The Gen

[Moggy]

Latvian authorities okay Nazi memorial march in centre of capital

03.03.2005, 12.20

RIGA, March 3 (Itar-Tass) - Latvian authorities on Thursday allowed the nationalist youth organization Klubs 415 to make a march in memory of Lettish divisions Waffen SS on March 16.

March 16 is considered in Latvia as the day of formation of a Lettish Waffen SS legion.

The date was an official memorial date until recently.

Veterans of the legion staged marches in which top officials of the Baltic republic took part, but the day was abolished from memorial dates under pressure of the world community.

TASS report
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[Moggy]

Russian Anti-Nazi Meeting Banned in Lativa

Created: 14.03.2005 19:28 MSK (GMT +3)

The Riga State Duma rejected a claim from the Russian National Unity “Motherland” movement to hold a protest rally against Nazism in the Latvian capital on March 16, RIA Novosti reports. The authorities refusal was reportedly motivated by the fact that Motherland was late in sending an application for gathering.

The protestors were going to picket the parade of former Waffen SS soldiers which is to mark the day the Latvian division was formed in 1943.

The veterans were granted permission to walk through Riga’s streets on March 16 a week earlier. The procession of 50 people will be held by the right-wing radical organization Club 415. The members of this body have been organizing such parades for five years.

Morover, the same procession will be held in another Latvian town of Liepai, where former SS troops will march together with members of the local nationalist Union of National Strength.

MosNews report
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[Moggy]

LATVIAN VETERANS OF SS WAFFEN TO MARCH THROUGH RIGA STREETS

RIGA, March 16, (RIA Novosti's Yuri Guralnik) - Veterans of Latvian SS Waffen together with young ultra-nationalists have been given permission to parade on Wednesday through the central streets of Riga.

The route to be followed by former SS men will be about one kilometer long, while the march itself will not last more than half an hour.

A similar action is contemplated in Liepaja, where the procession has also been agreed with the city duma in advance.

On the day before, Latvia's Interior Ministry circulated a statement, saying that during the march of the legionnaires extra precautionary measures would be taken. Reinforced police squads will be patrolling not only the center of Riga, but also protect key sites connected with the history of the Second World War - Jewish cemeteries, the monument to liberators of Riga, and many other memorial places.

The Russian national-patriotic organizations Rodina and the Latvian National-Democratic Party have repeatedly expressed a desire to hold an action of protest against the "popularization of fascism" in Latvia at the same time and in the same venue where legionnaires are going to parade. The city dumas of both cities did not permit these organizations to stage pickets, but their leaders have already said that they will all the same "come to watch the legionnaires, exercising their right of free movement".

Marches by former legionnaires have been held in Latvia since the early 1990s. According to data for 2005, the republic has only 300 former Latvian SS men residing in it, and several thousand living in the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom.

During the Nuremberg trial, SS Waffen was declared a criminal organization, as also all units incorporated into it. SS Waffen was manned with volunteers, and from 1944 by conscripts from territories occupied by the Third Reich. In 1944, out of 37 SS divisions only 12 were German-only, with the others consisting of volunteers from Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and even Sweden, which formally took no part in the Second World War.

Latvians, from the racial point of view, did not live up to Aryan standards, but, in the view of Nazi ideologist Himmler, they could make sufficiently reliable allies in the struggle against the Red Army. All told, about 150,000 former citizens of Latvia fought on the side of the Axis powers. The main task of the Latvian SS Legion was not to fight the regular Red Army, but to engage in counter-guerilla warfare on the territory of Belarus and Russia. As conceived by the Nazis, the Latvian Legion was from the start to become the numerically largest Baltic formation. All active Latvian SS units and the police were automatically included in the Legion, within which it was also planned to form an independent SS division.

Latvia's present-day authorities stick to a different view on the history of the Latvian SS Legion. In the opinion of the historian Inesis Feldmanis, "Latvian soldiers took no part in repressive operations, and only fought on the front. None of the Latvian legionnaires was ever accused in any court of war crimes which would have been committed in the context of the Legion's operations. The Legion was set up approximately a year after the last large-scale killing of Jews in Latvia occurred."

