The sports career of the world-famous decathlete Heino Lipp (1922–2006) began at the end of the 1930s largely due to the initiative of his older brother Erik. Very little has hitherto been known about the fate of Erik Lipp (1913–1946). He evaded mobilisation into the Red Army in July of 1941 and went into hiding in the woods, where he became the leader of a group of forest brothers (Estonian patriotic partisans). A little later, his younger brothers Endel (1921–1983) and Heino went from the mobilisation office in Jõhvi to Erik in the woods. There were 15 people in his group of forest brothers. The greatest service that they rendered was the protection of more than 60 civilians against the terror of the Red authorities.
Erik Lipp was arrested by organs of the Soviet authorities in 1944. The state security service failed to obtain any information from him in his interrogations on the members of his group of forest brothers. Needless to say, they also gained no information on the fact that his younger brothers had been members of the group. The Soviet regime never found out about the brief period in the summer of 1941 when Endel and Heino were forest brothers.
The principle of complicity prevailed in Stalin’s time. If a family member had opposed the Soviet regime, the rest of that family’s members were considered accessories. The conviction of his older brother Erik Lipp by the Soviet regime became a compromising circumstance for the famous athlete Heino Lipp. Throughout the Soviet period, Heino Lipp wrote in his applications for permits to travel abroad that his older brother ‘went missing in action during the war’. That was essentially true because at first, he knew nothing about his older brother’s fate. It was only years later that he received information that his brother had been sent to a forced labour camp, where he died in 1946.
But that was not all the security services had against him. There was also a KGB record card file, an operative file that was kept regarding persons who had to be monitored, on Heino Lipp in 1946–1955. He was suspected of having been connected to an intelligence group of Estonians that had been set up during the German occupation. The file was terminated after the Helsinki summer Olympic games in 1952. No connection was ascertained between Lipp and the intelligence group.
Unique materials from the private collection of Erik Lipp’s daughter have been used for this article. A highlight is a rare picture of all three Lipp brothers. An affectionate letter to his wife, which Erik Lipp managed to write while he was still in Estonia and toss out of the window of the railcar taking him to Siberia, is published in the article. The tiny letter that was folded into a matchbox contains the following sentence to his wife: ‘Raise our children as Estonians – in the spirit of their father’.