Alfred Käärmann
Estonian resistance fighter (1922-2010)
Alfred Käärmann (September 14, 1922 in Hargla – February 4, 2010) was an Estonian resistance fighter, also known as a forest brother, as the Estonians call their guerrillas, and author. In 2007 he was decorated with a military honour in recognition of his service. According to The New York Times, Alfred Käärmann's life is "a monument to man's astounding ability to endure the unbearable."
Life
Alfred Käärmann wrote many books about his life as a resistance fighter. Udumäe kodutütar (The Girl Guide of Udumäe) is about his relationship with his beloved Kleina.
In 1941 he enrolled in a local technical school, where he met and fell in love with a girl named Kleina. Volunteering to fight in the Waffen-SS for the Nazis in February 1944, Käärmann was among those who fought the Red Army until Estonia was occupied by the Soviets seven months later. At the end of the war, the Soviets conducted extensive sweeps to arrest and deport the many Estonians who had served in the German Waffen-ss. Wanting to avoid the fate of his brother, who was arrested and sent to Russia's most dreaded Arctic prison camp near Vorkuta, Käärmann returned home to his family farm on October 4, 1944. After a rest period, he went into hiding in the forest and joined up with fellow Estonian and Latvian Forest brothers, in the belief that it was "better to die in the forest with a weapon in your hands than in a Soviet camp."
On October 17, 1945, he was shot and wounded in a skirmish with Red Army forces. Evading capture by hiding in a swamp, then moving house to house, he was given refuge in the home of an elderly lady.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred Käärmann” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.