RIGA (AFP)---Latvian veterans who fought on Nazi Germany's side in World War II marched in the Baltic state's capital Tuesday amidst a heavy police presence and protests by opponents.    

Police said around 1,000 people took part in the controversial parade through Riga's Old Town, within a cordon of hundreds of police who kept the peace.
   

Waving Latvian flags, veterans and supporters filed to the city's Freedom Monument to lay flowers at the key symbol of the struggle for independence from Moscow.
   

They were heckled by dozens of mostly young protesters, some with signs recalling Nazi atrocities in Latvia during World War II.   

The past spills onto Riga's streets every March 16, when Latvian Legion veterans mark a key 1944 battle in their ultimately failed attempt to stem a Soviet advance.
   

Jewish groups, Moscow and some in Latvia's ethnic-Russian community see the parade as glorifying Nazism because the Legion, founded in 1943, was commandedby Germany's Waffen SS.   

"It's a very sad day when people like this are considered heroes," Efraim Zuroff, director of Jerusalem's Simon Wiesenthal Center, told reporters in Riga.   

Veterans insist they were not Nazis but simply defending their small homeland -- population 2.2 million -- and that many of them were conscripts.  

Some 146,000 Latvians fought in the Legion. Roughly a third died in combat or Soviet captivity.   

Another 130,000 sided with the Soviets; almost a quarter died, many in battles with their Legion compatriots.   

On the rally's sidelines a veteran debated with protesters, some sporting Soviet insignia. 

"My grandfather fought people like you," an ethnic-Russian youngster said. "Did he die in vain?"   

The veteran responded: "I was a 14-year-old boy when they sent me to the front. Is it my fault?"   

Riga city hall had banned the parade and counter-demonstration on security grounds, but organisers from both camps won a court challenge Monday. Past bans have been flouted.
   

Moscow seized Latvia under a 1939 deal with Berlin carving up eastern Europe, and deported 15,000 Latvians to Siberia.   

Germany drove out the Red Army when it ripped up the pact and invaded the
Soviet Union in 1941.   

Its troops were hailed by some Latvians as liberators. But they brought their own terror, killing 70,000 of the country's 85,000 Jews, sometimes helped by local collaborators.   

The Soviets pushed out the Nazis as the war's tide turned, capturing Riga in October 1944 and launching a crackdown lasting into the 1950s.   

Latvia remained under Soviet control until the communist bloc crumbled in1991.   

Latvian lawmakers declared March 16 a memorial day in 1998. They struck it from the official calendar in 2000 after international criticism, but veterans still rally on the date.