Contempt for history

It's OK, though. Laws permitting such outrage were democratically enacted by the Latvian parliament. Tellingly, the Lutheran cathedral opened its gates to these "defenders of freedom" whose belt buckles proclaimed confidently "God with us."

Hitler's hordes occupied Latvia in June 1941 and many patriots joined the partisans. Those who preferred the SS did so because they shared its ideology of anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism.

They eagerly participated in the extermination of Latvian Jewry and, enthusiastically, in the profitable conquest of the Soviet Union. None of it had anything to do with defending Latvia as falsely claimed today.

Jewish survivors recalled how "even before the nazis turned on us, we suffered at the hands of the Latvian fascists."

In one instance in Liepaja in early July 1941, 700 Jews were shot - murdered by members of a Latvian SD guard platoon, units of the 21st Latvian police battalion and members of the SD under the command of Fritz Dietrich.

The Latvian auxiliary police, the infamous Einsatzgruppe, specialised in pogroms, looting, torture and rape. They needed little encouragement from their German paymasters.

In the six months until December 1941 35,238 Latvian Jews were murdered - half the total number estimated to have fallen into nazi hands - 196 for every day of those six months.

When in 1944 the Red Army liberated Latvia only a few hundred Jews remained.

Ironically, fleeing Latvian fascists found refuge in the West as "displaced persons" enjoying the fake status of "victims of nazism" before being welcome to the US and beyond.

Only a handful were ever persecuted for their crimes.

Michal Boncza London NW8