Are the Latvians right?

ejmaztec

I think it's fair to commemorate those who fought against the Russians, despite the fact that they were fighting alongside the Germans. The Russians always say that they liberated various countries from the Nazis, and that all of those affected should be grateful for their help, but I think that their forcing communist regimes onto them negates anything that they did before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/16/latvians-march-commemorate-ss-veterans


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

Veterans of the Latvian Legion, two Waffen-SS divisions which united to fight the Russian advance into the Baltic nation, walk to Riga’s Freedom monument. Photograph: Ilmars Znotins/AFP/Getty Images





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."

marcsignal

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.

funny thing for David Miliband to say, considering the former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attley transoprted the entire 14th SS Division Galicia to England after WW2, so they could work for the West on covert Cold War operations behind the Iron curtain because of their expertese in the Language and local knowledge.

This unit was heavily implicated in War Crimes and no members have stood trial. There are former members of this Division still living peacefully in provincial towns in the UK today.

ejmaztec

marcsignal wrote: »

funny thing for David Miliband to say, considering the former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attley transoprted the entire 14th SS Division Galicia to England after WW2, so they could work for the West on covert Cold War operations behind the Iron curtain because of their expertese in the Language and local knowledge.

This unit was heavily implicated in War Crimes and no members have stood trial. There are former members of this Division still living peacefully in provincial towns in the UK today.

That chap never engages his brain before putting his mouth into operation, but I think that he's critical on this occasion so's he can stick it to the Conservatives before the upcoming election. I think that both his father and grandfather were Jewish Marxists, the grandfather having joined the Red Army when he was in Warsaw. He's probably got some sympathy for the Russians in this respect.

I worked with a woman whose late husband was a Latvian who ended up in England after WW2. I don't know what his involvement was, but I know that he hated the Russians with a vengeance. His widow told me that they had no children, and that this was her late husband's decision. He had this idea that in the distant future, the descendants of the exiled Latvians would try and free Latvia from the Russians, and get slaughtered as a result.

It was ironic, the choice that he made, given the way things turned out, but he wasn't alive when the Soviet empire crashed, so there was no face-palm moment.

Morlar

I would think milliband is looking at this from a jewish persons' perspective rather than a Latvian, or national one.

A friend of mine's grandfather was in the Estonian resistance to communism made up of former SS. It's a little known fact (in Ireland anyway) that after the war these guys fought bitterly against the communists taking refuge in the forests until well into the 1950's abandoned by the west to their fate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers

I think Latvians/Estonians should commemorate whoever they wish. Their perspective on all of this is a lot less glamourised & polarised by propaganda than that of the west. Latvians having had first hand experience of both German and communist occupation it wouldn't surprise me at all that they want to comemorate those who fought against communism in whatever form. To me there are paralells with the Irishmen who fought the british empire & occupation with German assistance. We rightly look on them as Irish patriots rather than German supporters.

Stovepipe

Hi there,
What you are also forgetting is the well-known enthusiasm with which Latvians and Lithuanians embraced the killing of Jews, to an extent that shocked and surprised the Germans.One Lithuanian, a well-known long-range pilot, was particularly vicious and publicly murdered Jews and Russians in the streets of the capital.Also, many of the SS from those nations ended up serving, voluntarily, in the Einsatzgruppen and in the Camp Guards.So, I think their celebration of their SS background is inappropriate, to say the least.
regards
Stovepipe

Morlar

Stovepipe wrote: »

Hi there,
What you are also forgetting is the well-known enthusiasm with which Latvians and Lithuanians embraced the killing of Jews, to an extent that shocked and surprised the Germans.One Lithuanian, a well-known long-range pilot, was particularly vicious and publicly murdered Jews and Russians in the streets of the capital.Also, many of the SS from those nations ended up serving, voluntarily, in the Einsatzgruppen and in the Camp Guards.So, I think their celebration of their SS background is inappropriate, to say the least.
regards
Stovepipe

I think the part that you are forgetting is that the communist party was rightly or wrongly largely seen as a jewish enterprise. It was called jewish bolshevism in german propaganda and in many peoples' minds this was accurate. Look at how many of the kommisars were jewish, they were also disproportionaltey present in leadership levels. Marx himself was a jew, you should probably look up the activities of people like Beria if you want to see what they were capable of. One of the first things the communists did on coming to power was make anti-semitism punishable by death and outlaw the christian churches. They systematically destroyed church buildings then and also post war. Ukranians, latvians and Lithuanians lived under brutal communist domination for decades. Many of them saw the germans as liberators & once liberated they turned on their former masters with a vengeance that to my mind, in that context, is probably understandable to a degree. Look up the ukranian collectivist/centralised famine for example. This was a communist organised famine where the Ukraine population was annihilated - some accounts put the population as cut by 50% - nowadays the estimates go from 4-10 million people dead in the space of 4 years. This was fresh in the memory at that time. This was not a natural catastrophe caused by crop failure or the elements - it was organised and instigated by the communist party & bearing all that in mind & considering the total non-reaction from the west it's not hard to understand why many welcomed the germans with open arms.

ejmaztec

There are always a few over-zealous psychopaths in any army, and I would even include the Western allies in this. Not all of the non-German members of the SS were involved in genocide, and simply wanted shot of the communists and all that they stood for.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" pretty much sums it up in my opinion.

As for the Jews, in general they were never the most popular people in history, and were probably scapegoats for many of the ills inflicted on society for over two thousand years. I spoke with a Polish chap a few years ago, who had found his way to England and became a fighter pilot. He admitted that he and his peers hated the Jews in pre-war Poland, and even attacked them physically on more than one occasion, and much of this taking place when he was at university in Warsaw. So it wasn't just the ignorant rabble bearing an anti-Jewish grudge.

I think that anti-semitic propaganda coming out of Nazi Germany exacerbated the anti-Jewish situation in surrounding countries, making the Jews bigger targets than they had been previously.