Over the past ten years, the VVN-BdA has repeatedly protested against the historical revisionist march that takes place in Riga every year on 16 March, on the so-called Legionnaires‘ Day.
Last living former members of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, family members and admirers as well as Nazis from Latvia and Germany were able to take the public space largely unchallenged with the support of the state security forces and indulge in their homage to Nazi criminals and Latvian collaborators.
Only international protests had prevented this day from becoming a national public holiday in the early 1990s. The core message of this SS „hero commemoration“ was always that the Latvian SS collaborators had merely joined the Germans in self-defence against the Soviet occupation. The systematic and also self-induced murder of Latvian Jews and, shortly before that, of the Jewish population deported from the German Reich to Riga, hardly receives any attention in Latvian historical accounts.
Now, with reference to the Russian aggressive war against Ukraine, the Latvian parliament has decided to demolish the memorial that commemorates the liberation from fascism in Riga and at the same time serves as a military cemetery. The VVN-BdA expressly protests against this decision to erase the memory of the historical achievement of the Red Army and the people of the Soviet Union from public space.
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