July 10


GERMANY:


Demjanjuk Trial to Break Legal Ground in Germany


The trial against suspected concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk is a
legal first for Germany. For the first time, a person who was low on the
chain of command is to be indicted, even though there is no proof of his
having committed a specific offence. Other alleged henchmen have gotten
off far more lightly.

The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about
the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she
had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which
lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the
Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter
listened in on the conversation. "She hopes and believes that he will
somehow return home," says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple's son.

That is unlikely to happen. His father is being detained in Bavaria,
waiting for his trial to begin. US authorities deported Demjanjuk in early
May, when he was flown to Munich on a chartered flight. When he arrived, a
German investigating judge handed Demjanjuk the arrest warrant, which
stated that the accused was "under strong suspicion" of aiding and
abetting the murders of at least 29,000 people.

Demjanjuk is alleged to have worked in 1943 as a guard in the Sobibor
death camp, and to have helped the Nazis commit mass murder against
thousands of Jews. He has repeatedly denied the charges, and his family
insists that it is the victim of a prosecution-obsessed justice system.

On July 3, prosecutors said that doctors had determined that Demjanjuk,
who has been held in custody in Munich since May 12, was fit to stand
trial. However, they imposed one condition, saying that his court
appearances be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day. State prosecutors
said that formal charges could be expected this month and that a trial
could commence as early as the autumn.

The case against this alleged member of the SS is a first for the German
legal system. For the first time, a foreign henchman from the lowest rung
of the chain of command will be prosecuted, not because of his
particularly gruesome behavior as a perpetrator of so-called "excessive
acts," but because he helped keep the killing machinery running smoothly.

That won't be easy. Will the prosecution in the case, the Munich public
prosecutor's office, be able to provide sufficient proof of his guilt? Can
it demonstrate that he participated voluntarily in the campaign of murder?

A number of documents suggest that Demjanjuk was part of a group of about
5,000 foreign helpers -- people from the Baltics, Ukrainians and ethnic
Germans living in other countries -- who the Nazis trained at the Trawniki
training camp, east of the Polish city of Lublin, to commit mass murder in
occupied regions. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Demjanjuk killed
out of murderous intent or greed. Instead, he was probably an ordinary
henchman, like thousands of others. But German courts have been extremely
lenient in the past when it has come to putting these Nazi helpers on
trial. In fact, even their superiors almost always got off lightly.

In other words, the judiciary is planning nothing less than a radical
break with a decades-long practice which was often perceived as offensive.

Responding to a complaint against Demjanjuk's detention filed by his
attorney Ulrich Busch, the Munich Regional Court explained that the
established practice of German courts in cases relating to SS overseers
and guards in extermination camps "does not create a precedent." In the
arrest warrant, it states that Demjanjuk, as a guard, was not compelled to
participate in mass murder. "He could have deserted, as many other
Trawniki men did," is the argument in the warrant.

For Demjanjuk's defense attorney, this line of argument "upends the entire
postwar legal practice in Germany." The court must conduct its proceedings
on the basis of evidence, and yet it presumably also wants to avoid being
accused of inaction or perhaps even leniency toward former Nazis. All of
this creates the impression that the German judiciary is using the
Demjanjuk case, which has become well-known because of its previous
history, to make up for past omissions.

Relatively Safe

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, is not the first presumed Nazi helper that
the United States has deported to Germany. More than 100 men have had
their US citizenship revoked for concealing their Nazi past, and 27 of
them ended up in Germany.

Dmytro Sawchuk, for example, traveled to Germany voluntarily in 1999 when
he was about to be deported. US investigators accused the man, born in
Poland of Ukrainian parents, of having participated in brutal ghetto
evacuations after being trained in Trawniki, and of having supervised
Jewish forced laborers in the Belzec extermination camp as they dug up
thousands of bodies and incinerated them. The public prosecutor's office
in Heidelberg, to which the case was assigned, terminated the proceedings
against Sawchuk after three years, arguing that Germany could only
prosecute the case if the "Republic of Poland, as the criminal
investigation authority principally responsible for criminal prosecution,"
dispensed with extradition. Poland investigated the case itself, but later
suspended its investigation. Sawchuk died in 2004.

