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Freedom fighter: Vasiliy Kononov during the war

More than 60 years after the end of World War Two, a man is to be judged by Europe's highest court on whether he was right or wrong to kill Nazi sympathisers collaborating with Hitler.

Latvian Vasiliy Kononov, 85, is claiming compensation of £4 million for being convicted and sentenced to six years imprisonment by his own country in 2001 for the unlawful killing of civilians who had betrayed a partisan group to the Germans.

Kononov, a guerrilla attached to the Soviet Red Army, helped kill the civilian collaborators after tricking them into admitting they had handed the partisans over to the Nazis.

Years later courts in Latvia found him guilty of crimes against humanity.

But Kononov is claiming that he acted correctly in killing the nine civilians in a Latvian village in 1944, because at the time he was legitimately fighting with the Red Army, and on the side of the Allies including Britain, to repel the Nazis from the Baltic state.

He also claims that he is the victim of political correctness in modern day Latvia, a European Union country where the State now openly defends those who fought for the Nazis against the Soviet army in the Second World War.

The Latvians argue the Soviets were seen as the greater threat to the country's independence, and this justified siding with Hitler.

The verdict from the European Court of Human Rights, due next month, will effectively re-open the issue of war crimes during the Second World War as established under the Nuremberg trials, by deciding whether a man can be punished for fighting against the Nazis.

It is seen as a test case which could lead to other financial claims in eastern Europe.

'During the war, Kononov was a specialist mine layer who personally destroyed 14 German troop trains heading into his country,' said his lawyer Mikhail Joffe.  

Court battle: Vasiliy Kononov today aged 85 and his lawyer Mikhail Joffe who is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights

In March, 1944 he was assigned to discover the fate of a partisan group of 12 men led by a Major Chugunov who disappeared near the village of Maliye Baty after being betrayed by villagers in the pay of the Nazis.

Disguised in a Nazi greatcoat, Kononov talked to villagers who boasted how they had betrayed the partisans.

Then Kononov and his men held a war court that convicted the villagers. The villagers were given a written judgement sentencing them to death.

Most were shot, although a man, and two women were in a building that Kononov set on fire and died in the flames.

In all, nine people were killed, including a child, which Kononov admitted was a mistake.

Kononov, who later became a police colonel in Latvia, was arrested in February 1998.

Convicted to six years, he spent 620 days in jail during which time his brother and son died. Kononov was not let out to the funerals.

Human rights lawyer Joffe then began the series of appeals that will end in Strasbourg next month.

The case brings into focus Latvia's contempt for the former Soviet Union after over four decades of occupation, with Kononov being cast as a Stalinist thug massacring civilians.

It hinges on whether the highly decorated former guerilla can be classified as a Soviet occupier of Latvia or as a Latvian citizen fighting the Nazi invaders.

'The Latvian courts agree that Kononov was a member of an anti-Hitler coalition, they do not dispute that,' said Joffe.

'They also agree that those villagers were in collaboration with Nazis.  

'Yet they claim that Kononov was representing Soviet occupiers and killed the civilians who were acting according to the laws of that time.  

'But this is nonsense. He is a native Latvian, he was fighting for his country.  

'And according to the rules of war, people taking guns from invaders in exchange for food and protection were not civilians anymore, but collaborators.

'This process is purely political like other things Latvia has been doing recently - such as reburying Nazis as heroes, and organising monuments and eternal flames at Nazi cemeteries.'

Kononov, now 85, said : 'I have never doubted that I was fighting for the right thing.  

'It was a shock for me to know that what I did to defend my country is now considered a crime.'