Novosti report
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[Moggy]

Russia condemns Latvian authorities for allowing SS march

16.03.2005, 19.23

MOSCOW, March 16 (Itar-Tass) - The Russian Foreign Ministry has resolutely condemned the Latvian authorities for allowing the former SS men to march in Riga on the occasion of a regular “anniversary” of the foundation of the Latvian SS Legion.

Commenting on the traditional march, which the legion members held in Riga on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry qualified the action as immoral and inadmissible.

“It is particularly cynical that such actions are being held with the consent of the Latvian authorities, which are trying, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the VE-Day, to find support in the European capitals for Riga’s policy of revising the World War II outcomes and the sentence of the Nuernberg trial, which classified the SS as a criminal organization,” the Russian Foreign Ministry emphasized.

Tass report
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[Moggy]

Nazism the Second Time Around

The Waffen SS is in Riga again

by Vladimir Vodo

Russian Article as of Mar. 17, 2005

Veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS legion held their traditional march in Riga on Wednesday. Members of the Homeland – Russian National Union tried to disrupt the march. Young dressed like Nazi concentration camp inmates blocked the SS veterans' approach to the Monument to the Homeland and Freedom. The police arrested several and allowed the marchers to lay flowers at the monument.

The Latvian Waffen SS had about 140,000 members during the Second World War. About 50,000 of them died in the war or in exile. The activities of the Waffen SS and its Latvian legion were ruled criminal at the Nuremburg Trials. Therefore, in 2000, the Latvian Seim decided to observe the day of memorial for Latvian soldiers not on March 16, but on November 11, Lacplesis' Day. Lacplesis is a Latvian folk hero. Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga called on the country's citizens to “remember those who gave their lives with the name of Latvia in their hearts for the freedom of their country” on Lacplesis' Day and “refrain from activities with this goal on other days.”

Several historians have noted that the Latvian Waffen SS was particularly famed for its cruel punitive operations in Belarus. Nonetheless, according to official Latvian historiography, they “did not participate in repressive actions, and only battled at the front. No Latvian legionnaire has ever been accused in any court of war crimes committed in the context of the legion's activities.”

With the permission of the Riga city council, the SS veterans began in the early 1990s to march annually on March 16 in memory of battles on the Velikaya River in Pskov Region, Russia. That is the anniversary of battles between the 15th and 16th legions of the SS with Soviet Army units in 1944. That was the first and last battle of the Latvian SS legion, since it was decisively defeated by the Soviets ....

Kommersant report
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[Moggy]

Riga police stop unauthorized march of SS veterans, supporters
19:29 | 16/ 03/ 2006

RIGA, March 16 (RIA Novosti) - Police in the Latvian capital stopped Thursday an unsanctioned march of Waffen-SS veterans and their supporters.

More than 300 former members of the so-called Latvian Legion that fought in the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany participated in the march.

The police also arrested several anti-fascist activists who attempted to block the march and shouted anti-Nazi slogans.

According to eyewitness reports, 150 Nazi veterans remain isolated on the central square of the capital, and the police have maintained order in the city.

On Monday, the legislature in Riga voted to ban the march, as well as protests against the former Nazi collaborators, but nationalists and radicals announced they would go ahead with the event despite official notices >>>>

RIA Novosti
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[Moggy]

Latvians Battle Over World War II Legacy

Yasha Levine
JTA Wire Service

APRIL 05, 2006
RIGA, Latvia

The recent uproar in Latvia over a proposed march by Latvian veterans of the Nazi SS highlighted the ambivalent relationship the Baltic nation has with its World War II behavior.

After last year's march -- during which protesters, dressed in striped concentration camp outfits, tried to stop the procession, but were arrested instead -- Latvia received condemnation from the international community -- especially Russia and Israel.

Condemning the march as an attempt to rewrite Latvian history and whitewash Latvia's role in the war, anti-nationalist factions vowed to repeat last year's protests and to do everything necessary to stop the march if it takes place again this year.

Fearing an outbreak of violent confrontations, Riga city officials canceled the march three days before it was scheduled to take place.

