July 20




GERMANY:

Germany remembers Hitler plotters----A defence ministry building in Berlin
is the site of a memorial to the plotters


Germany has marked the 65th anniversary of the failed attempt by a group
of officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and drive the Nazis from power.

The 20 July Plot saw Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg plant a bomb
under a table inside the "Wolf's Lair", Hitler's command post in East
Prussia.

But through a series of lucky circumstances Hitler was only slightly hurt,
and the conspiracy was exposed.

The assassination attempt is one of the proudest traditions of the German
army.

During a ceremony in Berlin on Monday, hundreds of young recruits to the
force took their ceremonial oath to a democratic Germany.

For many Germans, Von Stauffenberg is a hero - one of the few officers who
chose to follow his conscience rather than orders, says the BBC's Oliver
Berlau.

The plot in which he participated was the closest Hitler's opponents
within the German armed forces ever got to killing him.

The attempted coup, which would have seen the establishment of a
conservative military regime in Germany which was willing to negotiate an
honourable peace, was led by senior military leaders like Field Marshal
Erwin von Witzleben and Gen Ludwig Beck.

Col Von Stauffenberg was convinced Hitler had to be removed from power
As had been planned, Von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing
explosives under the table next to Hitler inside the Wolf's Lair. After he
left the building, he heard the bomb explode and assumed the German
dictator was dead.

But an officer had moved the briefcase behind a sturdy leg of the table,
and Hitler suffered only minor burns and concussion.

Unaware, Von Stauffenberg flew to Berlin to join Von Witzleben and Beck
and to take over using the German Home Army. However, they had hesitated
and failed to take over the communications network.

Once it became known that Hitler was still alive, the plot crumbled.

Von Stauffenberg and several of his co-conspirators were shot the same
night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, a building in Berlin which is
still part of the defence ministry and the site of a memorial.

Dozens of others were later humiliated in a show trial and executed,
hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks. Their deaths were filmed and shown
to senior members of the Nazi Party and the armed forces.

(source: BBC News)





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THE LAST NAZI TRIAL----Demjanjuk Case To Start in October


A district court in Munich is preparing for the planned October start of
what could be the final Nazi war crimes trial in Germany. The leading
judge in the case has already approved eight joint plaintiffs, and
prosecutors have secured 22 witnesses they hope will prove John
Demjanjuk's guilt.

Following a lengthy deportation process to bring him back to Germany from
the United States, Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk's case is
expected to go to trial in mid-October. The 89 year old, who stands
accused of being an accessory to 27,900 counts of murder at Nazi death
camps, will be tried before a Munich district court.

A large contingent of prosecutors and witnesses are set to take part in
the trial. The judge presiding over the jury court, Ralph Alt, has already
approved eight joint plaintiffs, whose families or relations were killed
between April and July 1943 at the Sobibr concentration camp. Public
prosecutors claim Demjanjuk, born in Ukraine, was a guard there during
that time.

The joint plaintiffs, who will be represented by five attorneys, are from
the Netherlands, the US and Germany. Some of them experienced the
atrocities of the death camps firsthand as young men.

With the help of 22 witnesses, the prosecution is aiming to prove that
Demjanjuk is guilty of being an accessory to murder in at least 27,900
killings at the camp. The exhaustive 86-page document detailing the
charges challenges the defense's argument that, as a Nazi prisoner of war,
the defendant had no choice but to comply with orders.

The prosecution maintains that Demjanjuk, who has so far remained silent
in the face of allegations made against him, was in a position to have
fled the camps. It has compiled a list of cases in which foreign Nazi
henchmen were able to escape from camps in Trawniki, Lublin, Treblinka and
even Sobibr.

(source: Spiegel)


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German who gave inside view of Nazi camps dies at 91


Isa Vermehren, a German entertainer who wrote one of the first post-war
accounts of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, has died at 91,
her Catholic order of nuns said Monday.

Vermehren, a singer and accordionist at a Berlin nightclub before the War,
was thrown into Ravensbrueck concentration camp after her diplomat brother
defected.

Her 1946 book, 'A Voyage through the Last Act,' described the humiliations
and executions in the camps to readers who were still unwilling to believe
the Nazis had been evil.

Vermehren, the daughter of an upper-class lawyer, had performed at
Katakombe, a Berlin club where the acts satirized the Nazis. The Gestapo
closed it early in the War.

The entire Vermehren family were thrown into concentration camps in
revenge when her brother, Erich Vermehren, a German diplomat in Istanbul

, defected to Britain with secrets in February 1944. All survived.

She wrote her book, acted in a film and then became an irrepressible nun,
using her talents as a stage entertainer to become the big-hearted
headmistress of girls' schools and a television personality.

Her boldness, whether she was dealing with a Nazi or a bishop, seemed
echoed in Whoopi Goldberg's role in the 1992 movie comedy Sister Act.
Vermehren retired in 1983.

The Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus convent in Bonn said she died in
the city on Wednesday last week but this was not made public at the time.

(source: Monsters and Critics)






UKRAINE:

Holocaust monument dedicated in western Ukraine


A monument to Nazi victims was dedicated in western Ukraine.

The memorial in Elyhovichi village in the Zolochev district of the Lvov
region, was dedicated July 15. The commemoration ceremony included local
officials, rabbis, representatives of the Jewish community, and guests
from Israel and the United States who were born in the region.

The memorial was built on the initiative of American and Israeli
organizations, and personally on the initiative of Roald Hoffmann, a
chemist and Nobel Prize winner who was born in Zolochev and survived the
Holocaust with help from Ukrainian neighbors.

More than 3,000 Jews in Elyhovichi were killed by the Nazis, and more than
14,000 in the Zolochev district in 1941-42.

