At the end of my five-week stay in Latvia, I visited the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, in Riga, which commemorates the Soviet and German occupations of the country from 1940 to 1991. I had been there five years earlier, during my first visit to Riga. I found it moving then. The story of a small nation, caught between two much larger powers led by wicked regimes, struggling for survival.
During my visit this time, a controversial issue that raised its head again and again was the Latvian Legion; Latvian Waffen SS units formed to fight with Nazi Germany against the Soviets. It was impressed upon me that most of the young men drafted into the legion were not volunteers, that they had no real choice. For Latvian men who refused service in Germany’s war effort, the alternative was labour camps. Yet I felt uncomfortable with the fact that the legion is widely celebrated.
On 16 March every year, the date of a battle against Soviet forces, ceremonies mark the legion as national heroes. While Latvia was part of the Soviet Union, Latvian émigrés, many of them ex-legionnaires, marked the event abroad. And following the restoration of independence, it was marked in Latvia itself. 16 March was an official national remembrance day in the late 1990s, although that official status was removed in 2000, under international pressure.
But the day is still marked. Young men from far-right organisations, one of which, All for Latvia, has just secured six seats in the 100-member Latvian parliament, line up with Latvian flags. Even some mainstream politicians visit the cemetery where members of the legion are interred.
I think Latvians who mark 16 March have got the balance wrong. One Latvian American who had moved to Latvia in the 1990s told me of his admiration for an uncle who had been in the legion, who had inspired him to be a Latvian patriot, and to return to the country. That Latvia found itself in such an impossible situation, occupied by the brutal Stalinist regime in 1940, which eradicated its independence and murdered or deported many of its people, and then by Nazi Germany the following year, was a national tragedy. Latvians were traumatised by the events of 1940 to 1991, when their land was colonised, their language and distinctiveness threatened with extinction as they came close to being a minority in their own country.
In 1941, many Latvians welcomed the Germans as the lesser of two evils, and saw in Germany the hope of greater respect for Latvian culture, and even for restored autonomy. It was a misplaced hope. The Nazis’ long-term aim was to deport much of the Latvian population to Russia, colonise the country with Germans, and Germanise the remaining Latvians. And what of Latvia’s Jewish population, sent to death camps, with the involvement of some Latvians, some of whom later joined the legion? Even though there is no suggestion that most legionnaires subscribed to Nazi ideology, is it really right to commemorate them as national heroes, as freedom fighters? Some did, it is true, carry on the hopeless struggle in the resistance for years after the Soviet return to the country.
Like all those, Latvian, Jewish and others who suffered at the hands of the appalling Stalin and Hitler regimes, the legionnaires should be commemorated as victims. For half a century, Latvians had no control over their own destiny, buffeted as they were by the forces of geopolitical affairs. Like in some other occupied countries, Latvians sometimes found themselves fighting on opposite sides. Some had been drawn into the Red Army in 1940, and others were committed communists. What I liked about the Museum of the Occupation was that it acknowledged all sides, and the tragedy that afflicted all Latvians, those who found themselves fighting for the Soviet Union and for Nazi Germany, the massacred Jews and the long-suffering civilians caught in the middle. Latvians were tragic victims in the war, and that is what should be marked. There was nothing heroic about the legion. Martial celebration of the legion’s military prowess on behalf of Nazi Germany is out of place. I found the Museum of the Occupation moving this time too, because it gets the balance right.
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