The killing fields of Rumbula and Salispils seem peaceful, under a blanket of snow, with a blinding sun and biting cold. How many murdered? Fifty thousand? Five hundred thousand? One is more than enough.
March 16, 2013. Riga, Latvia. Americans, me among them, go as witnesses to a celebration, a parade, a flower-laying in praise and remembrance of the Waffen-SS, which was responsible for those murders, mostly of Jews
There's the death head insignia and veterans of the death squads. A criminal organization, said the Nuremburg tribunal. In uniform, ancient surviving members of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS have come out, proud and happy. Young people join them, carrying swastika-like insignia with their flowers.
Every country has its fringe, and there's little one can do. It may even be best to ignore it. But this isn't the fringe anymore. They've elected members to the Latvian Parliament. March 16 was a national holiday, until the world found out about it and parliament backed off. But earlier in the week, parliament faced another attempt to again make it a national holiday. It was defeated.
You can see the Latvians' energy and determination to re-establish their national pride, their version of history, their anger. They attack a counterdemonstrator and rip down pictures of atrocities. It seems like the streets of Berlin in 1930. One old SS veteran mutters, "There go the kikes again."
Some are willing to talk peacefully: We admit the murder of 50,000 at Rumbula but deny the murder of 500,000 Russian prisoners of war at Salispils (as one historian has said); some of the Waffen-SS were drafted; they were freedom fighters opposing the Soviet army which occupied Latvia; most of the murders took place before the legion was formed. And: There was no Holocaust.
In Riga's stores, you can purchase calendars, date books and decks of cards with Nazi insignia and poster art. The rest of the city has a kind of Baltic charm, not a lot of modern office buildings to mar the skyline, gray and brown in winter, solid and stolid. The women are fit and wary; the men are beefy, unsmiling and vaguely threatening.
Riga is poised to celebrate 2014 as the European Capital of Culture. Latvia joined the European Union, but doesn't accept the euro, instead retaining its own currency. Its economy contracted by more than 25 percent during the financial crisis of 2009-2010. It won't grant citizenship to several hundred thousand Russians who entered between 1940 and 1991, when it became independent of the Soviet Union. Or their children. They don't like Russians.
The Waffen-SS parade lasts a couple of hours. What remains are a pile of flowers and a wartime picture of a smiling SS officer in full uniform.
It's bone-chilling to stand next to a man in an SS uniform, who might himself have been at the killing fields. And it's somehow worse to see the kids and politicians of the new generations organize and surge ahead.
This is not an outlier. It's happening across Europe. In Ukraine, France, Greece, Hungary and Germany, there are resurgent Nazi and neo-Nazi movements everywhere, building membership and organizations, electing members to parliaments and city councils.
What to do?
Some are truly fringe movements and it makes no sense to raise them up. Ignore them. But again and again, they are moving from the fringe to the mainstream. It's foolish to ignore this reality. And more foolish to stand silent.
In America, distant from the history of World War II, we watch as the Greatest Generation dwindles, and the memory of sacrifice and blood passes into history.
For many, Nazis are the bumbling, comic figures of "Hogans Heroes," outwitted by clever American POWs. Or George Lincoln Rockwell, the nutty head of the American Nazi party, who was himself Jewish.
There's little of what we see in Paris, where plaques on school buildings commemorate the deaths of deported French children. Or Riga, where remnants of the Nazi regime are on parade.
What should we do? What can we do?
It would be a mistake to overstate the problem, to give these movements a power and significance they haven't earned. It would be a much bigger mistake to pretend it isn't happening, and hope that it goes away. We tried that before, and it didn't work.
The killing fields of Rumbula and Salispils seem peaceful, under a blanket of snow, with a blinding sun and biting cold. How many murdered? Fifty thousand? Five hundred thousand? One is more than enough.
Richard Brodsky is a former state assemblyman from Westchester County. He is now a fellow at the Demos think tank in New York City and at the Wagner School at New York University.