Ukraine War Day #753: Back to Latvia! Legionnaire March

Wir kämpften schon in mancher Schlacht,
Im Nord, Süd, Ost und West.
Und stehen nun zum Kampf bereit,
Gegen die rote Pest.

(We have fought in many battles,
In the North, South, East and West.
And now stand ready to fight,
Against the Red Plague Pest.)

[SS Teufelslied]

Dear Readers:

I know that we have been talking a lot about Nazis recently, and I apologize for the repetition. But hey, Nazis are sort of everywhere, and it’s impossible to ignore them! So, today we return to the wonderful nation of Latvia for another segment in our “Friendship of Peoples” category. More Latvians, more Nazis, for those who just can’t get enough of it.

Yesterday (March 16), the Latvians celebrated their annual SS Legionnaires March to commemorate the Latvian SS Legion which fought for Hitler. Here is what the Russian Embassy in Latvia told the Izvestia editorial board about this event:

Latvia has remained the only country in the world which openly celebrates Hitler’s assistants.
And this despite the sentences passed down by the Nürnberg Tribunal, not to mention many international acts, including the Resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, “On the struggle against the heroization of Nazism”. Experts note that the heroization of Nazism proceeds in parallel with the falsification of history in the West.

Protesters point out the basic fact that the SS Legionnaires were Hitler fanboys.

The good news is that the annual SS March has become mostly an old-people thing, and that opinion polls show less and less support for this event among ordinary Latvians.

March 16 was picked as the traditional day to celebrate these Latvian Nazis, because that was the day they fought against the Red Army in Pskov, in 1944. Up until then, as the Izvestia editors point out, the Latvian SS fought mainly against unarmed civilians, having destroyed up to 60,000 Jewish people who were Soviet citizens. The Latvian SS were known for their extreme cruelty, which is why they made for great “punitive brigades” in the service of the Hitlerites.

The march is organized by a group called Daugavas Vanagi (laughingly translated as “Latvian Welfare Association”) which was founded in the 1950’s by Latvian Nazi emigres and has chapters all over the U.S. and Canada. These groups are in tight not just with the American government, but also with its quisling operatives in Riga. The annual march also attracts satellites from various right-wing Nationalist parties.

As the Russian Ambassador to Latvia has pointed out, the Russian government sternly condemns these Nazi marches, calling them “shameful gatherings”, and calling upon international organizations to condemn them.

Realistically, the marches are small, in recent years attracting only around 100-150 marchers. These people might be regarded as mere crackpots, were it not for the fact that they enjoy the firm support of the Latvian government.

Latvian journalist Yury Alexeev: “These SS Legionnaire marches started in the 1990’s. They did not enjoy a lot of support among the population. There were literally just a couple of hundred people. [Editor notes: But in a good year there might be up to 2,000 or 3,000.] The Victory Day celebrations, on the other hand (May 9) used to attract up to 150-200,000 people. Up until the time the government removed the Victory Monument. May 9 was popular, March 16 is not. The only people who attend the March 16 events are degenerate Nazis.”

In the early days, these marches were openly attended by members of the government and other prominent Latvian politicians. After the country joined the European Union, they became more discrete, because this was not good optics for Brussels. Still, to this day, the march is attended by deputies of the political party “National Unity”. The bureaucrats in Brussels close their eyes to this, their reasoning is, “National Unity” does not have any official posts in the government, so the march is not officially sanctioned. In 2023 several prominent leaders of National Unity marched wearing uniforms with Nazi chevrons and singing the hymn of the Waffen-SS.

I found this clip, I believe this is the song in question, it’s got a bouncy beat and you can sing along:

How the Westies Rewrite History

Events such as the SS Legion March take place not just in Latvia, but also in Estonia. Where, every year, they gather together the veterans of the 20th SS Division. For example, in 2019, parliamentary deputies of the Estonian Conservative Party and also the Fatherland Party participated in the event. But in recent years, the Estonian media has started to downplay this. One should note that the Nürnberg Tribunal had declared all of these various SS units as illegal, not just the German SS itself, but also its ancillaries in Latvia and Estonia. But in Latvia and Estonia, the Nationalists praise these units as “heroes who fought against the Soviet occupation.”

