Posted on March 16, 2010 - by Venik

Patriots or Nazi collaborators? Latvians march to commemorate SS veterans

David Cameron’s political allies among crowd in Riga at anniversary of battle against Russians

Aivars Ozols paid a heavy price for trying to save Latvia from Bolshevism. Transported to Siberia in 1945 as a Russian prisoner of war and starved nearly to death, he lost his legs when a train smashed into the lorry carrying him to a new labour camp in Stalin’s gulag.

The 85-year-old remembers every detail vividly. He spent nine years in Stalin’s camps. And he remembers, too, being conscripted by the Nazis into the Waffen-SS in Riga in 1943, when the occupying Germans needed new cannon fodder to try to hold back the Red army.

“We went to war. There was nothing voluntary about it. We had no choice,” he said.

He is proud, nonetheless, of the part he played. Of the successive occupations washing over Latvia – the Russians in 1940, the Germans in 1941, the Russians again in 1944 – there is no doubt which he preferred. “The Germans related to us more humanely. They saw us simply as people.”

For Britons reared on the Churchillian narrative, for Americans who crossed the Atlantic to save Europe from Nazi barbarism, for Russians who see the defeat of Hitler as their finest moment, and most of all, for Jews to whom the Holocaust represents the apogee of evil, Ozols’ position may seem perverse.

But in a British election season, the notion of Latvia mourning Waffen-SS patriots has acquired extra potency after Conservative leader David Cameron’s European alliance with the Riga politicians of the Fatherland and Freedom party (LNNK) who revere the collaborators in the belief, like Ozols, that the bigger enemy was Moscow and not Berlin.

In Latvia and across the three Baltic states, the octogenarian’s conviction that Stalin surpassed Hitler in monstrosity is commonplace. It is a feeling not confined to the wartime generation.

“They were both pigs, but Stalin was the worst,” said Karlis Pugovics, a 17-year-old Riga schoolboy.

The teenager and the old man were among 1,500 Latvians who today commemorated their Waffen-SS veterans with prayers and parades, songs and tears, flags and protest.

“They are the heroes of the Latvian people. I would be a bad Latvian if I did not [come to] do this,” said Peteris Tabuns, a nationalist MP.

In deep snow and bright sunshine, war survivors and their relatives trudged from the 800-year-old redbrick Lutheran cathedral in old Riga to the Freedom monument to lay white roses in tribute to the 140,000 men of the Latvian Legion, the two Waffen-SS divisions established in 1943, who 66 years ago today joined forces to temporarily thwart the Red army’s advance.

Today’s ceremonies mark the most contested date in the Baltic political calendar. In Riga, a city with a majority of ethnic Russians, a small band of protesters heckled the marchers with calls such as: “Shame on you”, “A disgrace” and “What is there to be proud of?”

Efraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter and head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said the event was deeply offensive. “These people were thinking they were fighting for Latvia but the real beneficiary of their service and their bravery was Nazi Germany.”

Nils Usakovs, the ethnic Russian mayor of Riga, who tried and failed to have the march banned, said he was worried about Latvia’s reputation. “They say they were fighting for a free Latvia. But it’s obvious this fight was always doomed. It’s pretty difficult to be a hero if you’re fighting for a German Nazi.”

The dispute has spilled over into British politics because Cameron severed the Conservatives’ alliance with the mainstream centre-right in the European parliament to form a new caucus of eurosceptics whose members include the LNNK.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, has described the Tory allies as “sickening”. Today he resumed the criticism. “David Cameron has quit the mainstream – leaving behind the French and German governments for extreme fringe parties he wouldn’t be seen dead with at home,” said Miliband.

There were extremists among the parade today, on their best behaviour. But Latvians broadly are incensed at being painted as closet Nazis. “Especially for the Latvian people, there’s no difference between the Nazi regime and Soviet totalitarianism,” said Gaidis Berzins, a former justice minister and deputy leader of the LNNK.

He emerged from the cathedral where Bishop Pavils Bruvers told the congregation that the Latvians of the Waffen-SS were national martyrs who “dreamed of a free, independent and flourishing Latvia”. Instead they were “robbed, beaten, deported, sent to the camps”.

Absent from this narrative of victimhood is the fate of Latvia’s Jews, almost all of whom – 70,000 – were murdered during the war. While the two Latvian divisions were overwhelmingly made up of teenage boys forced to don the SS uniforms, there were also, according to historians, eager volunteers some of whom were complicit in the mass murder.

“It is a fact that Latvians were taking part in the Jewish killing,” said Vilis Daudzins. “But it’s more popular for Latvians that we were victims. There are things we don’t like to talk about.”

Daudzins is a 39-year-old actor whose one-man show, Grandfather, has been drawing record crowds in Riga. The play is based on his research into his family history. He discovered that one grandfather fought alongside the Germans, the other with the Russians. Both were killed at the age of 30. Both left behind two-year-olds, the actor’s parents.

The story has resonated so powerfully because it replicates the experiences of so many families in Latvia, a small country dominated for centuries by Germany and Russia.

“We have a lot of families like that,” he said. “I often ask myself what I would have done.”

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