The trek across Eastern Europe to find David Cameron’s Nazi-loving friends came to a wholly unsatisfactory conclusion yesterday. It turns out they are just a bunch of sweeties.

Instead of inhabiting a dimly lit beer cellar echoing to the sound of steel-studded jackboots, the headquarters of the Fatherland and Freedom Party is about as menacing as a maternity ward.

Their three-room apartment is right next to the best hot-chocolate shop in Riga, the 100-year-old Café Kuze, and that’s where you go if you want to talk about new alignments in the European Parliament.

“Hi,” says a chubby man in a Hawaiian shirt. “We’re the Tories of Latvia.”

Perhaps the party used the same line when they met William Hague in London in March. Certainly the party, which has served in Latvian coalition governments for the best part of eight years, seemed a plausible enough member of the Gang of Seven, the Conservative and Nationalist Parties that make up the newly minted European Conservatives and Reformists Group in Strasbourg.

This was to be Mr Cameron’s first roll of the European dice, his way of demonstrating that he was not going to be a pushover in matters of deeper EU integration. Somehow though the grouping has come to resemble the cocktail party from Hell: in one corner there are breakaway Belgians, in another homophobic Poles, a sprinkling of Bulgarians, some fully clothed Czechs — and yes, sure enough, supposedly Nazi-sympathising Latvians.

“I don’t know where all that Nazi stuff comes from,” says Janis Tomels, 39, the international co-ordinator of the party. Actually, there is in the view of the Western press and experienced Nazi-hunters such as Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a pretty simple explanation.

The Fatherland and Freedom Party supports a march every year of veterans of the Latvian Legion from the tall Freedom Monument in Riga to the cathedral. In the past they have worn their old uniforms.

I visited an old legionnaire officer and he proudly opened a cupboard to show me his mothballed uniform — complete with the distinctive runes of the Waffen SS, for the legion had been incorporated into Hitler’s army in 1943. “We weren’t fighting for him,” said the former colonel, “but against the Soviets.”

The legion was a ragbag of soldiers and they included, among the well-trained and disciplined infantry and grenadiers, some members of the Arajs gang, Latvians who had either personally killed hundreds of Jews or who had helped the Germans to carry out the massacres. About 80,000 Latvian Jews lost their lives in the war.

“We have submitted the names of 13 suspects who deserve serious investigation,” says Dr Zuroff. “So far there has been no sign of the Latvian state prosecutor taking up the cases.”

The problem, then, is whether a party remains a credible ally of the Conservatives as long as it glorifies the legion. How tainted are the war heroes of the Baltic, and how modern are the East European parties that present themselves as Conservative allies in the European Parliament?

Latvian politicians across the spectrum condemn the Arajs killers and hail the rest of the legion as patriots. The slaughtering of the Latvian Jews occurred, they say, on German orders and was conducted before the legion was set up. There can, therefore, be no collective guilt for the legionnaires. In 1950 the US declared: “The Waffen SS units of the Baltic states are to be seen as units that stood apart and were different from the German SS in terms of goals, ideologies, operations and constitution.”

“That is why the American and the then Labour Government in Britain allowed surviving conscripts to settle in Britain and the US as political refugees after the war,” says Roberts Zile, who represents the Fatherland and Freedom Party in Strasbourg.

Gunta Sloga, political correspondent for the liberal Diena newspaper, said: “My grandfather wriggled out of serving for the Soviets, was conscripted by the Germans and after doing time in an Allied PoW camp, he returned home in 1947. I should have the right to commemorate him — and just about every Latvian is in a similar situation.”

One supporter of the veterans’ march is a former European Commissioner, Sandra Kalniete. Her family was deported to Siberia where she was born in 1952: she lost three of her grandparents in the enforced exile. Paying tribute to the legion, she says, is not a way of denigrating the Holocaust but simply acknowledging a historical truth.

The problem is mainly about how Latvia should deal with the Russians. Altogether the European Union has almost a million Russians living within its borders and many of them are unhappy.

It is only a matter of time, say analysts in Riga, before the Kremlin tries to put pressure on the Baltic states to be nicer to them.

Mr Tomels says: “If the Russians don’t like it here, they are free to leave.” And a chill enters the voice of Mr Cameron’s man in Riga.

timesonline.co.uk