People

Latvia state institutions 1887–1925 ✕ Car crash

Latvia's first foreign minister, who won international recognition for its independence

One of the most influential statesmen and diplomats of the early Latvian Republic. As its first foreign minister he drove the 1920 peace treaty with Soviet Russia, de jure recognition and League of Nations admission; he died in a car crash in 1925.

Latvia's first foreign minister, he won de facto British recognition in 1918, the Riga peace of 1920, and de jure Allied recognition and League membership in 1921. He also served as prime minister and died in a road accident in 1925 at thirty-eight.

Latvia state institutions 1898–1967 ○ Natural death

Latvian foreign minister who signed the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty in 1939 and was deported to the Soviet Union in 1940

Born in Riga to an Estonian trader and a Baltic German mother, he served in the Estonian Army during the Latvian War of Independence. He joined the Latvian foreign ministry in 1920, became its general secretary in 1933, ran the ministry de facto after Kārlis Ulmanis’s coup of 1934 and was foreign minister from 1936 to 1940; he was also active on the Council of the League of Nations. In June 1939 he signed the German–Latvian Non-Aggression Pact and on 5 October 1939 the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty. After the Soviet occupation he and his family were deported to Voronezh in July 1940 in the presence of the interior minister Vilis Lācis; he was arrested in June 1941 and in 1952 sentenced to 25 years. Released in 1954, he returned to Latvia in 1958, wrote against the Latvian diaspora organisations and died in Riga in 1967.

1900–1987 ○ Died in Riga

Riga docker who used his contract work for the Luftwaffe to smuggle dozens of Jews out of the ghetto and camps and hide them

Born in Jelgava, he served in the Latvian Army’s artillery during the War of Independence in 1919–1920 and then worked as a docker in the port of Riga. Having witnessed the persecution of Jews in the streets, he resolved to save them, became a contractor for the Luftwaffe and from late November 1941 smuggled Jewish workers out of the Riga ghetto and nearby camps. With his wife Johanna and friends he hid them in warehouses and a bunker dug in his yard until the Red Army arrived in October 1944. The number saved is given as forty to about 55. After the war the KGB questioned him repeatedly. In 1966 Yad Vashem recognised him and his wife as Righteous Among the Nations, and when he died in 1987 the Jews of Riga arranged his funeral.

Latvia state institutions 1951–

The physicist who walked Latvia out of the USSR and commanded the nights of the barricades

On the night of 20 January 1991, after Soviet special forces stormed Latvia's Interior Ministry, killing five, Godmanis telephoned Soviet interior minister Boris Pugo, who told him: 'I was not involved.'

A Latvian physicist turned politician, Godmanis earned his doctorate in solid-state physics and taught at the University of Latvia before joining the Latvian Popular Front in 1987. After the Front's victory in the 1990 Supreme Council elections, he became the first prime minister of a Latvia that had declared the restoration of its independence, and during the January 1991 barricades he coordinated the defense of strategic sites and personally telephoned Soviet interior minister Boris Pugo, who denied any involvement in the OMON attack. He returned as prime minister in 2007, steering Latvia through the global financial crisis until his resignation in 2009.