At the end of World War II, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania vanished behind the Iron Curtain — the only countries wiped off the map after the war, illegally annexed by the Soviet Union. They disappeared from public discourse and awareness.
The hunt for Nazis wiped away that anonymity. Starting in the 1960's, Soviet propaganda targeted their most troublesome nationalities: Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The KGB launched show trials domestically, convicting and executing individuals who could not have been present at the scene of their alleged crimes.1 Abroad, a concerted propaganda campaign attacked the virulently anti-Communist post-war émigré leadership of those same nationalities.2
That campaign bore fruit in 1977 when the U.S. Department of Justice launched the deportation trial of Vilis Hāzners, former Latvian Legionnaire, a leader in the Latvian community including Daugavas Vanagi, Hawks of the Daugava river, the Legionnaire's self-help welfare organization. The proceedings galvanized the anti-Nazi movement and launched the Latvians-are-Nazis cottage industry. And when Hāzners was rightfully acquitted, there was outrage at DOJ "ineptitude" and Hāzners's "escape from justice."
At the core of that outrage? The two Latvian Legion divisions the Nazis created from largely illegally conscripted Latvians to fight against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front were Freiwillige ("Voluntary," a Nazi propaganda lie) "Waffen Grenadier Divisions of the SS", "Waffen-SS". The criminal SS, perpetrators of the Holocaust! Hāzners could not possibly be innocent.
The falsehoods that the Latvian "Waffen-SS" were in any way Nazis, volunteered to fight for and supported the Nazi cause, were involved in the Holocaust, originated in Soviet propaganda launched in the 1960's and afterwards. Today's Russia carries on that tradition and insists the USSR "liberated" the Baltic states, which had already joined the USSR of their free will prior to the German invasion. That to insist otherwise, as do the Baltic peoples, is a neo-Nazi attempt to "rewrite history." And so the propaganda onslaught continues:
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Propaganda: Legionnaires murdered Jews in the Holocaust.
Fact: The Legion was formed after the Holocaust swept through Latvia. Prior collaborators sent to the front at the end of the war and "joined" to the Legion were tried and convicted after the war. No one considers them part of the Legion. No one excuses their actions because they fought against Soviet reinvasion.
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Propaganda: Legionnaires supported Hitler.
Fact: Legionnaires were compelled to swear an "oath to Hitler" to obey military orders (from the Wehrmacht, under which they served) in the "fight against Bolshevism", nothing more. Regardless whether volunteered or conscripted, a German rifle was the only option against Soviet re-occupation. An oath given in trade for a rifle or under duress (80%+ were illegally conscripted) confers no loyalty. Legionnaires wore their loyalty, a Latvian flag, under their uniforms.
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Propaganda: Legionnaires fought for Nazi victory.
Fact: This myth presumes the only possible outcomes for Latvia were either Soviet or Nazi victory and subjugation. Latvians simply hoped to repeat their War of Independence: fight with the Germans to drive out the Russians, fight against the Germans to drive them out to achieve independence.
Propaganda: Even if Legionnaires did not fight for Nazi victory, they delayed Allied victory, causing more Allied war casualties and delaying Soviet liberation of Hitler's death camps, thus killing more Jews.
Fact: This is malignant victim-blaming. All Stalin had to do was bypass Courland (western Latvia, where Latvians held out to the end of the war), per sanitized Soviet history. Instead, Stalin threw in division after division to their slaughter: 394,000 Red Army dead, wounded, and missing, thousands of tanks destroyed, in his attempt to re-take every last bit of Latvian territory. Perhaps he panicked over the memory that after World War I, Latvians wrested their homeland away from the Bolsheviks after their newly declared sovereign government had been reduced to huddling on a ship in Liepāja (Libau) harbor, holding not a speck of Latvian territory, while Russians held virtually all of it and had already declared an independent Soviet Latvia. Blame Stalin for attempting to eradicate the Latvians, not Latvians for attempting to survive.
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Propaganda: Latvian Legionnaires were Nazis.
Fact: German membership in the elite Waffen-SS required proof of pure Germanic ancestry, and at least initially, 20:20 vision and cavity-free teeth. Members were volunteers and Nazi party members. German Waffen-SS (and SS in general) members were guilty of Holocaust atrocities. Legionnaires were infantry conscripts fighting on the Eastern Front uninvolved in the Holocaust or with the Nazi party.
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Propaganda: The annual commemoration of the Latvian Legion every March 16th in Latvia is proof that Latvians are resurrecting Nazism and glorifying Hitler and Jew-murderers.
Fact: A rapidly dwindling number of veterans and the public proceed solemnly to the Freedom Monument to commemorate the 50,000 Latvians who died with the hope in their heart of restoring Latvian independence after the war, hoping the Legion would become the core of Latvia's restored army. Commemoration was observed for decades prior to Latvian independence with not a wisp of controversy.
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Most insidiously...
Propaganda: On 16 March, anti-fascists protest the glorification of NazismFact: Who are the leading "anti-fascists"? They are Kremlin trolls paid to call the Legionnaires "Nazis." Josef Koren heads Latvia Without Nazism, a branch of Putin-organized World Without Nazism, which Russia has used to appropriate the cause of anti-Nazism to denounce the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian peoples as neo-Nazi anti-Semites. Russia's "Compatriot Fund" bankrolls a campaign to promote the myth that "Latvian Nazism" is resurrecting. In truth, activists such as Tatjana Ždanoka, a former member of the Communist party, actively fought against Latvian Independence from the USSR occupation in the late 1980s and (clearly) hold a grudge against Latvian independence.
Unfortunately, politicians and activists fall prey to World Without Nazism. For example, falsely translating "žīds" ("Jew") as "kike" for visiting American politicians. The Soviet regime introduced the currently used "ebrejs" ("Hebrew") as a means to appropriate the identity of the Latvian Jewish community, replacing historically Yiddish and German-speaking Latvian Jewry with its linguistically and culturally foreign Russian counterpart.
Mission
Latvians do not deny their collaborators: Arājs Kommando and police battalions subordinated to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). However, even Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff himself stated (2012) on Latvian television that the Latvian Legion did not participate in the Holocaust.
Twelve years after Zuroff's affirmation, the story of the Latvian Legion — origins, allegiances, aspirations, actions — is still obscured in false allegations that they were members of "the greatest Jew-killing machine in human history", that by fighting against the Red Army they delayed Allied victory and caused more deaths of innocents, even extended the extermination of Jews in Hitler's death camps. Nothing could be further from fact.
Nor does the annual Latvian Legion commemoration in any manner glorify Nazism. Neo-Nazis only began to attend the commemoration after its critics loudly denounced it as Nazi glorification, the only place in Europe where Nazis are honored.
Our goals are straightforward:
- examine historical fact;
- promote an informed understanding of the Latvian Legion and those who honor its memory; and
- stem the tide of propaganda and false accusations.
| 1 | For example, the Latvian 18th Police Battalion was convicted of slaughtering all the Jews of Slonim, Belarus. One convicted and executed individual had been in a hospital at the time. The Germans' own documentation confirms the Germans did the killing, the battalion had not yet existed when the killings actually took place, and the battalion had not been in Slonim when the Soviet trial alleged the killings took place. |
| 2 | Two notable KGB propaganda publications were Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? attacking Latvians, and SS Wherewolves attacking Ukrainians. |