Gustavs Celmiņš

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Gustavs Celmiņš (German Gustav Celmins , born April 1, 1899 in Riga , Russian Empire ; † April 10, 1968 in San Antonio , USA ) was a Latvian politician , leader of the radical nationalist organizations Feuerkreuz and Donnerkreuz .

biography

Gustavs Celmiņš attended the trading school of the Riga Stock Exchange and, after Riga had become a frontline city in the First World War in 1915, continued his school education in Moscow and completed it there. In 1917 he studied at the Riga Polytechnic Institute , which had been evacuated to Moscow. After the October Revolution , Celmiņš returned to Latvia.

In 1918 Celmiņš joined the newly established Latvian Army , where he was promoted to lieutenant the following year. In 1920 he was appointed military attaché in Poland .

After Celmiņš left the army in 1924, he worked from 1925 to 1927 in the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Secretary of the Minister. Celmiņš then worked in the Latvian Ministry of Finance. When the radical nationalist group Feuerkreuz (Lat. Ugunskrusts ) was founded on January 24, 1932 , Celmiņš took over the function of its leader. After the ban on the fire cross group by the Latvian government, Celmiņš founded the radical nationalist Latvian people's movement Thunder Cross (Lat. Pērkonkrusts (Latviešu Tautas Apvienība) ). After the coup d'état of May 15, 1934 by Kārlis Ulmanis , Celmiņš was arrested and his three-year imprisonment ended in 1937 with his deportation.

Celmiņš went to Italy and then to Switzerland , where he was arrested and expelled in Zurich . He later lived in Romania , where he had contacts with the Iron Guard . Then he moved to Finland . There Celmiņš ran the “foreign contact office” of Donnerkreuz . In the winter war started by the Soviet Union against Finland in November 1939 , Celmiņš fought as a volunteer in the Finnish army. After the end of the war, Celmiņš moved to the Greater German Empire .

Celmiņš moved back to Latvia in 1941 as part of the Barbarossa company to work again as leader of Donnerkreuz . On March 14, 1944, the Gestapo arrested him for illegal underground activity. Celmiņš was taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp and from there to Dachau . Until the end of the war, Celmiņš remained a “special prisoner” and was relocated together with other celebrities as a hostage of the SS from Dachau via Innsbruck to Niederdorf in the Puster Valley during the last days of the war . On May 4, 1945, the prisoners at Lake Braies were liberated by the US 5th Army .

After his liberation, Celmiņš moved to Italy. There he published the newspaper "Free Latvia" (Lat. Brīvā Latvija ) in Rome . In 1949 he moved to the USA . There he worked as a consultant from 1950 to 1952. In the years from 1954 to 1956 Celmiņš worked in Mexico as an industrialist. In 1956 Celmiņš went to San Antonio , Texas , where he worked as a librarian at Trinity University until 1958 . In 1959 he received a professorship at the "Center for Russian Studies" at St. Mary's University there.

Celmiņš died on April 10, 1968 in San Antonio.

Honors

In 1921 Celmiņš was awarded the Bear Slayer Order.

literature

  • Literature by and about Gustavs Celmiņš in the catalog of the Herder Institute Marburg.
  • Björn Felder: "Separating the wheat from the chaff ...". The Latvian card index - Pērkonkrusts in SD Latvia 1941–1943 . In: Latvijas Okupācijas Muzeja Gadagrāmata (Yearbook of the Latvian Occupation Museum ), ISSN  1407-6330 , vol. 2003, pp. 47-68.
  • Karl Heinz Gräfe: From the thunder cross to the swastika. The Baltic States between dictatorship and occupation . Edition Organon, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-931034-11-5 , short biography p. 431 f.
  • Ilya Lenski: Celmiņš, Gustavs . In: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, pp. 131f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Björn Felder: "Separating the wheat from the chaff ...". The Latvian card index - Pērkonkrusts in SD Latvia 1941–1943 . In: Latvijas Okupācijas Muzeja Gadagrāmata (Yearbook of the Latvian Occupation Museum ), vol. 2003, pp. 47–68.
  2. ^ Matthew Kott: Latvia's Pērkonkrusts: Anti-German National Socialism in a Fascistogenic Milieu . In: Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies , ISSN  2211-6249 , Vol. 4 (2015), pp. 169–193.
  3. ↑ Vanda Zarina: Rīgas domnieki laikmeta līkločos . Rīgas dome, Riga 2019, ISBN 978-9984-31-148-7 , p. 234.
  4. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol , online edition Mythos Elser 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Celmiņš, Gustavs
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Celmins, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Latvian politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1968
Place of death San Antonio