Nation split over ex-Nazis' march

RIGA - The grizzled old men turned out in their hundreds despite the snow.

Nearly all of them were in their late 80s and many hobbled on walking sticks.

Watched by more than 1000 blue-uniformed riot police, they brandished red-and-white Latvian national flags and barked out patriotic wartime "warrior songs" that echoed ominously through the narrow streets of Riga's old town.

The march, by about 350 surviving former members of Latvia's Nazi Waffen SS division and more than 2000 of their supporters, looked like an act of collective octogenarian defiance.

In many ways, it was. Hours earlier, Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the man considered to be the world's leading Nazi hunter, had called on Latvia to ban public celebrations marking the country's controversial Legionnaires' Day, calling it an "attempt to rewrite history".

He was backed by Jewish groups, Holocaust memorial organisations and by Nils Usakovs, Riga's ethnic Russian Mayor, who said: "It is a bit difficult to claim to be a hero if you were fighting for the Nazis."

But at the last minute, Riga's district court overturned the ban after judges agreed that a city which last year permitted a gay pride parade could not in all fairness prohibit a march by former Waffen SS men.

Latvia's so-called Legionnaires' Day marks the anniversary of a 1943 battle in which two Latvian divisions of 30,000 Waffen SS troops defeated the Soviet Red Army.

After an emotional church service held in Riga's 14th-century cathedral, the veterans and supporters marched freely through the city.

Flanked by hundreds of Latvian flags, they placed flowers and Waffen SS memorabilia at the foot of the city's 1930s-built freedom and fatherland monument, which was erected to celebrate Latvia's post-World War I independence.

A large gang of young ethnic Russians brandished placards bearing the words "Waffen SS" and the names of Latvian villages where atrocities against Jews were committed by Latvian Waffen SS members during the war.

About 75,000 Jews were murdered in the country during the Nazi occupation.

"It is disgraceful that these people should be allowed to march here," said a man, who said his name was Mikhail.

Riga's inhabitants, who number close to a million, are equally divided between Russians and Latvians. Yet the Russian anti-Waffen SS protesters were in the minority during yesterday's celebrations.

In Riga, a capital city that was part of the Soviet Union until 1990, anti-Soviet resentment remains high.

"These Waffen SS veterans were fighting for the liberation of Latvia," said one respectable-looking man in his 50s. "They have a right to their celebration."

That view is echoed by an 86-year-old man, one of 140,000 Latvians who fought on the German side during World War II. He said that Latvians were prohibited from joining the regular German army and were only permitted to serve in Waffen SS "legions".

"We chose the lesser of two evils because during the German occupation, the Germans killed or deported 18,000 Latvians, whereas the Russians killed or deported 300,000. Were we not right to make such a choice?"

- INDEPENDENT