Liudas Kairys, who also trained at Trawniki and was a senior guard at the
Treblinka camp, was a rank above Demjanjuk's presumed rank in Sobibor.
There was a lot of evidence against him from survivors and documents. He
was sent to Germany in 1993, as he had hoped, after US authorities revoked
his passport. From Kairys's perspective, it was the right decision.
Investigation proceedings launched against the native Lithuanian in 1993
for murder were suspended six years later by the prosecution in the
western city of Darmstadt. Kairys had died in the meantime.

In February 1982, the US attorney general asked his counterpart in Bonn
for a stronger commitment. He wanted Germany to petition for the
deportation of Nazi collaborators from Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia who
had been tracked down in the United States, and put them on trial in
Germany.

But Bonn's justice minister turned down the request, arguing that
deportation was only allowable in the case of crimes "that had been
committed on the territory of the country submitting the request." And
because of the statute of limitations, he argued, only murder cases could
be prosecuted anyway.

The former Trawniki men living in Germany could also feel relatively safe,
as long as there was no evidence of their having been Exzesstter, in other
words, people who committed excessively cruel acts. One such Exzesstter
was Treblinka guard Franz Swidersky, who was sentenced to a seven-year
prison term in Dsseldorf. Another former guard in Belzec, who had held the
rank of Zugwachmann, or platoon member, is spending his retirement in an
idyllic village in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He had
testified about the Nazi death camps in two trials, but he was unwilling
to talk about his experiences with SPIEGEL.

Those at the lower ends of the chain of command, and their supervisors,
invoked the principle of Befehlsnotstand, a legal term applied to those
who carried out a criminal command because they would otherwise have
endangered their lives. The historian Jochen Bhler characterizes the
defense as being the justice system's "top favorite for acquittals":
Almost all of the accused alleged that they would have suffered if they
had refused to follow orders -- and that they had only killed on command.

Sadists or Pitiful Old Men?

In the trials conducted in Hagen, West Germany, in 1965-66, against former
SS men who had served at Sobibor, only one defendant was given a life
sentence: Karl Frenzel, the camp director, a gruesome sadist who had
whipped a dying prisoner and shot him personally. Five defendants received
prison terms of between three and eight years, and five others were
acquitted.

Karl Streibel, the commandant of the Trawniki training camp, was tried in
a Hamburg court from 1972 to 1976. He and five other defendants, all
senior members of the camp administration, went unpunished. The judges
argued that the Trawniki trainers had not been aware of the purpose for
which they were training the foreign workers -- a somewhat dubious
interpretation of their tasks.

If it was already so difficult to bring to justice the men who had been
higher up the chain of command, how are the courts expected to deal with a
man like Demjanjuk, a captured member of the Red Army who was apparently
recruited by the SS in 1942?

The Trawnikis -- as the men trained at the camp of that name are known --
were undoubtedly among the "most notorious offenders of World War II,"
says Hamburg historian Frank Golczewski. Many profited shamelessly from
the death camps, using money and gold taken from the murdered prisoners to
pay for sex with women in the surrounding villages.

And yet, says Peter Black, chief historian at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC, one cannot conclude that these men volunteered to commit
mass murder. The conditions in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were so
horrific, according to Black, that the men "had limited options." The
non-German volunteers were at the lowest end of the hierarchy. If they
refused to cooperate, says Black, "they could be shot on the spot," at
least until the spring of 1943.

Helge Grabitz, a well-known Hamburg criminal prosecutor who has since
died, also believed that the Trawnikis were "coerced." They volunteered,
according to Grabitz, "to escape certain death from starvation, freezing
to death or epidemics in the camps." The "proven inhuman atrocities" could
hardly be attributed to individual offenders, she wrote, making criminal
prosecution "relatively difficult."

Neither Canada nor Britain nor Australia managed to convict former
Trawnikis who had immigrated to those countries.

In the Demjanjuk case, Germany now hopes to improve on that record, while
at the same time establishing stricter benchmarks.

Decades of Failure

Nevertheless, investigators are dealing with a case overshadowed by 30
years of failure on the part of jurists on several continents. "Germany
stumbled into these matters," says Demjanjuk's son, John Jr. The senior
Demjanjuk has been "paraded through a variety of countries like a dancing
bear," says Ed Nishnic, Demjanjuk's former son-in-law. Nishnic fears that
the German proceedings will amount to a "show trial," as has already
happened once before.