The pro-Hitler narrative of the Baltic nationalists is met halfway by the EU. For example, the Euro-Parliament in 2019 adopted a resolution called “On the importance of preserving historical memory for the future Europe”. In which they asserted that “the USSR, along with Germany, bears responsibility for unleashing World War II.” They also complain that the Soviets “occupied” the Baltic states and a part of Poland; a conclusion which is strongly refuted by the Russian government and Russian historians. For example, Professor Dmitry Surzhik notes ironically how “Radio Free Europe” announcers came to power in the various countries after the end of the Cold War; and proceeded to rewrite history according to their propaganda bullet points. In their version of history, the German Nazis were the good guys, and the defeat of Germany in the war was a terrible calamity for the Baltic states.

History Professor Dmitry Surzhik

For example, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, a Canadian emigre who served in the NATO’s “psychological war division”, became President of Latvia between 1999-2007.

The glorification of Nazism extends beyond the borders of the Baltic Republics. For example, Bulgaria has been plagued, these past 20 years, with an annual torchlight event called “Lukov’s March”, named after General Christo Lukov, a Bulgarian Nationalist who worked to ally Bulgaria with Hitler’s Germany. However, the past 2 years the Sofia government has not approved permission for this march.

And the article ends with the very famous story of the scandal that took place in the Canadian Parliament in 2023, when Ukrainian President Voldemar Zelensky greeted Nazi Galichina SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka. Historians know for a fact that Hunka and the soldiers of the Galichina participated vigorously and with lots of gusto in the Holocaust of Soviet and European Jews.

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19 Responses to Ukraine War Day #753: Back to Latvia! Legionnaire March

  1. TomA says:

    No child is born with Nazi beliefs and then grows up to do horrible things by nature. Such things are nurtured by adults and local culture to which the child is exposed during his/her formative years. Such children are actually the first victims of these pathological ideologies. I say this because I don’t think you can solve this problem by addressing it late in life when the child has already grown up and adopted these mental habits. Society protects young children against pedophiles. Should it not do the same when children are being nurtured with hateful ideologies?

    Liked by 1 person

    • yalensis says:

      I suppose so. That would be the role of an enlightened educational curriculum.

      Like

    • JC says:

      For some fun, look up “Who Taught You how to Hate” by Disturbed.

      There are three pillars of society that must be wrested back: education–so the young may be prepared to think and plan for the future, history–so the past may not be forgotten and form as true a line through the present to the future, and psychological mental health–so deviancy may be scientifically identified and treated instead of politicized and glorified.

      The West lost when all three of these were co-opted by inimical forces.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. Beluga says:

    The US kind of set the tone after VE Day of WW2. Accepted Wernher von Braun and his cohorts of rocket experts to be sent to the US. All the stories say the same thing — von Braun set out on the road with his top staff deliberately looking to surrender to the Americans, regarding the Brits as lame. Of course, the Brits were more than somewhat pissed off with the recent V2 attacks, and had conducted bombing raids on Peeenemunde Island where Herr Dipl Eng Nazis had developed the rocket. If captured by the Brits and being unable to pass themselves off as country peasants, von Braun faced at minimum a lengthy stay in one of HM prisons. von Braun knew the Americans were generally clueless on details of anything outside US borders, and correctly assumed Yankeeland would accept him for his technical knowledge. And their ongoing dislike of the Soviet Union — witness the White vs Red war in Russia after WW2.

