"Do Mention the War": Nostalgia for Nazi-era heroes in NATO's host Latvia

 

By Mark Almond (Oriel College, Oxford. MPAlmond@aol.com)

 

Imagine a country in which grand monuments to collaborators with Hitler were put up while memorials to anti-Nazi partisans were pulled down. Think of a state which neglected its main concentration camp as memorial to the victims of the Holocaust while Nazi nostalgia was commemorated in stone. Ponder a military which employs aged veterans of the Waffen SS to give pep talks to young recruits before they go a-peacekeeping abroad. What would Western democrats like George W. Bush, Tony Blair or Angela Merkel say about such a state?

 

The answer is: "Let's party!"

 

Sadly what might seem like a black joke or Borat-style calumny is true about NATO's host-state Latvia. Imagine the German or Austrian governments giving permission for a "private" memorial to the Waffen SS mimicking the Washington Mall's Vietnam Wall – only with more than 30,000 names of martyrs who died fighting for Hitler. That is the  huge memorial complex to the dead of the Latvian legion of the Waffen SS erected at Lestene west of Riga. The Salaspils concentration camp just outside Riga is poorly maintained, ridden with weeds outside and spiders' webs in the display cabinets inside! In 2004, an elderly veteran of the SS was showing a group of Interior Ministry troops preparing to go to Iraq around a "private war museum" near the frontline in 1945 west of Riga. It is filled with authentic equipment and other exhibits of the Latvian legionaries' fierce resistance to the Red Army. The vet assured German speaking visitors that statues to "Adolf" would be put up because he had led the anti-Russian struggle then.  

 

Old Nazis from the Baltic States and Ukraine as well see NATO expansion as proof that their anti-Soviet struggle at the side of Hitler put them on the side of the march of history – only they were a bit premature in choosing sides.

 

No doubt George W. Bush  is as ignorant about the deep-roots of his hosts anti-Communism and pro-Western views as he is about his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush's acting as an agent on behalf of Nazi German companies in the United States until February, 1942. I doubt if Tony Blair knows much about Latvia's past or World War Two.[1]

 

To add insult to injury, on its last day in session before the start of the NATO summit the Latvian Seimas (Parliament) voted down a bill to pay restitution to Jews who had lost property during the war.[2] Even Britain has paid compensation to German Jews whose assets were seized to help fund the common anti-Hitler war effort, but plucky Latvia apparently can find more time to ponder the rights and wrongs of the issue.

 

The only concession the Latvian government made to any lingering Allied squeamishness about the war was its instruction to the hundreds of Latvian folklorists knitting commemorative mittens for the NATO delegates not to embellish them with swastikas! Even Sasha Barron Cohen could not invent analysis like "Swastikas have featured in traditional Latvian knitwear for centuries, variously known as the Thunder Cross or Fire Cross, but its feared that delegates, unfamiliar with local folklore, may take mittens decorated with swastikas amiss."[3] Although Latvians like to explain the Perkonkrusts or "Thunder Cross" as a an ancient pagan fire symbol – which it was in Germany too – they cannot get away from its use by Latvian collaborators in the Second World War.  It decorates the names of the Lestene monument's most solemn dedicatees: the martyrs to whom Hitler awarded the highest decoration, the Knights' Cross of the Iron Cross. 

 

Maybe the war was a long time ago but elsewhere insensitivity to Nazi crimes let alone celebration of collaborators would lead to outrage around the world. It is difficult to imagine a US president letting a country get away with neglecting the scenes of the Holocaust and celebrating last ditch-defenders of the Bunker without a serious finger-wagging.  

 

NATO's government leaders plus 4,100 other freeloaders, sorry delegates with defence expertise have descended on Riga for two days and three nights. Northern Europe's stag party capital[4] has been closed to ordinary traffic so NATO delegates can get from conference hall to the clubs without hindrance from the largely Russian-speaking locals. Latvia is the EU's poorest member per capita and yet this orgy of international bonhomie is at the expense of the impoverished people who are kept away from the festivities for security reasons. Independent Latvia's first foreign minister, Janis Jurkans says that the Summit is a holiday organized... at the expense of the whole Latvia: "Ask any person in the street: what city hosted the previous NATO summit? and he will hardly answer your question… I would understand if each of the guests paid for himself… but what they do is coming to Latvia, the poorest and almost the most corrupt EU country, to hold a summit that will cost it a pretty penny – a penny Latvia could well spend to build some good hospital…"[5]