In 1987, Demjanjuk was put on trial in Israel after being extradited by US
authorities. Survivors of the Treblinka death camp had recognized him in a
photograph and identified him as a guard nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible."
Even in Treblinka, a hellish place where 900,000 people died, the guard
had stood out as a monster. He used his bayonet to slice off the breasts
of doomed women, and he started the motor from which the exhaust gases
were piped into the gas chambers.

But the case ended in an acquittal on appeal, after a lower court had
already sentenced Demjanjuk to death by hanging. A TV reporter for the
American CBS network tracked down a woman in a village near Treblinka who
admitted to having been a lover of Ivan the Terrible. The woman claimed
that the sadistic guard's surname was Marchenko, and both guards and
survivors from the camp later confirmed that this was true. The Israeli
prosecutor Michael Shaked found evidence in Russian and German archives
that destroyed his own case. The survivors had been mistaken. Demjanjuk
was not Ivan the Terrible.

In 1993, after several years in solitary confinement, he was acquitted and
returned to the United States, which reinstated his citizenship, setting a
precedent in the history of American public administration.

It was a bitter setback for the US Justice Department. Its Office of
Special Investigations (OSI), created in 1979 "to investigate and
prosecute participants in World War II-era acts of Nazi-sponsored
persecution," had spearheaded Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel. Now the
OSI investigators were forced to admit, in a court investigation, that
they had "acted on a preconception" and had "deceived" the courts by
withholding two pieces of testimony and a list of camp guards that
documented the true identity of Ivan the Terrible.

But the OSI won the next round in the decades-long legal battle, and
Demjanjuk lost his US passport once again. Ukraine and Poland refused to
accept Demjanjuk. But then the Germans stepped in. A few months later,
investigators in the southwestern city of Ludwigsburg began conducting
their research.

The prosecution in Munich has now inherited a host of old files containing
contradictory opinions and snippets of source materials that have been
analyzed again and again. The allegations are based exclusively on
documents; potential witnesses are long dead. The only man still alive who
believes to have identified Demjanjuk claims that the two men worked as
guards together at the Flossenbrg concentration camp in Bavaria.

Although inmates there also died horrible deaths, Flossenbrg is
unimportant to the prosecution. They are focusing on Sobibor, which was
purely an extermination camp. Anyone who was assigned to Sobibor, the
prosecutors argue, was automatically an accessory to murder.

The pieces of evidence of Demjanjuk's presence in Sobibor are long known.
Chief among them is his SS identification card, which bears the number
1393. And then there is the testimony of Ignat Danilchenko, a Soviet
Trawniki who is now dead, who testified against Demjanjuk in 1949 and
1979. Danilchenko claimed that he had seen Demjanjuk, an "experienced and
efficient guard," driving Jews into the gas chambers at Sobibor, and that
this was his "daily work." Demjanjuk's name also appears on a roster of
guards being transferred from Trawniki to Sobibor.

The defense, which will attempt to call the documents into question, sees
an abundance of potential holes in the prosecution's case. For instance,
the Munich public prosecutor's office neglected to have the SS
identification card, which has already been examined multiple times,
subjected to forensic analysis one more time in Germany. In March, experts
with the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation concluded, after
a relatively superficial examination of the document, that it is
"possible" that the ID card is genuine. This weak conclusion will hardly
suffice to conclusively discredit theories that the card was forged.

Demjanjuk's defense attorney has uncovered a third statement by the
witness Danilchenko that contradicts his other testimony. In 1947,
Danilchenko claimed that he had spent most of the war in a German hospital
near Rivne in western Ukraine. There is no mention of Sobibor, although by
mentioning Sobibor Danilchenko would also have incriminated himself.

This example illustrates the back-and-forth of petitions and defense pleas
that will likely dominate the coming days and weeks. Nazi war crimes
trials tend to be exhausting and drawn-out affairs -- as well as being a
delicate issue. The defendants can easily be portrayed as pitiful old men
who are being mercilessly pursued.

This effect could also materialize in the Demjanjuk case, the more it
becomes evident that he is to atone for a crime for which many others
escaped punishment. Even the investigators now concede that "Demjanjuk was
unlucky."

That is one side of the truth. But German historian Norbert Frei points to
another side of the truth that prosecutors can hardly ignore, despite
their justifiable objections. "The Germans owe it to the victims and the
survivors, but also to themselves, to prosecute Demjanjuk," he says.

