With chilling echoes of the 2022 war in Ukraine, 40,000 Latvian soldiers of the 15th SS Division - some Russian Front veterans, most raw teenage conscripts - faced the Red Army in Pomerania in Arctic blizzards between January and March 1945. One in three died: the majority never returned home. They became the lost Legion. The author interviews the last remaining Latvian Legionnaires who came to the UK after the war, then follows their footsteps across modern Poland, adding many stories from Latvian archives in English for the first time. Thrown in to strengthen Nazi defenses as the German forces collapsed, the Latvians are constantly encircled and outgunned, outrunning the merciless T-34 tanks. It's kill or be killed: even the priests have Panzerfausts. After battles at Nakel, Immenheim, Vandsburg, Dorotheenhof and Flatow the Latvians retreat to Jastrow, trying to hold a vital bridge across the river Gwda Kuddow]. Then comes a four-day period known to the Latvians as 'the 15th
