New Reference Book Profiles 426 Police Officials of Interwar Latvia

A biographical dictionary profiling 426 police officials from interwar Latvia, when the country was an independent state, was published this autumn. It is one of the first attempts to cover civil servants whose names appear rarely in history books, or not at all.

Historians have so far mostly devoted biographical dictionaries to statesmen, diplomats, military officers and other well-known figures. Yet the Latvian state's day-to-day work was also carried out by thousands of officials. The new volume is intended as a reference for historians and for anyone researching their family history.

A police force built from scratch

Historian Valters Ščerbinskis, one of the book's compilers, told the portal Delfi that after the state was founded, the entire administrative system was built literally from zero, not only the police. Recruits to the police had to be trustworthy, skilled and willing to work. When these conditions were met, a person was taken on. Often, however, people ended up in the police by chance and later proved unsuitable, though he said the same happened in other fields.

Ščerbinskis said that in the 1920s it was especially difficult to find police staff in Latgale, where there was a shortage of people who spoke and wrote Latvian well. He acknowledged that the police of the 1920s also included people who had joined more or less by chance.

A photograph from the Latvian National Archive, dated May 1927, shows senior police figures: Riga prefect Teodors Grīnvalds, Political Administration head Valdemārs Ozoliņš and Criminal Police Administration head Gustavs Tīfentāls.