(source: Der Spiegel)






July 12



GERMANY:

Music In and Out of Harmony With Nazi Ideals


Richard Wagner is the classical composer most associated with the Nazis,
but Johann Sebastian Bach was the one the party dubbed "the most German
of Germans" and whose music was played at rallies to stir up nationalist
zeal.

The Nazis praised Bach for his "racially pure" family tree dating to the
11th century and for the "German" discipline of his baroque-style music.
Felix Mendelssohn, on the other hand, who revived Bach's concertos and
overtures in modern concert halls, was scorned by the Nazis for his Jewish
roots.

This complex relationship between Bach's and Mendelssohn's works during
the Third Reich is the focus of an exhibit called "Blood and Spirit,"
which runs through Nov. 8 at the Johann Sebastian Bach Museum in Eisenach,
the eastern German town where the composer was born in 1685.

It examines the treatment and abuse of both composers' music under Hitler
and how their works shaped the Nazis' idea of "Germanness," museum
director Jrg Hansen said.

"We had a lot of positive reactions," said Hansen, who said that around
15,000 visitors, among them many foreign tourists, have seen the show
since it opened in May.

"Most visitors are very surprised, because they didn't know about Bach's
[music's] role under the Nazis," Hansen said. "They had no clue, for
example, that he was played at Nazi party rallies."

Visitors entering the show are confronted with a cacophony of the
composer's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 interspersed with the staccato voice
of chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels coming from a documentary
playing in the gallery.

Bach's pieces were performed by members of the Hitler Youth and played
almost daily on the radio. In 1935, festivals were organized in several
cities across Germany to mark the composer's 250th birthday, peaking in
the "Reich Bach Festival" in Leipzig, attended by Goebbels and Adolf
Hitler himself.

"The Fuehrer followed the austere music of Bach seriously. . . . It is a
music in harmony with his spirit -- austere, disciplined to its core, and
German through and through," a newspaper reported from the festival.

Mendelssohn, whose discrimination under the Nazis is examined in a second
gallery, was considered "unbearable for a cultural movement based on
race," as one Nazi musicologist put it.

His romantic compositions "utterly failed to speak in the great German
language of feeling and form" and "possessed too much that was unreal and
sentimental," Third Reich-era music critics quoted in the exhibit wrote.

In part of the anti-Semitic push, a statue of the classical composer in
the city of Leipzig vanished overnight in 1936. It proved more difficult
to remove Mendelssohn's music from the country, where it was extremely
popular with the German public.

While there was no formal ban on his work, the Nazis forbade male choirs
to sing popular songs by the composer at party events. They hired several
Nazi-friendly composers to rewrite and "Aryanize" some of Mendelssohn's
"Midsummer Night's Dream," with its famous Wedding March. Composer Carl
Orff, who wrote "Carmina Burana," was among them.

The exhibition also confronts visitors with a piece of German postwar
history that is often overlooked: Many of the musicologists who wrote
anti-Semitic pamphlets during the Third Reich, and helped shape the two
composers' public reception at the time, became prominent academics after
the war.

"One often says that we've dealt with our Nazi past in every way, but that
did not really happen," Hansen said.

(source: Associated Press)






July 13




GERMANY:

Prosecutors Charge Alleged Nazi Camp Guard Demjanjuk


German prosecutors have formally charged John Demjanjuk with helping to
kill almost 28,000 Jews during the Holocaust. A court in Munich announced
the charges on Monday but has yet to confirm when the trial will commence.

German prosecutors have formally charged John Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts
of being an accessory to murder. The charges relating to the murder of
Jewish inmates in a Nazi death camp during World War II were filed at a
court in Munich on Monday.

The path had been cleared for the charges earlier this month after doctors
declared that the 89-year-old retired auto worker, who was deported from
the United States in May, was fit to stand trial. However, their one
condition was that there would only be two 90-minute court sessions on
each day of the proceedings.

German prosecutors allege that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk served as a
guard in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War
II. He denies the charge, claiming he had been a Red Army soldier and then
a prisoner of war who never hurt anyone. However, documents obtained by US
justice authorities and shared with their German colleagues seem to
identify Demjanjuk as an SS-trained guard at Sobibor.

Prosecutors could not say when the trial, which is likely to be the last
big Nazi war crimes trial in Germany, would take place.

Efraim Zuroff of the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomed the
filing of formal charges on Monday. "This is obviously an important step
forward," he told the Associated Press. "We hope that the trial itself
will be expedited so that justice will be achieved and he can be given the
appropriate punishment."