Latvia's president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, once a supporter of Soldiers Day -- as the March 16 date is known in the official calendar since 1999 -- also spoke out against it.

She voiced concern about the negative attention the event brings Latvia and worried that it portrays the Baltic nation as a country full of fascists and neo-Nazis.

Nonetheless, nationalist factions organizing the event, planned to go ahead with the march. This year, a 1,000-strong police force was mobilized, and Riga's city center was fenced in to prevent any mass rally.

A few hundred protesters from both sides attended the banned march. After minor skirmishes and some arrests on both sides, police was finally able to quell the demonstrators and prevent the march from taking place.

Why such a surge of emotion?

Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, gained its independence after the end of World War I. But in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Soviet army occupied the country and imposed its rule on its mostly ethnic Latvian population.

When the German army advanced on Latvia in 1941 and pushed out the Soviet forces, many Latvians greeted the invading German soldiers as liberators.

"The Germans treated Latvians much better than the Soviets," said one young participant in this month's march, waving an Estonian flag. He drove from Estonia to Riga to show solidarity with his Baltic kin, even though he knew the march had been canceled. According to him, in World War II Latvians chose the lesser of two evils -- a view widely shared in the Baltic countries today >>>>

Jewish Times
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[Moggy]

October 8, 2009

A sordid tale that brings shame on Britain
Labour and the Tories are ignorantly exploiting a tragic and complex period of Latvian history to score cheap points
Ben Macintyre

The Second World War tore Latvia to shreds: annexed by the Soviet Union, occupied by Germany, then occupied again by the Red Army, brutalised, degraded and devastated, Latvia suffered dictatorship, colonisation and mass murder.

For many in the small Baltic state, this was a civil war, with all the horror that word implies. One third of Latvia’s prewar population, perhaps 630,000 people, was lost between 1940 and 1954. Almost the entire Jewish population of 80,000 was wiped out. Both Soviet and German occupiers conscripted Latvians into their armies. Brother fought brother.

This is the grim battlefield into which the Labour and Conservative parties have both marched with a staggering lack of intellectual rigour and historical understanding. Both sides have cynically tried to deploy history for political gain, and both have got it wrong.

Last week David Miliband attacked the Tory alliance with Latvia’s right-wing For Fatherland and Freedom Party, one of its new friends in the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping in the European Parliament. Every year, the Foreign Secretary pointed out, this party celebrates those Latvians who, in 1944, fought for the Waffen-SS in a doomed attempt to hold back the Soviet troops. For Mr Miliband, this is evidence of Tory association with some of Europe’s most unsavoury neo-Nazi elements.

The Conservative Party chairman, Eric Pickles, however, argues that the two Waffen-SS units making up the Latvian legion consisted of conscripts, and that Mr Miliband is recycling Soviet propaganda by condemning them. By this interpretation, the Latvian SS legion was made up of patriotic anti-communists battling Soviet occupation, and therefore worthy of celebration.

History seldom conforms to the easy platitudes of politics. Latvia’s wartime experience was messy, brutal and morally complex. But the story of the Latvian SS legion is suddenly casting a shadow over British politics: this slice of the distant past is now part of David Cameron’s future.

Some 65,000 Latvians, mostly teenagers, were enrolled in the legion, starting in 1943. The majority were conscripts, forcibly mobilised to prop up Germany’s collapsing eastern front. Offered a choice between a Waffen-SS uniform or transfer to a German slave-labour camp, many saw no choice at all.

After the war, the American commissioner for displaced persons concluded: “The Waffen-SS units of the Baltic states are to be seen as units that stood apart and were different from the German SS in terms of goals, ideologies, operations and constitution.”

Even so, the ranks of the legion contained a substantial minority of racist killers, men who not only volunteered to sign the oath to Hitler, but did so eagerly. The mass murder of Latvian Jews in 1942 was ordered and directed by the Nazis, but Latvian extermination gangs enthusiastically participated in the genocide. Stories of Latvians helping Jews to escape the Holocaust are shamefully rare >>>>

Times
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