Lettiska legionen

At the end of World War II, Estonia , Latvia , and Lithuania vanished behind the Iron Curtain — the only countries wiped off the map after the war, illegally annexed by the Soviet Union . They disappeared from public discourse and awareness. The hunt for Nazis wiped away that anonymity. Starting in the 1960's, Soviet propaganda targeted their most troublesome nationalities: Estonians , Latvians , Lithuanians , and Ukrainians . The KGB launched show trials domestically, convicting and executing individuals who could not have been present at the scene of their alleged crimes.1 Abroad, a concerted propaganda campaign attacked the virulently anti-Communist post-war émigré leadership of those same nationalities.2 That campaign bore fruit in 1977 when the U.S. Department of Justice launched the deportation trial of Vilis Hāzners , former Latvian Legionnaire , a leader in the Latvian community including Daugavas Vanagi , Hawks of the Daugava river, the Legionnaire's self-help welfare organization. The proceedings galvanized the anti-Nazi movement and launched the Latvians-are-Nazis cottage industry. And when Hāzners was rightfully acquitted, there was outrage at DOJ "ineptitude" and Hāzners's "escape from justice." At the core of that outrage? The two Latvian Legion divisions the Nazis created from largely illegally conscripted Latvians to fight against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front were Freiwillige ("Voluntary," a Nazi propaganda lie) "Waffen Grenadier Divisions of the SS", "Waffen-SS". The criminal SS, perpetrators of the Holocaust! Hāzners could not possibly be innocent. The falsehoods that the Latvian "Waffen-SS" were in any way Nazis, volunteered to fight for and supported the Nazi cause, were involved in the Holocaust, originated in Soviet propaganda launched in the 1960's and afterwards. Today's Russia carries on that tradition and insists the USSR "liberated" the Baltic states, which had already joined the USSR of their free will prior to the German invasion. That to insist otherwise, as do the Baltic peoples, is a neo-Nazi attempt to "rewrite history." And so the propaganda onslaught continues: Fact : The Legion was formed after the Holocaust swept through Latvia. Prior collaborators sent to the front at the end of the war and "joined" to the Legion were tried and convicted after the war. No one considers them part of the Legion. No one excuses their actions because they fought against Soviet reinvasion. Fact : Legionnaires were compelled to swear an "oath to Hitler" to obey military orders (from the Wehrmacht, under which they served) in the "fight against Bolshevism", nothing more. Regardless whether volunteered or conscripted, a German rifle was the only option against Soviet re-occupation. An oath given in trade for a rifle or under duress (80%+ were illegally conscripted) confers no loyalty. Legionnaires wore their loyalty, a Latvian flag, under their uniforms. Fact : This myth presumes the only possible outcomes for Latvia were either Soviet or Nazi victory and subjugation. Latvians simply hoped to repeat their War of Independence: fight with the Germans to drive out the Russians, fight against the Germans to drive them out to achieve independence. 4. Propaganda : Even if Legionnaires did not fight for Nazi victory, they delayed Allied victory, causing more Allied war casualties and delaying Soviet liberation of Hitler's death camps, thus killing more Jews. Fact : This is malignant victim-blaming. All Stalin had to do was bypass Courland (western Latvia, where Latvians held out to the end of the war), per sanitized Soviet history. Instead, Stalin threw in division after division to their slaughter: 394,000 Red Army dead, wounded, and missing, thousands of tanks destroyed, in his attempt to re-take every last bit of Latvian territory. Perhaps he panicked over the memory that after World War I, Latvians wrested their homeland away from the Bolsheviks after their newly declared sovereign government had be