Demjanjuk had topped the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of the 10 most
wanted suspected Nazi war criminals. The organization says Demjanjuk
pushed men, women and children into the gas chambers at the Sobibor camp.

(source: Spiegel)




JULY 17


GERMANY:

GARDEN NAZI----Hitler-Saluting Gnome Sparks Outrage


Great art or bad taste? A "Nazi" garden gnome in Nuremberg has prompted a
public investigation and a renewed debate on what constitutes art.

The humble garden gnome is usually associated with quaint tradition rather
than progressive art. Nonetheless, a gallery owner in the German city of
Nuremberg has caused controversy by displaying in his window a golden
gnome making the Nazi salute.

The public prosecutor's office in Nuremberg has launched an investigation
following an anonymous letter of complaint regarding the Nazi gnome.
Spokesperson Wolfgang Trg explained to the German press agency DPA that
the display of the symbols of organizations which are banned under
Germany's constitution -- such as the Nazi party -- is only lawful if the
organisation is being overtly criticized. "We are currently deciding
whether the case of the garden gnomes is as clear cut as placards with
crossed-out swastikas."

The creator of the exhibition, art professor Ottmar Hrl, told DPA of his
shock at the reaction to his work. "I am completely stunned," he said. "In
1942 it would have been the Nazis massacring me because of this piece." He
argued that "presenting the master race as garden gnomes" clearly
constitutes satire.

Still, it is possible that both Hrl and the owner of the gallery could
face punishment for their association with this provocative piece of art.
The public prosecutor's office is currently giving Hrl time to make a
statement in response to the furore.

Earlier this year, Hrl, who has been president of the Nuremberg Academy of
Fine Arts since 2005, displayed 700 of the Nazi gnomes in the Belgian city
of Gent -- where they were seen by over 40,000 people -- and the Italian
region of South Tyrol. The exhibition, entitled "Dance with the Devil,"
received no official complaints in either country and garnered postive
feedback from the Jewish community.

(source: Der Spiegel)





ISRAEL:

Fight Holocaust Denial In Israel
July 17, 2009

New York
Kenneth Bandler
JTA Wire Service


The last place one might expect to find Holocaust deniers is in Israel.
Yet a new University of Haifa survey shows that an astonishing 40.5
percent of Israeli Arabs say the Holocaust did not happen.

The finding is in the latest index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel, an
annual survey conducted by Professor Sammy Smooha since 2003. When he
first posed the Holocaust question in 2006, 28 percent of Arab citizens
doubted its authenticity.

Holocaust denial is prevalent across the Arab and Muslim worlds. Irans
regime, especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made questioning the
Holocaust a centerpiece of its ideology, rarely missing an opportunity to
proclaim falsehoods about one of the most thoroughly documented periods in
history.

In Gaza and West Bank schools administered by the Palestinian Authority,
the Nazi campaign to murder 6 million Jews still is not taught. Here, as
with the Iranian regime, truth is debunked to advance political goals.

Israeli Arabs, comprising 20 percent of the population, do learn about the
Holocaust in school. They live in a country where the premier Holocaust
memorial and remembrance institution, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is
frequented by school groups and dignitaries visiting from around the
world. And in Israel, anyone is likely to encounter in the public space
older Jews with numbers on their arms. So how can a significant percentage
of Israeli Arabs be so unaware?

It is important that Arab students visit Yad Vashem to be exposed to the
scale of the tragedy, Ali Haider, co-director of Sikkuy, a leading
nonprofit advocating for greater equality between Israels Jewish and Arab
citizens, told me.

With all the resources readily available in Israel, why even three years
ago did more than a quarter of the countrys Arab citizens doubt the
Holocaust? What underlies the surge of 12 percent reflected in the new
survey? Further, according to Smooha, 37 percent of Arabs with higher
education are among the deniers.

Do they honestly believe the Holocaust is a fraud, or is the reaction
politically motivated?

It can be seen that some of the frustration experienced by the Arab
citizens from the failure to achieve equality engenders a resistance to
recognizing the Holocaust, said Haider.

The observation has validity for Smooha, who says, When they say there was
no Holocaust, they are protesting. They are saying I am not giving
legitimacy to the Jewish state.

