Digging for World War II History in Latvia's Battlefields

Rising prices for World War II relics have pitted preservationists against sellers with shovels.

- Thomas Rogers

TALIS ESMITS WAS FELLING TREES near his home in Latvia when he received a phone call about two Nazi soldiers. The caller, a national guardsman in the Courland Peninsula, a horn of forested land between the capital, Riga, and the Baltic Sea, said that a friend had unearthed their remains while driving his tractor and wasn’t sure what to do. It was a Wednesday in March. Esmits told the man to leave the bones where they were and that he would come pick them up.

A few days later, Esmits drove a white van rapidly down a country road. A stout 52-year-old, he had dressed for the occasion in golden army boots, a replica World War I hat, and dark green camouflage. Esmits is the co-founder of a Latvian volunteer group, Legenda, that exhumes the scattered and forgotten bodies of World War II combatants for proper burial. In the van sat his crew of six diggers and a flatulent 150-pound Italian mastiff named Bagram, all of them violently jostling back and forth on the bumpy road while Rebecca Black’s song Friday played on the stereo. Most of the diggers were also dressed in camouflage and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Latvian army. Toward the rear, Viktors Duks, a professor of screenwriting at Riseba University in Riga, slouched and moaned about a hangover. Further up, Andris Lelis, a 22-year-old militaria seller, cheerfully pointed out battle sites next to the road. “There are still probably lots of bodies in that farmer’s field,” he said.