March of SS veterans face protest in Latvia

A march by veterans of two Latvian units of the Waffen SS, and their supporters, took place in the country's capital Riga on Tuesday. Protesters met the marchers at the city's Freedom Monument.

The veterans, known as legionnaires, were marching on a date that RT reports has been known as Latvian Legion Day since 1998. It is a day on which some Latvians celebrate the fact that they or their family members fought alongside German troops in 1944 to halt the progress of forces of the former Soviet Union. According to Ria Novosti, when reporting on the march in 2008, observation of Latvian Legion Day began in 1994 and was an official celebration until 2001. Numbers for the march, which was preceded by a church service and culminated in a ceremony in which flowers were laid at the Freedom Monument, were estimated at 1,000 by the Guardian. Among those 1,000 people were some 200 to 300 survivors of a battle that took place in Russia itself and stopped the advance of Soviet troops into Latvia, a country on the Baltic Sea which has modern-day Russia on its eastern border and was a part of the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until the 1990s. Arrests were made, but reportedly there were no major disturbances, as the marchers were met at the Freedom Monument by protesters described as either members of the Latvian Anti-Fascist Committee or simply ethnic Russians. In Latvia, with a population of approximately 2.2 million, around 30 percent are of Russian origin. In addition to the protesters, whose numbers were put at 100 by RT, hundreds of police were at the monument to keep the two sides apart. Marches such as the one seen on Tuesday were apparently banned by the Latvian authorities in the middle of the last decade. It remains unclear if yesterday's march was legal. RT insists that a recent ban on the march and the gathering of protesters, imposed by authorities in Riga, was upheld by the Administrative Court. However Mix News reported on Monday that the Court had lifted the ban on marchers and protesters alike. Regardless of the legality of the event it has drawn strong criticism from inside Latvia and from outside of the country. Nevertheless some of the veterans and their supporters have spoken to defend the event, observing that many of those who fought with the Waffen-SS had not done so through choice. U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whose family lost some of its members to the Holocaust, is quoted as saying the commemoration was "nauseating". He was joined in criticizing the march by both Ephraim Zuroff of The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a U.S.-headquartered Jewish human rights organization, and Nils Usakovs, the mayor of Riga. The latter man, an ethnic Russian, said "It's pretty difficult to be a hero if you're fighting for a German Nazi", while a representative of the Anti-Fascist Committee, Gennady Kotov, warned:

According to the latest data, 73% of Latvian schoolchildren think that the former members of the SS unit are heroes and that this day should be commemorated. This means that 73% of schoolchildren are infected with fascism

In the past Russian officials have referred to Latvian Legion Day as "disgraceful" and mentioned how the Waffen-SS was condemned at the Nuremberg Trials. One young Latvian attending the commemoration, 24-year-old Edgars Darznieks, explained that he had family members who fought for the Russians and others who fought for the Germans. Stating that he wanted to remember two brothers of his grandfather conscripted in to the Waffen-SS he added "History is complicated". Aivars Ozols, 85 years old and a prisoner of the Soviet Union for nine years after his capture in 1945, said that he was not a voluntary member of the Waffen-SS. He recalled that the only choices he had were to "join the legion or go into the forests and join the partisans". Another veteran, Yuris Liepinsh, gave a slightly more robust defense of his participation in World War Two on the side of Germany, saying:

War is war, this is history. We received a notice to go serve through the mail. According to martial law, if we don't serve, we are deserters. We had to go. You know there is an American saying, we fought on the wrong side, but our enemy was the right one

It is estimated that more Latvians, perhaps as many as 146,000, fought with the Germans than fought with the Soviet Union, which had between 90,000 and 130,000 Latvian members of the Red Army.