July 31




Horrors Of Camps Overshadow Killings By German SS


Before the Jews of Western Europe were transported to camps, where many
eventually died, the special forces of the German SS, known as
Einsatzgruppen, roamed through Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, murdering an
estimated 1.5 million Jews and partisans.

This little-known part of history is the focus of Hitler's Hidden
Holocaust. a new TV documentary series by National Geographic that starts
Sunday.

"The shooting operations were very much in-your-face killings," historian
Peter Black of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says in the documentary.
"They were not by remote control the way gas chamber operations were."

Historian Timothy Snyder of Yale University, who wrote an essay in the
July 16 issue of The New York Review of Books called "Holocaust: The
Ignored Reality," says the documentary sheds light on an important aspect
of World War II.

"It performs the very important service of forcing our eyes to the East,
to realizing the Holocaust begins not when Auschwitz begins to take
transports from Hungary or from Western Europe, which is very late in the
war," he tells Robert Siegel.

He says, however, that the documentary sheds light only on the
Einsatzgruppen, leaving the question of how 2,000 people could shoot
millions of Soviet citizens.

"The next thing that one has to see is that the Einsatzgruppen were not
acting alone," he says, adding that they received considerable help from
the German police and army.

Snyder says that by the time Auschwitz was operational, about 70 percent
of the Jews who were going to be killed in the Holocaust were already
dead. Many of those were the Jews of the Soviet Union, who were targeted
by the Einsatzgruppen, the German police, the German military and their
helpers.

"The farther east you go, in general, the less Americans, the less West
Europeans think about [the killings]," he says. "And so, the
Einsatzgruppen, who were active ... farther east, are indeed part of the
Holocaust that we know the least about."

Snyder says the knowledge of the horrors of Auschwitz warps public
understanding of the Holocaust.

"It's as though once we know about Auschwitz there couldn't be anything
worse, and that's a very understandable perspective," he says.

Snyder says the reason there is awareness of what went on in Auschwitz is
that it was a labor camp as well as a death facility. Three other
facilities Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec served only as death camps and
killed more people than Auschwitz.

But "because there was no labor component to those camps, there were
effectively no survivors. ... So there was no one to tell the tale,"
Snyder says.

Another reason not much is known about the eastern deaths, he says, is
that many of those stories disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. After
World War II, the Soviets did not want to discuss the fact that Jews were
killed in the Holocaust, counting their numbers with other Soviet
citizens.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Snyder says, tried to create the myth that the
Russians suffered the most and died the most in World War II. He says that
though Russians did suffer and die in horrible numbers, Ukrainians,
Belarussians and Jews fared worse.

"Stalin was very keen to deny the special character of German policy
toward the Jews because that would have displaced the Soviet people and,
in particular, the Russian people, from the story of suffering and victory
that he wanted to tell," Snyder says.

(source: National Public Radio)





AUSTRIA:

Fate of Holocaust institute teeters amid dispute


The future of an Austrian institute for Holocaust studies was in
doubt Tuesday over a dispute with the city's Jewish community.

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies began provisional
operations in January after being stymied for years by funding problems.

Its aim, among other things, is to give scholars from around the world the
possibility to carry out research projects using the roughly 8,000 files
of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and parts of a vast archive
belonging to the Jewish Community Vienna.

Last week, the institute's seven-member executive committee resigned in
protest, asserting that the Jewish community was blocking access to its
archive, the Austrian newspaper "Der Standard" reported on its Web site
late Monday.

When asked for confirmation, Anton Pelinka, the institute's chairman, said
in an e-mail to The Associated Press: "Yes, we have resigned. And it is up
to the Jewish Community to decide whether the Wiesenthal Institute can
survive."

Numerous Austrian organizations are involved in the project, including the
Jewish Community Vienna.

The disputed archive is made up of thousands of unevaluated administrative
files, correspondence, card indexes and books and is the largest preserved
archive of any Jewish community worldwide, according to the institute's
Web site.

Jewish community president Ariel Muzicant denied that his group was
blocking access to the archive, saying the lending issue was addressed in
a detailed and carefully prepared contract submitted to the institute's
lawyer on July 17.

"The accusation that access to the archive of the IKG Wien (Jewish
Community Vienna) is being denied to the VWI (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute)
does not conform to the facts," Muzicant said.

But a person familiar with the issue said it was precisely the contract
that triggered the executive board resignations.

"The conditions contained in the contract are completely unacceptable,"
the person said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of
the matter.

Among other things, the community wants users to request permission for
each piece that is used and reserves the right to remove pieces at will,
the person said. It was also unclear what exactly would be made available.

Pelinka, when asked to comment on the statement, said Muzicant had reneged
on his promise, articulated in a letter dated June 10, that the institute
would get the same access to the files as the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.

The draft contract was "a complete break of this promise," he said in an
e-mail.

Pelinka appeared pessimistic when asked if the institute could do without
the archive if need be.

"The institute would become a different (much smaller) one and I am not
sure if the members would agree on that," he wrote.

