Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Nazi Waffen SS Veterans Join Ultranationalist March in Latvia

Several hundred ultranationalists, including seven veterans of Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS, marched through Riga on the independence day of the Baltic nation of Latvia.

The march Wednesday, a controversial affair which is Europe’s only annual event by Waffen SS veterans, drew a handful of counter-protesters from Latvia’s Jewish community and about 40 anti-fascist activists, including 20 Germans, Efraim Zuroff, the Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JTA in by phone from Riga.

Latvian authorities detained five Germans who crossed over to the Baltic nation from Lithuania and prevented another one from boarding a plane bound for Latvia, Zuroff said. He added several Latvian lawmakers from the far right also participated in the march.

Noting an absence of pressure by leading EU countries to curb the Latvian Nazi marches,” Zuroff said they were “a stain on the EU record of confronting the glorification of perpetrators of the Holocaust.”

In the Baltic nations, collaborators who fought alongside the Nazis and participated in the annihilation of local Jewish communities are seen by many as heroes because they fought against the Soviet Union, which ruled the Baltic nations until the early 1990s. Lithuania officially considers the Soviet Union’s domination of its territory as a form of genocide, along with the Holocaust – a perception which is commonplace elsewhere in the Baltic countries as well.

Russia under Vladimir Putin, Zuroff said, uses the Baltic nations’ ultranationalist marches in propaganda that he said is meant to falsely depict the populations of those countries as fascist. “They are not, but they are also derelict in confronting the canard that fighting alongside Nazis was patriotic, and that Soviet domination was in anyway comparable to the Holocaust,” Zuroff said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.