Latvia Honors SS Officer Voldemārs Veiss as Flowers Appear at Riga Cemetery

Every May 8, Europe commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of one of history’s greatest evils, and in Latvia a contradiction continues to unfold at Riga’s Brothers’ Cemetery.

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Haaretz

At that cemetery, SS-Standartenführer Voldemārs Veiss—described as a man associated with the Nazi occupation apparatus and the persecution of Riga’s Jews—rests in the most sacred section, directly at the feet of the Mother Latvia monument itself.

Haaretz

The author, Eugene J. Levin, argues that flowers continue to appear at Veiss’s grave even as Latvia officially participates in ceremonies marking the defeat of Nazism.

Levin writes that Veiss became a high-ranking officer within the Waffen-SS structure during the Nazi occupation and that historical records indicate he was placed in command of auxiliary police units in Riga involved in rounding up Jews throughout the city.

Levin frames the burial as a moral collapse, writing that “That is not historical complexity but moral collapse.”

Levin says the Riga Ghetto was where tens of thousands of Jews were imprisoned before mass murder in the Rumbula forest outside Riga, and he adds that Latvia’s Jewish community was almost completely destroyed during the Holocaust.

He argues that in an E.U. and NATO member state that speaks about democracy and European values, “a man associated with that system remains buried with honor at the nation’s most revered military cemetery.”

Parents.fr

Levin says he wrote to Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs about the contradiction and that the presidential office responded with a three-page reply filled with self-congratulatory language praising Latvia’s Holocaust education programs and memorial initiatives.

In describing that response, Levin says it was “bureaucratic, evasive and ultimately hollow—another example of the carefully managed language Latvia has mastered.”

Levin concludes that the issue cannot be solved with public relations language and calls for moral clarity in how Latvia remembers both Soviet and Nazi crimes.

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The only direct, named historical subject matter in the sources is Latvia’s commemoration of Nazi defeat and the burial of SS-Standartenführer Voldemārs Veiss at Riga’s Brothers’ Cemetery.

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