August 19

LIECHTENSTEIN:

Liechtenstein prince angers German Jews _ again


Liechtenstein's reigning prince has angered German Jews by invoking the
Holocaust to defend his country's banking secrecy laws, drawing sharp
reactions Monday.

The latest flare-up of fractious relations between the tiny Alpine
principality and its much larger neighbor to the north stemmed from
comments in a weekend interview Prince Hans-Adam II gave for
Liechtenstein's national holiday.

The prince took aim particularly at Germany, which has been pressuring
Liechtenstein to clamp down on confidential banking practices that it
claims allow wealthy Germans to evade taxes.

"We and Switzerland saved many people, especially Jews, with banking
secrecy," Hans-Adam II told the Liechtensteiner Volksblatt. "Germany
should clean up its own act, and think about its past."

The prince noted how some Jews were able to buy their safety during the
Holocaust by using money they had safely deposited in Switzerland or
Liechtenstein. Secrecy rules also helped people persecuted by communist
governments and "continues to save life ... in Third-World countries run
by bloodthirsty dictators," he said.

"Beyond that, Germany and many other countries have an unbelievable mess
with their state finances," Hans-Adam II said, referring to a traditional
argument here that poor governance and high taxes lead to tax evasion, not
banking secrecy. "These must first be put in order. They have been
unsuccessful until now in doing this. The financial crash basically goes
back to this alarming disability."

The comments were met with harsh criticism from Germany's Jewish
community, which also slammed Hans-Adam II last year for describing
modern-day Germany as a "fourth" Reich.

"The comments are a mockery of the Holocaust and its survivors," Stephan
Kramer, general secretary of the German Central Council of Jews, told Bild
newspaper. "It is historically incorrect for him to portray Liechtenstein
as a merciful helper of the Jews. His highness would be better off
retiring."

The Central Council did not answer a request for comment, while the
Liechtenstein royal family's press office declined to respond to the
criticism.

The prince, 64, has waged numerous legal battles in Germany to recover
artwork he claims was looted from his family by the Nazis during the
Second World War. More recently, Liechtenstein has been embroiled in a
spat with Berlin over rich German citizens that have evaded taxes through
the principality's banks.

Last year, German authorities paid a former employee of Liechtenstein's
LGT bank to obtain the names of about 1,400 alleged tax cheats. The
seizure provoked an angry response from the bank, which is wholly owned by
the prince and his family, but also pushed the country toward reforming
its financial sector.

Hans-Adam rejected the idea that his country was prospering because of tax
evasion.

"What is demanded is high quality performance, and now we are offering
that," he said in the interview. "There are clients who deposit money here
completely legally, because they value our good service."

Still, he warned that Liechtenstein faced contraction over the next two or
three years as "the market crash is hitting far more negatively than the
whole tax debate."

(source: Associated Press)





USA//TEXAS:

Holocaust exhibit sheds light on story of unlikely rescuers



Photographer Norman H. Gershman's "Besa: A Code of Honor" exhibit
chronicles one of the more unusual -- and less-known -- stories from the
Holocaust.

Its 30 black-and-white photos tell the stories of some of the more than
20,000 Albanian Muslims who rescued Jews from the Nazis during World War
II.

"There is no evidence of any Jew being turned over to any Nazi," said
Gershman, who is Jewish, from his home in Basalt, Colo. "Seventy percent
of the people in Albania are Muslims."

Muslims rescuing Jews seems improbable in today's world. Gershman hopes
the exhibit, which will open a five-week run Aug. 23 at the El Paso
Holocaust Museum and Study Center, will help chip away at ethnic and
religious stereotypes.

"Our purpose is really to inform the West of what Muslims did," he said.
"These are Muslims. They did it in relation to their religion. They
primarily did it without compensation or want of any."

The six-year project took Gershman, who turned 77 on Friday, to the
southern European country and to neighboring Kosovo, where he met with
some of the people (or their families) who helped spirit Jews out of the
country.

"In many cases, Jews were arrested or were refugees, and those (Albanians)
living there would give them false passports and dress them in Islamic
garb," Gershman said. "In many cases, the Albanian rescuers never even
knew their real names."

The Albanian people were practicing a centuries-old code of conduct called
besa.

"There's a culture of besa. It's thousands of years old. It's a code of
honor," he explained. "It's inconceivable for an Albanian to turn their
back on someone that needs help, to the point where they will lay their
lives down for them."

The people he photographed and interviewed -- Gershman also produced a
book of photographs and stories -- had integrated besa into their
religion.

"One said, as an example, that there is no Quran without besa, no besa
without Quran," Gershman recalled. "They said, 'We were saving God's
children,' 'If you save a life, you to go paradise,' 'Jews and Muslims are
cousins,' and on and on."

When Gershman asked one man why his family risked their lives for the
Jews, he replied, " 'Any Albanian would have done it. It's nothing
special.' "

But it's a pretty special story to Gershman, one that's received very
little publicity, largely due to more than four decades of oppressive
communist rule at the hand of Enver Hoxha. The stories began circulating
after Hoxha's death in 1985 and the election of a non-communist regime in
1992, Gershman said.

"I'd never heard of it, either. I'm learning about this along with
everybody else," said Maribel Villalva, executive director of the El Paso
Holocaust Museum and Study Center. "I'm surprised. People who are scholars
on the Holocaust are hearing about this for the first time, too. It took
Mr. Gershman to discover this story and put it out there."

The show consists of about 30 16-by-20-inch black-and-white portraits,
some straightforward, others emotional. Each is accompanied by explanatory
text. Gershman chose to shoot in black and white because, he said, it
gives the portraits a more "timeless" look.

