Thursday, March 17, 2016

Latvia: Lawmakers march alongside Nazi Waffen SS veterans


Via CJN:
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 Centre, 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.”

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