 

Even when Brezhnev visited the capitals of Soviet republics they were not subject to this level of security shutdown and the official propaganda was not quite so insistent on the "joy" felt by locals at the presence of a real live superpower president in their midst.[6]

 

In Soviet times it is true history was re-written, but then so it is today. Under Communism, the official line grossly exaggerated the welcome given by ordinary Latvians to the incorporation of their country into the Soviet Union after 1940, but Soviet propaganda also played down the amount of collaboration with the Nazi invaders after 22^nd June, 1941. Nowadays, Latvian official history – and it is written by state-sponsored committees and published in volumes sponsored by history-minded institutions like the Latvian Ministry of Defence -  weasels away at explaining why joining the Waffen SS was not so unreasonable for "patriots" and in any case they were conscripted. It is all terribly reminiscent of the apocryphal Turkish explanation for the Armenian genocide in 1915: "It never happened and any way it was a long time ago." 

 

The basic problem is that active Latvian collaboration in Hitler's military did not start until 1943 _ apart from the few thousand police battalion volunteers who took part in the extermination of most of Latvia's Jews in the two years after Hitler's invasion. Whereas in June/July, 1941, Latvians like many other unhappy subjects of Stalin could be forgiven for hoping that the German army would be liberators from Communism, by 1943 who could really believe that Hitler offered Latvia a restoration of national independence, let alone any kind of democracy? Hitler's local enforcers had made clear that the Baltic States were to be an outpost of the Reich, ruled by Germans with the Balts in loyal subordination – and the Russians as slaves.  It was only after Stalingrad when Hitler needed more troops than Germany could provide that he reluctantly agreed to recruit Balts among other subject peoples who were not even permitted the hollow dignity of a Quisling or Vichy-style nominal self-government. 

 

Those troops fought a bitter battle to hold on to the Courland peninsula until May, 1945, though some Latvian troops like Estonian SS men also participated in fighting away from their homeland in Poland, Czechoslovakia and in Berlin the dying days of the war.

 

Although many Latvians fled westwards, or tried to, only in 1945 as Stalin's troops advanced, the Nazis evacuated privileged collaborators. Latvia's president Vaira Vike-Freiberga was only a child at the end of the war but her parents' relations with the Nazi occupier seem to have been privileged. Her biographer tells us, "three days before the arrival of Russian [sic.] troops, her stepfather heard by chance that a German convoy was on the point of leaving… and that a certain number of people would be allowed to join it."[7] This was in autumn, 1944. Memory can play tricks on all of us, but at the NATO Summit in Prague in   she gave her "dramatic narrative" of her family's flight into exile.  US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns,  ''You could feel what she was saying. There was absolute silence in that room. President Bush was very moved by it, and I believe it was one of the finest speeches I have ever heard in Europe.''[8] But did they understand that the future Latvian President's family was conveyed by a Nazi ship to German-occupied Poland, or what her biographers call the port of  "Gotenhafen (now Gdynia)." The problem is that "Gotenhafen" only existed on Nazi maps. The port of Gdynia was founded by Poles in newly-independent Poland after 1919 to give the reborn Polish state an access to the sea of its own. Anyone with any sense of the true history of would refer to Gdynia as "Gotenhafen under Nazi occupation", but being NATO's pin-up means never having to get the past right.[9]

 

If President Vaira-Freiberga's memory of the wartime period is understandably hazy in someone born in 1937, reading Latvian history books would hardly help set her mind clearer about the who, what and when of 1941-45. If any of the NATO delegates or journalists travelling with them were to break away from the conference sessions they could visit Riga's bookshops and see for themselves what is on sale. For those who are linguistically challenged and have difficulty understanding "Waffen SS" in Latvian, several bookshops have English-language sections with the nostalgic works usefully translated along with officially-sponsored histories of the country which repeat the improbably claim that Nazi Germany equipped unwilling and unreliable conscripts with tanks and even their own air force. Just look at how cautious America and Britain are in "newly democratic Iraq" about letting  "sovereign Iraq's own army" get its hands on up-to-date equipment for fear that the soldiers might desert to the insurgents to see how implausible it is that Hitler and Himmler would let their most powerful weapons fall into the hands of likely deserters.  