    In any case, both the US and Russia ripped out German technology by the trainload and shipped it to back home. Everything even bolted down was swiped. No doubt the British and French carted off their share as well, including BMW engine production machinery that ended up in AC

    (remember the Cobra?) and Bristol cars. It was a unique design, so everyone knew it was stolen, a straight six engine tooling, and nobody denied it.

    Formal reparations by treaty? Nah, the victors plundered on the spot, not even bothering to limit themselves to areas in what later became their recognized Zones of Occupation. Face it, the place was in chaos, with didplaced persons wandering everywhere, POWs and slave labourers freed to go home and no easy way to get there. So of course, a lot of brainy Nazis fled to Switzerland and so on, to get to Mexico (a strong German presence from the past) South America, and liars shipped out to the US and Canada pretending to be displaced persons or whatever.

    Let’s not oversimplify how nazis made it around the world, escaping essentially sight unseen in the uproar of civil chaos. Other nazi ex-soldiers from Ukraine and the Baltic states simply walked home. As did French, Czech, Poles and others formerly working as slaves in German factories. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.

    Of course, the man with a voice in his head, General George Patton, wanted o keep his Army right on going to kill hisself some commies for Christ. Or whatever. US backing of Stalin ended immediately after VE Day. I’ve read a couple of speculative books on what might have happened if the US unleashed Patton on the Soviet Union. His army would have been smashed like crushing cooked peas. US army troops were available in no quantity — they were all properly agitating to be demobbed and sent home. And where has the US ever had a decent land army except during the Civil War? Never. The second echelon Germans put up a decent fight against the Allies after Normandy D Day, and put up a good defence in Italy after Mussolini was ousted. Only the likelihood of soon threatening the Soviets with the atom bomb (only let on to Patton as a wonder weapon) is what kept that surly idiot and his six guns sort of quiet for a few months. Luckily for him. Then he got run over ina traffic accident, sob. It let the bullshit legend about him grow in true Hollywood fashion subsequently. Along with the BS that the US won WW2 virtually unassisted.

    That’s a precis. So, while I appreciate the good reporting on dumb Baltic nazis and their parades, I recall Orange day parades where Protestant Northern Irish provoked Catholics, and the whole northern shore of Lake Ontario in Canada is full of Orangemen, Northern Irish protestants who have parades and so on. Drove through that area with my pal, an Irish Catholic, back about ’83 — he didn’t even know those crazies lived there in quantity! So is it a surprise nazis turn up everywhere around the world to this day? I think not. One can blather on about what SHOULD have happened, sorting out nazis from regular proles before letting them board ships to points West right after VE Day WW2, but I think you COMPLETELY underestimate the chaos in defeated Germany after VE Day, and for a good year afterwards.

    And, btw, that’s “discreet”, not discrete in your post.

    Liked by 1 person

    • JC says:

      Churchill was all for going after the Soviet union immediately. He got a lot of looks at the table for the stupidity of his ideas, which were a lot more enthusiasm and fear for Britain’s global position than they were sensible.

      Patton was of similar mind, if not part of some kind of “camp” advocating for such. He wasn’t run over, but according to official record his driver was speeding and slammed into the side of an army truck at a cross street, suffering a broken neck and later blood clot to the heart. It was timely, for sure. “God grew tired of him,” as the Sudanese refugees would put it.

      Liked by 1 person

    • australianlady9 says:

      But…..how were 2000 Nazi war criminals and collaborators able to gain admission into Canada? What was the role of western intelligence?
      https://www.timesofisrael.com/newly-declassified-docs-reveal-why-canada-didn’t-strip-nazis-of-citizenship/

      Like

      • yalensis says:

        “The applicant’s obligation is to satisfy the Court that he is of good character,” [Pierre] Trudeau, who would later become Canada’s prime minister, wrote in a legal opinion at the time. “He is not required to satisfy the Court that he, at no time in his past, committed an opprobrious act. … From a practical, and indeed reasonable, point of view, few, if any, applicants could meet a requirement of that kind.”