The survey also found a significant drop in the percentage of Israeli
Arabs who recognize Israels right to exist as an independent state, from
81.1 percent in 2003 to 53.7 percent in 2009.

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel have long been complicated. Arab citizens
enjoy the fruits of Israeli democracy, including the right to vote and
serve in the Knesset. But longstanding economic and social inequities,
notably unequal budgets allocated to Jewish and Arab communities, have
dampened their aspirations of becoming full participants in Israeli
society.

Frustrations are deepened by political developments, including the impasse
in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the 2006 Lebanon War, the governments
failure to implement recommendations of the Orr Commissioncreated in the
wake of the police shootings of a dozen Arab citizens in 2000and, most
recently, Avigdor Liebermans Yisrael Beiteinu partys efforts to introduce
legislation aimed at the Arab minority.

Israeli Arabs understandably are unlikely to embrace Hatikvah and other
symbols as the Jewish majority does, but disputing a historical foundation
of the state is troubling.

Refuting Israels legitimacy by denying the Holocaust must be emphatically
countered. Israels Arab citizens presumably could help. After all, Israeli
Arabs, especially the younger generations who grew up in Israel and are
fluent in Hebrew, are best positioned of any Arabs to understand the
Jewish psyche.

On the other hand, Israeli Arabs know which emotional buttons to press if
some choose to hurt the Jewish majority without using violence. Responding
to a survey questioner is one tactic and, in this instance, led to
headlines emphasizing the hurtful result on the Holocaust.

None of this can fully explain or excuse the evidence of Holocaust denial
in Israels Arab community. Can it be dismissed as a form of protest by a
minority seeking to improve its lot in Israeli society? Or is it more
ominous, a worrisome trend aimed at allying with forces seeking to
deligitimizeand ultimately eliminateIsrael?

The kernel of doubt, if nurtured, can grow into a mighty myth and expand.
What Smoohas survey has revealed needs urgent attention by Arabs and Jews,
working in their own communities as well as together.

(source: Kenneth Bandler is director of communications for the American
Jewish Committee; JTA)





DENMARK----film review

Danish Nazi movie an irresistible thriller


From the opening black-and-white footage of Nazis invading Copenhagen,
"Flame & Citron" draws you into its doom-laden atmosphere and keeps
ratcheting up the tension.

This searing, stylish account of World War II heroism from Denmark's Ole
Christian Madsen avoids period realism, conveying the story of two heroes
of the Danish resistance as a noir thriller, complete with shadowy alleys,
double-crosses galore and the requisite femme fatale.

Beneath its stylized surface, "Flame" is also a provocative film of ideas,
exploring the notion of heroism. Although based on true events, it
unspools like a fever dream, circling back to the hero's opening
voiceover, which at the end takes on new poignancy.

This icy portrait of two assassins shooting Nazis point-blank offers no
Hollywood-style uplift to mollify mainstream viewers. But "Flame" should
pull in a niche group of World War II connoisseurs and will delight
art-house and fest audiences with its innovative mix of drama and history
filtered through genre. The IFC Films release opens in New York on July
31, then in L.A. and a other markets August 14.

It's 1944 and Copenhagen is occupied by Nazi forces. Two resistance
fighters with the noms de guerre of Flame (Thure Lindhardt) and Citron
(Mads Mikkelsen) work undercover for the Holger Danske Group,
assassinating Danish turncoats. They also itch to off the German invaders,
in particular the silver-tongued Hoffman, head of the Gestapo in Denmark.
Flame and Citron take orders from the well-fixed Aksel Winther (Peter
Mygind), who in turn receives orders from London.

Known for his red hair and fearlessness, Flame, barely 20 and the younger
of the duo, has become notorious throughout Copenhagen and carries an
inflating price on his head. He acquires Ketty (Stine Stengade), a femme
fatale in a Veronica Lake blonde wig, who works for the underground as a
courier.

Following the loss of two comrades in the cell, it becomes apparent
there's an informer in their midst. Now all loyalties appear murky. To the
film's credit, it captures the confusion among the renegades -- call it
the fog of resistance -- keeping the viewer as off-balance as the
fighters.

Winther, it turns out, may be using his position as a front to protect
financial interests tied to the Germans. Meanwhile, Ketty, though
seemingly in love with Flame, may be a double -- or triple -- agent.
Disillusioned with their self-seeking superiors, Flame and Citron become
resistance "outlaws," pursuing their own vendetta to its inevitable bloody
denouement.

