvement in this crime. Then I also found sources of women who were responsible for overseeing the distribution of looted Jewish goods. So there's also the evidence of Thundercross women having participated in the genocide. Then we have what one historian called an intellectual crime. So quite a lot of high ranking Thunder Cross men held really high posts in national and local newspapers. And of course, you can say these papers had to print everything that the Germans told them. But because the Germans couldn't oversee everything that was written in Latvian, they definitely had a chance to form narratives, also to form narratives about Thunder Cross. They published various articles about Thunder Cross. So these are some examples of how they interacted and supported the German occupation apparatus. But then what happens is interesting because already in August 41, the Germans closed down the organization. And it is quite obvious that they did so because Thunder Cross men were acting far too much on their own accord. So, for example, they tried to get into local authorities, become headmasters, things like that. And they would arrest people without orders from German higher ups, just from the streets. And the Germans, of course, did not like that at all. And then when you think of Zelmich's character and what he had done, for example, in Italy, you can see that he definitely did not want to be an underling. So he was actually really angry because the Germans didn't give him any kind of interesting role. And then he started to write pamphlets and criticize the German occupation apparatus. And then the police, the German police arrested him and put him in prison. And so suddenly, you have this anti German behavior as well. And it's not just Seminch, it's also several other Thunder Cross members who actually participate even in providing the Latvian resistance networks with secret information. So there is this anti German activity. But on the other hand, you have quite a lot of Thunderclass members who really, right until the very end, cooperate with the Germans and continue to work with them the whole time. And I think one of the driving factors is again the anti Bolshevism. And there's just the being horrified of the idea that the Bolsheviks will come back.
- [57:38]
B
So after the Nazis lose the war, Latvia is incorporated into the Soviet Union and a lot of Thunder Cross activists end up in exile. But they've got this embarrassing problem of the Holocaust and collaboration. How did they explain their activities after the war?
- [57:54]
C
Yeah, so when I did the research for the book, I realized that the whole story, as you say, doesn't end in 1945. Right. There's exactly this problem, like how to present themselves and. Yes, exactly. So quite a lot of the Latvian fascists, particularly the leading ones, those who. Who were like the higher ups, they ended up in Western exile. They managed to escape when the Bolsheviks arrived, and then they ended up in Western exiles in West Germany, Canada, the us, Australia. And it is so interesting how they then build their new lives. So take Zelminch, for example. What happened was the German security police arrest them in Riga, and then he's transported to Flossenburg concentration camp, where he was a Sonder Heftling, which is like an honorary prisoner. So those were prisoners who were important public figures or former collaborators, and they were held under special conditions. So for example, Simon XI had his own cell and he could write letters and he didn't have to do physical forced labor, which obviously is quite better than the rest of the prisoners. But of course he, for example, could hear what was going on in the camp and he had no idea what was happening to him. So I'm not saying it was easy, but it was a different situation for him, of course. But then after 45, he of course, was both. So he had been a collaborator, but he had also been a prisoner of the Germans. And then he immigrated to the US in the 1950s. And he of course, absolutely emphasized his anti German activity. So he wrote his memoirs. Actually, quite a lot of them wrote memoirs and books, like quite a lot of the Thunderclass men. And Samin's memoirs begin, what a surprise, with the day of his arrest by the Germans. So there's absolutely nothing about his activities beforehand. And then Happens something. Well, it's actually not surprising, but the US media and local newspapers pick up his story and present him, on the one hand, as this former resistance fighter against the Germans, but then also they add the other layer that he now is also a refugee from communism. Which is, of course, a brilliant narrative in the, like, I don't know, like the high time of the Cold War. So it is a ticket that actually quite a lot of Thunder Cross members used that they. They quite successfully integrated into their new home countries and their diaspora communities. There was a large diaspora community in these countries. And yeah, as I said, quite a lot of them published books. Many wrote about the threat of Bolshevism. And what is really interesting here is that they not only write, of course, anti Soviet books, but within these books, they also managed to continue to express their anti Semitic views. And they simply replace their accusations against Jews with accusations against Zionists, maybe. Sounds familiar. So this is something that they do, and it's not an invention of what we see today, but already the Latvian fascists in the 1960s used it very successfully and nobody stops them. So I think this is really interesting and it shows really clearly that they were very aware of how they had to phrase things and maybe to end up with one example, because I really think it summarizes all really well. So we have this one leading Thundercross man. He was an ardent antisemite. Already when he was a pupil, like a high school student, he already wrote his first anti Semitic pamphlets. He was a really important figure for Thunder cross over the 1930s. He then was very active in the Nazi propaganda apparatus. And he also oversaw, for example, the theft of Jewish goods in Latvia. At some point at the end of the war, he ended up in West Germany because he obviously, in his position, had the chance to escape. And then he became an activist for Latvian refugees because, as I noted, there were like, quite a lot of Latvians, not all of them collaborators, but quite a lot of Latvians who ended up in Germany after the war. And he was really an activist for these DPs. And then when he died in the early 1990s, there was a local West German newspaper and it published an obituary. And it said something like, I quote from memory. It says his interest was always with the persecuted. And I really think this speaks for itself.
- [62:39]
B
Well, what a story. That's about all we have time for today, but thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, and I strongly recommend people go out and buy the book.
- [62:50]
C
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. For all the interesting question. It was really great to talk about it.
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A
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Cut the camera.
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A
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