        So true. Who amongst us has not committed an opprobrious act in the past? Let he who has not committed an opprobrious act, cast the first stone!

        Like

      • John Jennings says:

        As horrific as that all sounds today, I totally understand why that cuck Trudeau balked at sending the war criminal back to face justice.
        I’d never ask a lady, even an Australian lady how old she is. I don’t know where or how you were schooled. But I can tell you, from the standpoint of the US political climate in the ’60s and 70s when I grew up, that everything the USSR did and said was implicitly regarded as illegitimate.
        Any minister who sent a Baltic SS ‘freedom fighter’ back to Moscow for well-deserved execution on the basis of an in-absentia Soviet war-crimes conviction would have been branded a Soviet stooge, politically eviscerated and likely sent to prison for, oh let’s say, ‘tax evasion.’
        The climate of secrecy within the USSR synergized with the climate of paranoia in Washington to produce a sort of low-grade but very public long-running confrontation. The upside was that despite their neuroses, the top officials on both sides were grown-ups, with a grasp of the real-world consequences for bad decisions.
        It’s not clear at all that the same is true today.

        Like

        • yalensis says:

          Who? What? Nobody asked anybody’s age, where is that coming from?!

          In any case, I get the Cold War politics. But Cuck-Trudeau Papa could have simply been honest instead of duplicitous. He could have said exactly what you said: “We won’t send a Canadian Nazi back to the USSR to be executed because we don’t trust them commies with their farce of a judicial system…”

          Instead of that b.s. about “being of good character” despite having an opprobrious past. I mean, somebody could have been a serial killer in their youth, then stopped killing and become a good citizen in middle age, does that mean they get away with what they did 30 years ago? Of course not!

          Liked by 1 person

    • S Brennan says:

      Sherman: Gee Mr. Peabody, a viewer writes…”The US set the tone after WW2″ Is that true? Was it really the Americans that set the tone after WW2?

      Mr Peabody: Well Sherman, a lot of Anglophilic peoples are in the habit of rewriting history to suit their personal whims…let’s set the WABAC machine to the hot summer of 1943 in Hamburg, Germany and let’s examine the “tone” of RAF Bomber Command’s Arthur “Mad-Bomber” Harris’s Operation Gomorrah, which was the First of WW II Firestorms that killed 100’s of thousands of civilians in their homes.

      Sherman: Yes Mr. Peabody…I’ve got the WABAC set…here we go!
      —————————

      With German radars rendered useless between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m the RAF released 2,300 tons of bombs were on Hamburg, setting a new world record. Included in the aerial salvo were 8,000-pound “block busters” and 4,000-pound “cookies,” along with over 350,000 individual incendiary bombs. Most of the destruction was not from the explosions, but the ensuing fires. This was intended as incendiaries started the fires, but the British cleverly placed high explosive bombs along with delayed-action fuses that killed fire brigades who attempted to put out fires [nice touch huh?].

      But, for the residents of Hamburg, this was only the beginning the worst was yet to come.

      Still in shock over the RAF night raid followed by two days of daylight raids by the Americans on rail yards and shipping facilities combined with a dry, hot summer, these conditions would add to the tragedy of the next raid. At 10:00 p.m. on July 28, just after midnight 722 aircraft began dropping 1,174 tons of incendiaries at 1:00 a.m. The bombs continued to fall for the next 45 minutes. Landing largely in the eastern part of the city, fires began to rage. An RAF pilot later recalled: “We didn’t need any navigation. We could see Hamburg from over the North Sea” With this cauldron of fire observed from above, the scene below in the city became something unimaginable.

      At 1:47 a.m., the last bomber dropped its load as the firestorm raged. A sea of flame grew with temperatures quickly rising over 1,000 degrees Celsius. Superheated air rose above the flames, creating a vacuum that sucked in more air and oxygen, thus feeding the rapidly growing inferno. The process accelerated and generated a wind blowing between 120 and 170 miles per hour, stronger than most hurricanes. Trees were uprooted; people were swept away by the gusts. Along with the heat and light, the fire roared. One eyewitness recalled: “What a sound it was! It was hell, it was hell’s fires. In hell it is not only hot, but loud. The firestorm was screaming.”

