Estonia's Waffen-SS soldiers hold secret reunion

  • 2000-08-17
TALLINN (BNS) - Estonia's former Waffen-SS soldiers semi-secretly held a remembrance meeting at Sinimae in East Viru County on Aug. 8 to avoid attention from the press and the public.

The county paper Pohjarannik wrote that it was difficult to get information about the meeting before the event, because on the eve of the meeting neither the Vaivara communal government, which issued a permit to hold the meeting, nor the county government knew anything about what was going to happen.

About 50 men from the Estonian veterans association of the 20th Waffen-SS division assembled in Sinimae to remember their fallen comrades at a memorial of some of the fiercest battles of World War II in 1944.

"They still attack our division, and no one has come out in our defense. So we have to defend ourselves, put out our chests and say that we were right, and that we did not fight for the German Reich but for the restoration of Estonian independence," chairman of the association Heino Kerde told reporters at the meeting.