Wiesenthal, who lived in the Austrian capital and died in his Vienna home
in September 2005 at the age of 96, was personally involved in planning
the center.

Wiesenthal helped find hundreds of war criminals, including one-time SS
leader Adolf Eichmann, who organized the killing of millions of Jews.

(source: Associated Press)





USA:

Lawsuit over seized German art is dismissed



A federal judge in Nashville has dismissed a lawsuit by a Holocaust
survivor and his family against the German government over an
extensive art collection seized by the Nazis.

Retired Vanderbilt University economics professor Fred Westfield sought
unspecified damages for some 400 pieces of lost art including paintings by
El Greco and Peter Paul Rubens. The 82-year-old Westfield claimed the
paintings were owned by his family and were seized by the Nazis and sold
at auction during World War II.

U.S. District Court Judge Todd J. Campbell, in dismissing the suit, ruled
Tuesday that the seizure of the art collection was not a commercial act.
The judge also said Westfield should seek damages elsewhere than a U.S.
federal court.

(source: Associated Press)


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National Geographic special on Nazi crimes not so special


Though nearly seven decades have passed, the Holocaust remains the pivotal
event in recent world history. The lessons of that cataclysmic crime can
never be taught enough.

Unless those lessons are taught poorly.

A new National Geographic special, Hitler's Hidden Holocaust, attempts to
recount in 45 minutes the history of the Einsatzgruppen. Beginning in
1941, these Nazi marauders fanned out across Eastern Europe, wiping out
entire Jewish communities, one person, and one bullet at a time.

More than 1.5 million Jews died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, but
the Nazis decreed that wasn't enough, and thus the more efficient death
camp concept was born.

While images of slaughter and ruin in the documentary certainly sear the
viewer, due to inept storytelling, Hitler's Hidden Holocaust fails as a
documentary.

Starting with the title.

An Einsatzgruppen soldier guns down a mother and child in Ukraine,
1942.There was nothing hidden about the Einsatzgruppen. Their actions have
been well documented since the end of the war. Yad Vashem has an entire
room dedicated to their crimes.

Like similar documentaries, this one brings in historians to unpack
events. Michael Berenbaum and Peter Black of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum offer historical context, yet one can feel the filmmakers unseen
hand tugging on them to lay the emotion on thick.

It's as if the filmmakers don't trust their audience to comprehend the
monstrosity of it all.

In scene after scene, the filmmakers hammer home that the Einsatzgruppen
killed Jews one at a time (and in case you still don't get it, close-up
shots of bullet casings remind you).

The emotion runs to ghoulish extremes with the testimony of Zvi Michaeli,
a survivor of a 1941 Einsatzgruppen massacre in Latvia. Michaeli tells his
story with such breathless agony, it looks as if he might pass out from
horror right there on camera. This sequence comes dangerously close to
exploitation.

The film then bounces from one gruesome tale to the next, including a
fascinating analysis of a two-minute film fragment depicting a mass
shooting, a bit about the Nuremberg trials and a look at the work of
Patrick Debois, a French priest researching the killing fields of Eastern
Europe.

The part about Debois proves to be the most riveting sequence in the film,
and deserves a documentary all its own. Debois' research, as described in
his book 'Holocaust By Bullets,' truly did uncover a hidden Holocaust.

The film does a few things right, especially in terms of the cinematic
techniques used to augment that grainy film fragment. Coupled with insight
from historians, the viewer comes to understand much about the banality of
evil.

Similarly, morphing old photos of long-lost shtetls and showing those same
locales today, absent their former Jewish residents, emphasizes, as only
cinema can, a vanished world.

But it's not enough for 'Hitler's Hidden Holocaust' to have its intended
impact on viewers. No one could fault the filmmakers for wanting to expose
the Einsatzgruppen for the monsters that they were. But ginning up the
emotion is not necessary when simple storytelling will do.


'Hitler's Hidden Holocaust' airs 10 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 2 on the National
Geographic Channel.

(source: Jewish Weekly)


*************************************************


Holocaust denier David Irving to take message to New York City

Notorious Holocaust denier David Irving has added New York to the list of
cities where he plans to spew his noxious notions about what the Nazis did
to the Jews.

"In the fall, I'll be in the New York area," said Irving, when reached on
his cell phone Friday. "I won't go into specifics."

That's probably because Irving, who once claimed that Adolf Hitler knew
nothing about the slaughter of 6 million Jews, is not likely to get a warm
reception.

"Let's put it this way, if he comes to New York, he will be confronted by
truth and justice," said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American
Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants. "That's how
you deal with hate and provocation."

A British professor who recently served a year in an Austrian jail for
violating that country's law about denying the Holocaust, Irving has
quietly been criss-crossing the country and speaking to small groups.

Irving, 71, was in Chicago and preparing to give a lecture claiming that
the number of Jews who went to the gas chambers is overblown when he was
tracked down by a Daily News reporter.

The author of nearly 30 books, Irving has contended that most of the Jews,
Poles and others who died in the German concentration camps were killed by
diseases such as typhus.