 

In Estonia, where George W. Bush broke his journey en route to Riga, the capital Tallinn rejoices in an Occupation Museum. Visitors are greeted at its entrance (or were on my last visit) by a life-size model Estonian Waffen SS soldier with a flame thrower! He is a "resister" not an "occupier". Edward Lucas of The Economist told me in December, 2004, if anyone thought the exhibits in museum were bad enough, he thanked God no-one could read the Estonian-only signs to go with them "full of stuff about Judeo-Bolsheviks"!

 

For the Nazi nostalgics in the Baltics, NATO expansion marks the belated victory of those who collaborated with Hitler. The blatant russophobia sponsored by NATO expansion and its supporters is a sinister echo of the anti-Slav racism of the war period. Instead of damning Communism and Stalin's agents whether Russian or Latvian, the new Latvian elite has forged an alliance of Latvian ex-Nazis and Latvian ex-Communists to beat up on Russians and other non-Latvians. Yet all of this ignored by the bigwigs of the West and EU who usually never lose an opportunity to wag fingers at backsliders on human rights, racism let alone neo-Nazism.    

 

Up to 700,000 ethnic Russians and other Slav "occupiers" are denied full civic rights in Latvia and are frequently told to "go home", including in the past by Mrs. Vike-Freiberga if they did not like their conditions in "free" Latvia. The Baltic model of national homogenous states replete with occupation museums to decry the "Russian" communists who ruled them before 1991 are being promoted across the pro-Western states of the old USSR. In Georgia, for instance, the Estonian Occupation Museum was taken as the model for Tbilisi's own account of Russian occupation by Stalin et al! (Sadly when I tried to enter the Tbilisi Occupation Museum a few weeks ago  a power cut closed the building.)

 

So long as American and West European leaders mouth anti-fascist slogans and the rhetoric of democracy while ignoring those in  NATO and the EU's ranks who turn a blind eye to nostalgia for Nazism at best or actually promote it, then Russian fears that NATO expansion is a weapon directed at them as a people won't diminish. Bush and Blair may not know or care what their new allies in the New Europe think about their Slav neighbours but those who remember attitudes in the first New World Order to Russians who will not be easily reassured when they see the propaganda of yesteryear endorsed and the symbols of Nazi Europe proudly displayed in the new NATO.  

---

[1] Blair claimed after 9-11 that ""My father's generation went through the Blitz… There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. That country was America." See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1555440.stm One North American country fought with Britain during the Blitz in 1940-41, Canada. Hitler declared war on the United States on 12^th December, 1941. Knowing no history leaves Blair free to make it uninhibitedly with the well-known consequences See BBC News, "We share grief, Blair tells America" (20^th Sept. 2001):  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1555440.stm.

[2] See Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Latvia's Parliament rejected a proposed law on the restitution ... (24^th Nov, 2006) and the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), "Latvian parliament rejects Jewish restitution law" (24^th Nov, 2006): http://www.cjp.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=201150. So far as I can find, the German DPA is the only mainline news agency to report the rejection of restitution to the victims of the Holocaust.

[3] See Laura Sheeter, "No swastika for Nato mittens" BBC News (20^th Aug. 2006): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5268950.stm.   

[4] Google offers 197,000 links for Riga and stag party.

[5] See Regnum.ru, "Death in the airport: First victim of the Nato summit in Riga" (27^th Nov, 2006): www.regnum.ru/english/745480.html.

[6]  The Latvian embassy in Washington's website assures visitors: "Latvia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Artis Pabriks notes that he is "truly delighted that Riga will have an opportunity to receive NATO leaders at the time between two significant celebrations – the anniversary of the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Latvia and Christmas, thus making the year-end an unforgettable and very special occasion…" See http://www.latvia-usa.org/backgrrround.html. The sycophancy extended even to possible US presidential candidates: "[Latvian President] Vike-Freiberga expressed joy that Giuliani had accepted the invitation to attend the NATO Riga summit." See "Giuliani praises Latvia's democracy" in the Baltic Times (28^th Nov, 2006): http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/16915/ 

[7] Emphasis added. See Nadine Vitols Dixon, A Life's Journey: Vaira Vīķe Freiberga, President of Latvia (Pētergailis: Riga, 2005), 12.

[8] See Charles M. Sennott  and BrianWhitmore, "Latvia shining example for new NATO nations" in  The Boston Globe (24^th Nov. 2002): http://www.iub.edu/~bafsa/tidbits.html

[9] See Vitols Dixon, A Life's Journey, 14-15. Latvian language lives of the President contain the same anti-Polish geo-historical howler.