"There are wonderful stories of courage," Villalva said. "Some are really
sad, but the common theme in all of them is this is what they had to do --
it didn't matter if these people were Jewish or Christian. It was simply
because they were human."

It's also an inspiring story, she added. "It's very easy to get caught up
in the horrors and the sadness of the Holocaust," Villalva said. "What
this exhibit does is showcase the courage of the people who did everything
in their power."

The exhibit was organized by the Hebrew Union College -- Jewish Institute
of Religion Museum. It has been displayed at Yad Vashem, Israel's
Holocaust museum, as well as the United Nations and the Council of
European Nations.

It has been endorsed by Presidents Clinton and Carter, Holocaust survivor
and activist Elie Wiesel, and Jehan Sadat, the widow of Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat.

Villalva said the exhibit has been making the rounds of Holocaust museums
and is showing concurrently at the Holocaust Museum Houston. It will head
to Nashville after its El Paso run ends Sept. 27.

Gershman's project is also the subject of a documentary, "God's House,"
which will be released in 2010. He's been interviewed about it on radio's
Voice of America and Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network. He will be
featured on future editions of "CBS Sunday Morning" and NPR's "Weekend
Edition."

Villalva said the exhibit serves as a powerful reminder of what people of
various ethnic and religious backgrounds can do together. The message is
particularly timely in the post-9/11 world, where racial and ethnic
stereotypes have worsened.

"You hear a lot about the strife between Muslims and Jews. This highlights
a time when people of both faiths coexisted during one of the most
horrible times in our history," she said.

Gershman said he really wasn't sure what the project was going to become
when he started digging around six years ago. But he believes he chanced
upon an inspiring, if little known, part of our history.

"I had no idea why I was doing it," he said, "but I knew I had to do it."

(source: El Paso Times)






GERMANY:

New book reveals horror of Nazi camp brothels


In 1942, the Nazis decided that forced labourers in concentration camps
would work harder if they were promised sex -- so they made female
prisoners work in brothels for them.

The brothels form the subject of "Das KZ Bordell" (The Concentration Camp
Brothel) by Robert Sommer, a book that has been hailed as the first
comprehensive account of a little known chapter of Nazi oppression in
World War Two.

Sommer's 460-page work, due to be presented at the Berlin state parliament
on Wednesday, explores the origins, structure and impact of the
"Sonderbauten" (special buildings) run by Heinrich Himmler's SS in Germany
and Nazi-occupied Europe.

"In the collective memory and written history of World War Two, the camp
brothels were for a long time taboo," the 35-year-old Berliner told
Reuters. "The former prisoners didn't want to talk about it: it was a
difficult subject to handle.

"It didn't fit so easily into the postwar image of the concentration camps
as monuments to suffering."

Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in 1942, the SS opened 10
brothels, the biggest of which was in Auschwitz, in modern Poland, where
as many as 21 women prisoners once worked. The last opened in early 1945,
the year the war ended.

The chapter is separate from the annals of the Holocaust of European Jews.
Jewish women were not recruited as prostitutes, and Jewish men were not
admitted to the brothels.

Sommer estimates around 200 women inmates in total were forced to work in
the brothels -- initially offered the prospect of escaping the brutality
of the concentration camps.

"They were promised release after half a year if they served in the
brothel. But the promises were never honoured," he said. "Later, the SS
just selected women they felt were suitable."

"Jews were not allowed in. Neither were Soviet prisoners of war," he
added. "Jewish women did not serve as sex workers."

Tens of thousands of captured soldiers, political prisoners and people
branded socially undesirable by the Nazis, including Roma and homosexuals,
were held in camps alongside the millions of Jews who died in the
Holocaust.

"The idea behind the brothels was to raise productivity by providing
forced labourers with added incentive," said Sommer. "Yet from what I
found, it didn't work at all. Only a few people were actually in a
physical condition to go to them."

According to Sommer, the use of prisoners to provide sex to other
prisoners was purely a Nazi phenomenon in the war.


NO COMPENSATION

The prostitutes, most in their early 20s, received more food and were
treated less harshly than other women inmates.

In return, they had to provide sex to selected prisoners every evening
between 8 and 10 p.m., and on Sunday afternoons.

"The brothels show another dimension to the Nazi terror, where victims of
the Nazis were made into perpetrators against the women," said Sommer, who
grew up in communist East Germany.

After the war, the women -- many of whom had been interned by the Nazis on
the grounds they were "asozial" or anti-social -- remained stigmatised
despite their ordeal, Sommer said.

The brothels were strictly regulated, charging a fixed sum. The idea of
providing material incentives for prisoners was borrowed from Soviet
gulags, where inmates' behaviour could determine the size of their food
rations.

"The Nazis even imposed race laws inside the brothels," said Sommer.
"Germans who wanted to go to a brothel could only go to a German woman.
And a Slavic prisoner only to a Slavic woman."

Only privileged prisoners like Kapos (camp supervisors) had the means to
afford frequent visits, and Sommer estimates less than 1 percent of the
camp population ever went to the brothels.

Once the SS had issued a brothel permit, men were assigned a woman and
medically examined. If their name was read out in an evening roll call
they were marched to the building and had a medicinal cream applied to
their genitals by a doctor.

Even the act of intercourse was supervised, as detailed SS logs of the
brothels testify.

"The SS had spy-holes to check up on them," said Sommer. "Only 15 minutes'
sex and the missionary position were allowed."

To research the book, Sommer visited all 10 camps -- which included Dachau
and Buchenwald -- and interviewed 30 former prisoners, among them a number
of men who used the brothels.

However, nearly all the women forced to work there are now dead, and those
that remain are reluctant to talk.

"We don't know of any who were compensated for what they went through,"
Sommer said. "It's important that these women are given back some of their
dignity."

(source: Reuters)