Still-imprisoned members were persecuted under the first Soviet occupation; some collaborated with subsequently invading Nazi Germany forces in perpetrating the Holocaust.

Pērkonkrusts continued to exist in some form until 1944, when Celmiņš, who had initially returned to work in the occupying German administration, was imprisoned.

[4][5][6] Fascism researcher Roger Griffin describes Pērkonkrusts as having been a "small but genuine fascist opposition" which "pursued a revolutionary solution to the [economic] crisis and which would turn Latvia into an authoritarian state based on a new élite with a new corporatist economy", with its politics defined by "integralist nationalism".

[5] Building on Griffin's definition of generic fascism, a categorisation of Pērkonkrusts as "anti-German national socialism" has also been proposed in an article from 2015.

Pērkonkrusts aimed its propaganda against minorities who supposedly had taken over the Latvian economy (i.e. Baltic Germans, Jews) and the contemporary parliamentary politicians, whom it accused of corruption.

[9] Despite its rural ideals, Pērkonkrusts gained most of its support in the urban areas like Riga, Cēsis, Valmiera, Jelgava, more specifically among students at the University of Latvia.

The group used a variation of the Roman or Hitler salute, and greeted with the Latvian phrase "Cīņai sveiks" ("Ready for battle"[6] or "Hail the struggle").

Kārlis Ulmanis, leader of the conservative nationalist Peasants' Union Party and then Prime Minister of Latvia, proposed constitutional reforms in October 1933, which socialists feared would target the left more than the right.

During his peripatetic exile, Celmiņš had established personal contacts with the representatives of other fascist groupings in Europe, most notably Romania's Corneliu Codreanu.

According to research by historian Rudīte Vīksne, however, there were only a handful of members of Pērkonkrusts who played a role in the Holocaust in Latvia,[13] their activities focused more on propaganda.

During the early phases of the Holocaust in Latvia, Mārtiņš Vagulāns, whom historian Valdis Lumans describes as a member of Pērkonkrusts, led a killing squad attached to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in the town of Jelgava.

[15][16] Aside from front-line combat duties, these battalions also participated in so-called anti-partisan operations in Latvia and Belarus that included the massacres of rural Jews and other civilians.

[17] Pērkonkrusts members working within the SD apparatus in occupied Latvia would feed Celmiņš information, some of which he would include in his underground, anti-German publication Brīvā Latvija.

[18] A radical group claiming Pērkonkrusts's name emerged in the 1990s as an organization whose stated goal was the overthrow of the current unsatisfactory government and the establishment of a "Latvian Latvia".

[19] In 1995, three former members of the group "Rība's Defenders" - Valdis Raups, Aivars Vīksniņš and then-68-year-old Vilis Liniņš - joined up with martial artist Juris Rečs to reconstitute Pērkonkrusts.

"[20] The ideology of the group was primarily characterized by ethnic and racial nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism and opposed to free markets.

Members of the reconstituted Pērkonkrusts tried three times to bomb the Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders.