Courland Pocket - Aftermath

Aftermath

On 9 May 1945, General Hovhannes Bagramyan accepted the surrender of German forces at Ezere Manor in southwest Latvia.

According to Russian records, 146,000 German and Latvian troops were taken prisoner, including 28 generals and 5,083 high-ranking officers, and taken to camps in the USSR interior and imprisoned for years. Current scholarship puts the count of those surrendering at more than 200,000: 189,112 Germans including 42 generals—among them the German commander, Carl Hilpert, who subsequently died in a Soviet POW camp in 1947—and approximately 14,000 Latvians.

The Soviets detained all males between the ages of 16 and 60, and conducted widespread deforestation campaigns, burning vast tracts of forest, to flush out resisters.