On 29 October 1944, the headquarters of the Kurelis group moved to the Annahite glass factory — Stikli in Puze parish, about 12 kilometres from Usma station. There, General Jānis Kurelis’s men were no longer merely executors of German orders: through the Latvian Central Council they maintained contacts with Ventspils and Stockholm, and many hoped to become the nucleus of an independent Latvian army. Stikli became a brief antechamber to tragedy — in November the German security services destroyed the group, while Rubenis’s battalion still resisted in the forests of Kurzeme.

The Kurelis group was one of the most complex episodes of Latvian national resistance at the end of the Second World War — caught between Nazi occupation power, the approaching Soviet army, and hopes of Western support. Its fate shows that some Latvians were thinking not of victory for foreign armies, but of a chance to restore the Latvian state.