The lesser of two evils? Latvia's Nazi parade goes ahead

On Tuesday a group of ageing war veterans risked arrest by parading through the streets of Latvia's capital Riga.

The city's court had ruled the march to be illegal on the grounds that it would incite violence between Latvian nationalists on the one side and the country's Russian speaking and Jewish populations on the other.

That is because the parading veterans fought alongside the Nazis in the Second World War. They were called the Latvian Legion and were under the command of the Warren SS.

Despite being a flashpoint for tension the event was peaceful and attended by 1,000 people. Both groups had the ban overturned.

The war divided the country. 130,000 fought with the Soviets while 146,000 fought for the Germans.

Many Latvians joined the Germans because they saw them as liberators. Latvia had suffered a brief but brutal occupation by the Soviets between 1939-1941. Latvia was again annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944 and remained part of the communist bloc until it collapsed in 1991.

The demographic result of years of Soviet occupation was a large Russian speaking population which interprets history in a different way to the majority of ethnic Latvians.

Despite fighting for both sides, neither the Soviets or the Nazis became less lenient. 15,000 Latvians disappeared to Siberian concentration camps between 1939-1941 and when the Nazis invaded they rounded up and killed 70,000 of Latvia's 85,000 Jews, with the help of loacl informants.

It is a moral quagmire whose complexities are a far cry from 'good vs evil' narrative prevalent in the West and Russia.