It helps that the vendetta is carried out by two gorgeous, charismatic
actors. Lindhardt, with his orange shock and milky skin, makes a riveting
screen presence. Despite the film of cold sweat over his grizzled face and
unflattering glasses, Mikkelsen's sculpted, exotic beauty pierces through.

The Occupation literally makes Citron sick to his stomach, leaving him
with no choice but to fight it. Though more wed to battle than family
life, he also loves, in his fashion, his wife and child. In a wrenching
scene, he clumsily comes on to his wife, his need for her palpable, but
she knows that at heart he's a rootless wanderer.

Flame, from a privileged background, developed his hatred of Fascists
after witnessing anti-Semitism in Germany. Through Flame the filmmaker
looks deep into the character of a hero, suggesting that he loses some of
his humanity to the Cause and risks resembling the enemy he fights.

In a telling face-off, Flame visits his hotelier father, owner of the
mountain retreat favored by Nazi bigwigs, who simply wants to get by. The
film indirectly challenges viewers to ask what they might do in a like
situation.

For "Flame's" bravura style, credit goes to below-the-line contributors.
Cinematographer Jorgen Johansson favors overhead shots of figures in
fedoras and stormtrooper uniforms fanning out or closing in like pawns
directed by a higher force. Production designer Jette Lehmann has
contrived a palette of gunmetal grays and livid whites daubed with red
velvet, especially striking in the barny backrooms of cafes.

In its tough-mindedness "Flame" owes much to Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army
of Shadows." Avoiding the docu-style string of anecdotes of many
fact-based films, it offers the shapeliness and irony of classic drama.
For beneath his stony exterior, it's Flame's romantic soul that will prove
his worst enemy. This masterful film is at once a portrait of wartime
heroism and a poignant journey into a boy's secret heart.

(source: Reuters)




July 18



AUSTRALIA:

Holocaust denier Toben banned from attending exhibition


A FEDERAL Court judge has forbidden Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben from
going to an exhibition on people who risked their lives to save others
during the Holocaust, after concerns were raised that he would offend
survivors.

Toben, 65, who is appealing against his three-month jail sentence for
contempt of court, had planned to take advantage of a relaxation of his
bail conditions to attend the opening of the Courage to Care exhibition in
Horsham, Victoria, on Monday.

Justice Anthony Besanko yesterday ruled it was not appropriate after a
motion to restrict Toben was brought forward by Jeremy Jones, the former
president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

"I don't consider it appropriate that that liberty be exercised for the
purpose of attending the exhibition," Justice Besanko said, ordering Toben
not to attend the exhibition "or any similar event".

Toben foreshadowed that this could be problematic, saying he had been
invited to speak at an event in Adelaide next month.

"'Similar' is a problem for me," he said, but the judge said he was not
prepared to ban Toben from speaking at all public meetings.

Robin Margo SC, for Mr Jones, said his client would not have previously
consented to a loosening of bail if he had known Toben's intentions.

"This is a confrontational visit by Dr Toben to an organisation ... to
confront a Holocaust survivor, Mr Harry Better," Mr Margo said. "There's
no evidence that he was invited to this.

"It was clearly implied firstly that the undertaking was varied for the
purpose of Dr Toben travelling on compassionate grounds."

Toben announced his plan to attend the exhibition -- aimed at high school
students -- earlier this week, specifically saying he wanted to meet Mr
Better, who spent his wartime childhood living with a Catholic family
while his mother went to Auschwitz.

Toben -- speaking to the court on his mobile phone from Victoria -- said
the order not to attend the exhibition "smeared" him.

"It implies that I do not know how to behave in public," he said. "I know
how to behave. I'm a civilised person. I see no reason why I should not be
there. I will not be saying anything."

Justice Besanko raised the possibility of activating a warrant for Toben's
imprisonment, which is on hold until the appeal decision, but Mr Margo
said his client did not want to threaten the appeal procedure.

"We wouldn't want him to serve even a week if the sentence was put aside,"
Mr Margo said.

Toben may now only leave South Australia to visit his lawyer in Melbourne,
or for compassionate visits during July, seeing ill supporters.

His appeal is due to be heard next month. He has been given a three-month
sentence for repeatedly breaching court orders not to publish certain
offensive material about the Holocaust and Jews on his website.

(source: The Australian)