(source: JTA)





THE NETHERLANDS:

Fire destroys Anne Frank barrack


A suspicious fire destroyed the wooden barrack that Anne Frank stayed in
while detained in a Dutch work camp.

The fire Saturday night in northeast Holland destroyed two barracks from
the Westerbork work camp, where Frank stayed before being deported to
Auschwitz in 1944.

Her barrack, number 57, was set to be moved back to the site of the work
camp as part of a Holocaust memorial center.

The cause of the fire is unclear, according to reports.

The barracks had been sold in 1957 to a nearby village and were used to
store farm equipment.

(source: JTA)





USA:

300 Nazis still go free in America


300 Nazis are living in plain sight in the United States, according to
the world's preeminent Nazi-hunting organization.

Although the case against John Demjanjuk, the former Ohio auto worker
formally charged with war crimes in Germany last week, is being called the
last great Nazi war-crimes trial, Efraim Zuroff told The Post there are
hundreds more suspects to be brought to justice.

"We don't have much longer," said Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Israel. "We have to go after them or they will be too sick to bring to
trial."

Many of the Nazis still here are elderly men who worked and raised
families in the United States and whose neighbors were unaware of their
past, including:

* Johann Leprich, a retired tool-and-die worker from Michigan, who was a
"Death Head" guard at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, where inmates
were used as slave laborers in a quarry and tortured and killed by
gassing, hanging and electric shock.

* Mykola Wasylyk of upstate Ellenville, who ran a Catskills bungalow
colony renting cabins to Jewish visitors. He served as a perimeter guard
at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland. He proclaimed in a 2002 letter to
the US attorney that he was forced into Nazi service and that he had been
"an exemplary and law-abiding citizen" for the last 54 years.

* Jakiw Palij of Queens, who quietly tends his flower garden every morning
outside his Jackson Heights home. He was a guard at Trawniki and found to
have helped keep prisoners from escaping the camp where 6,000 people were
shot to death in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.

* Elfriede Rinkel, who lived such a seemingly ordinary life as a San
Francisco furrier that her Jewish husband knew nothing about her past.
Rinkel worked as a guard at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for women
in Germany, where guards were known for forcing malnourished inmates to
march to slave-labor sites daily and then kept in check by attack dogs.

The number of Nazis who came to the United States after World War II has
been estimated from a few hundred to several thousand. Hundreds of
thousands of Nazis are thought to have survived the war, many of them
staying in the countries where they committed their crimes.

Since 1979, 107 Nazis have been prosecuted in the United States and at
least 60 have been deported. Eleven suspected Nazis are now being
prosecuted, and another 30 are under investigation.

Such investigations can take years.

Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship in 1981, when he was believed
to be "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at Poland's Treblinka death camp. He
was sentenced to death in Israel, but that country's Supreme Court threw
out the case, saying he was the wrong man.

US prosecutors began a new case in 1999, accusing Demjanjuk of working as
a guard at a different Polish camp. He was finally deported to Germany in
May.

"These are the ultimate cold cases," said Eli Rosenbaum, the director of
the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, which
hunts Nazis and other human-rights abusers.

Cooperating witnesses were either murdered by the Nazis or have since
died, and most of the criminals were not known by name to their victims,
Rosenbaum said.

"The Nazis destroyed much of the incriminating documentation in the
closing months of the war when they realized that an Allied victory was
imminent, [and] the bulk of the surviving documentation is scattered in
archives in many countries and remains poorly indexed," he said.

The DOJ usually snares Nazis on immigration violations, contending they
lied about their past when they entered the United States, and by proving
their underlying criminal conduct during the war.

Five Nazis brought to justice and stripped of their US citizenship are
stuck in a deportation limbo with no countries agreeing to take them.

Among them is Palij, 85, whose citizenship was revoked in 2003.
Prosecutors found that he lied when immigrating to the United States in
1949.

Germany, Poland and Ukraine have all refused to accept him.

Wasylyk is also awaiting deportation after four countries refused to take
him.

Many of the Nazis have been found by governmental officials poring over
immigration documents and comparing them with a list of 70,000 war
criminals culled from countries around the world. The collapse of the
former Soviet Union in 1989 brought more information to light.

In Israel, Zuroff spends much of his time persuading countries in Europe,
the former Soviet Union and Australia to prosecute Nazis.

While Israel was the site of probably the most important Nazi war-crime
trial, that of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the country has recently shied away
from accepting other Nazis prosecuted on immigration issues in the United
States.

Zuroff said in order to try these Nazis in Israel, a case would have to be
brought on criminal charges, which would be difficult to prove since so
much time has elapsed.

(source: New York Post)






ROMANIA:

Romanian mayor and son parade as Nazis


A Romanian city mayor outraged Jewish and pro-democracy groups after he
goose-stepped with his son in World War Two German uniforms during a
weekend fashion show.

Wearing Nazi uniform is illegal in Romania, which denied participating in
the Holocaust until 2004 when it accepted the findings of international
commission that Romanian authorities killed up to 380,000 Jews in
territories under their control.

The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism sent a letter Monday
to the country's general prosecutor urging an investigation of Radu
Mazare, 41, mayor of Black Sea city port Constanta, for breaking the law
and instigating a child to follow his example.

Mazare said the uniform had no swastikas and was the uniform of a German
infantry general and nothing to do with the SS.

"I was inspired from the Valkyrie movie ... I wanted to dress like a
Vehrmacht general because I've always liked this uniform, and admired the
rigorous organisation of the German army," newspaper Evenimentul Zilei
quoted him as saying.

Under pro-Nazi Marshal Ian Antonescu, Romania became a German ally in 1940
but switched sides just before war ended.

(source: Reuters)