      The fire seemed to become a living entity, changing course at will, consuming everything in its path, and generating a heat that melted glass and cutlery and turned bricks to ash. For over four hours, the city burned. Charred bodies littered the landscape as only the facades of buildings remaining. While no definitive casualty number was recorded, some estimates place it near 40,000. Many of the deaths were not caused by fire, but from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning as the flames consumed all the available oxygen.

      This was not an isolated incident. Such scenes were reported again two days later on July 29–30, just after midnight, they dropped their ordnance for 45 minutes over a much wider area than before. Despite the scattershot pattern, a second firestorm occurred, but this time in the northern sections of Hamburg.While it seemed there was not much left to bomb in the city, the RAF conducted a fourth raid on August 2–3…

      [https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation-gomorrah-first-firestorms]
      ————————–
      Mr Peabody: So you see Sherman, many anglophiles go to strenuous lengths to blame “the Americans” or, “Nazi-Rocket-Scientists” for the brutality of WW II clearly, they need to pull their head out of their…er..uh..uhm…out of the sand…yes that’s it, this is a family show .

      Sherman: Yes Mr. Peabody it’s amazing how people like to focus on their personal hatreds while ignoring that British firebombing killed almost 400,000 civilians in Europe, which inspired Curtis LeMay to kill another 500,000 firebombing Japan…far more than the V-1/V-2, more than the Atomic Bombs…which, when you put those two together is far less than conventional artillery!

      Mr Peabody: Well Sherman, there’s hope for you but, not for the Von Braun HATERS…they’ll just keep re-posting the same rant over and over on different threads.
      [https://awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/ukraine-war-day-752-nato-attacks-russian-oil-refineries/#comment-36662]

      Liked by 1 person

      • S Brennan says:

        Liked by 1 person

      • yalensis says:

        Good Lord! and these people have the gall to call the Red Army brutes.
        Dumb question, though, why was German radar inactive from 1:00 to 2:00 AM? Was that every night, or just that one night?

        Liked by 1 person

        • S Brennan says:

          The Brits dropped millions of mylar strips that had aluminum film applied by vapor deposition [similar to recording tape which has an iron oxide on it], this obscured the British bombers. Variations of the theme are still around today, the Israelis have their attack bombers hide behind the radar shadow of civilian airliners and so it goes…

          Liked by 1 person

          • yalensis says:

            That sounds like a pretty good technique. But I do NOT approve of firebombing civilians like that, it’s barbarous. That would have been a war crime were it not for the fact that the winners write the rules!

            Liked by 1 person

  3. Bukko Boomeranger says:

    Why does that eagle in the silver/blue/gold illustration you inserted have upside-down Legos where its talons should be?!? Do Legos have some sort of cultural significance for Latvians? Is this a subliminal product placement advertising trick? Why would whatever corpo it is that owns the Lego brand want to put its toys in the insignia of some obscure Nazi-venerating .org?

    Like

    • yalensis says:

      Well, we might have to page Professor Robert Langdon to explain all the symbology. But to my ignorant eyes, those talons look more like tiny gardening rakes than lego blocks. Maybe it means that the Latvian Nazi Eagles feel like their job is to rake up all the leaves into a heap? Then the German soldiers can run and jump into the pile of leaves – wheee!

      Like

  4. hismastersvoice says:

    What a jolly song!

    Everybody knows how the Nazis were able to recruit people by offering them spiffy uniforms, but — apart from the Horst Wessel Lied, which turns into a horrible mindworm whenever I think of it — I hadn’t realised that they were also very good at generating songs which one can hum, whistle and exterminate subhumans by.

    Like

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