MOSCOW, March 23 (Itar-Tass) —— The Russian State Duma is to adopt a statement on Friday which will denounce Waffen SS march in Latvia as an attempt to glorify Nazism.
The draft statement describes the annual march of the Latvian SS Legion veterans on March 16 as “insistent attempts of the Latvian authorities to glorify members of criminal Nazi organizations.”
“Some Latvian politicians use invented pretexts to whitewash the actions of the soldiers of Latvian SS Legion, pose them as independence fighters, and blasphemously call on modern generations to bow before them,” the draft says.
Russian lawmakers believe Latvian authorities thus revise the decisions of the Nuremberg trial which denounced all SS members, including Waffen SS.
“The neo-Nazi day of Latvian Legion soldiers and related events in Latvia insult the memory of all soldiers of anti-Hitler coalition, of many millions of victims of SS butchers and their accomplices. It is a direct challenge to all true anti-Nazis, human rights champions who oppose racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism,” the document says.
Lawmakers also express bewilderment over connivance of European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and other international institutions. The absence of a clear condemnation “means actual agreement with the attempts of Latvian authorities to rehabilitate Nazism and revise the results of World War Two.”
At the same time the draft statement says that Russian lawmakers “are ready to take all efforts so that Russian-Latvian relationship is based exclusively on the desire to cooperate in various fields for the benefit of our peoples and countries.”