(source: New York Daily News)








POLAND:

Polish comic books cover Nazi camps


A Nazi death camp may not seem a fit topic for comic books but a
new series with real-life stories from Auschwitz has come out in Poland --
in Polish and English -- to teach youngsters about the Holocaust.

The drawings, at times as raw as the reality, are offset by the humanity
of real, historically documented prisoners -- and jailers -- like the
doomed, young lovers in the first adventure, "Love in the Shadow of
Death".

The creators Beata Klos and Jacek Lech said they mulled over the idea for
years and the format -- 40-page, soft-cover comic books -- was deliberate.

"We think the history of the death camps isn't sufficiently taught to the
younger generations and rarely in a way that would draw their interest,"
Klos told AFP.

The illustrations in the series, called "Episodes from Auschwitz", do not
spare readers from what their website calls "the nightmarish depravity of
Auschwitz".

A proviso recommends the comics not be read by youngsters under 16.

More than one million, mostly European Jews perished in Auschwitz -- in
the notorious gas chambers or worked to death as slave labourers -- during
the German Nazi occupation of Poland, and the first book shows piles of
naked corpses and sadistic camp guards.

One page has dramatic frames of the heroine on the ground, kicked and
beaten with a pole by uniformed guards before being hauled off to a death
whose details were never known.

The book says it's a story that "became legendary in the camp", that of
Edward Galinski, nicknamed Edek, a non-Jewish Pole and one of the first
prisoners sent to Auschwitz in 1940, and Mala Zimetaum, a Polish Jew
arrested in Belgium in 1942.

Mala's knowledge of languages saved her from the gas chambers and got her
a "good" job, allowing her to help others.

A third figure, Nazi SS officer Edward Lubusch, an ethnic German who grew
up in Poland, helped the couple escape on June 24, 1944, but they were
caught 12 days later and executed -- she only 26, he 21.

"These three people behaved in such noble manner!" said Auschwitz
historian Adam Cyra, who acted as a consultant along with camp survivor
Kazimierz Smolen.

"The publishers did well to learn from eye-witnesses who survived," said
Smolen in comments on an independent website.

Defiant to the end, Mala slashed her arms and gave her executioner a
bloody slap. "Mala did it her own way," the blurb reads.

So did Edek. Standing at the gallows before other prisoners forced to
watch, he thrust his own head into the noose and jumped -- shocking the
hangmen who forced his body back onto the platform. "At the end Edek
surprised them once again," a blurb says, when he shouted something --
"perhaps it was 'Long live Poland' or the beginning of our national
anthem".

A frame shows prisoners removing their striped caps in respect, further
irking angry guards.

"They probably started to regret that it was a public execution," reads a
blurb.

The work, with a print run of 2,000 copies in each language, was published
in May, and has been applauded by both the official Auschwitz museum and
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

A second comic, on Polish anti-Nazi resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, is
due out in August and a third "most likely" in September, Klos said.

"The entire story is based on completely authentic facts (...) a lot of
testimony from former prisoners. This is exactly why we agreed to
distribute it," Auschwitz museum director Piotr Cywinski told AFP.

"Seventy percent of our visitors are youngsters" but "it's difficult to
get them interested (in Auschwitz) using thick history books," he said.

Rabbi Schudrich, who is American, told AFP "the important thing is it
engages young people," noting "this is a problem in an age where often you
don't catch young people in the first few seconds in the world of instant
everything".

He hailed the work's "educational" message in not only helping teenagers
"to understand what the Nazi genocide against the Jews meant" but in
showing that the Nazis were also targetting others, including non-Jewish
Poles, gypsies and political opponents.

"Many people don't realise that more or less as many non-Jewish Poles were
murdered as were Jewish, it's the percentages that were different: it was
90 percent of Polish Jewry and 10 percent of the general Polish
population," the rabbi said.

The Nazis ran Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the southern Polish town of
Oswiecim, from 1940 until it was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27,
1945, three months before Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies.

It was among the most notorious facilities in Adolf Hitler's plan of
genocide against European Jews, six million of whom perished at the hands
of the Nazis during World War II.

The website for the series is www:episodesfromauschwitz.pl.

(source: Agence France-Presse)


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Warsaw, Poland Marking Iconic 1944 Revolt Against Nazis


Ageing Second World War Polish resistance veterans gathered this week in
the country's capital for emotional commemorations of their ill-fated 1944
Warsaw uprising against occupying Nazi Germany.

"This 65th anniversary is exceptional. Many of us won't be around for the
70th," said Zbigniew Scibor-Rylski, 92, head of an ex-combatants'
association.

The number of veterans of the two-month revolt, launched on August 1,
1944, has dwindled to 3,500.

The uprising was launched by the Home Army -- commanded by Poland's
London-based government-in-exile -- which secretly deployed around 50,000
fighters in Warsaw.

Around 18,000 Polish fighters died. Nazi losses were around 17,000.

(source: Canwest News Service)