Aug. 24




LITHUANIA:

Lithuanian to consider restitution to Holocaust survivors


In Vilnius, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite on Monday promised
descendants of the country's Jewish community that they would receive
restitution for property seized during World War II.

Addressing an international congress in Vilnius of 'Litvaks,' as
Lithuania's Jews are known, Grybauskaite said the Baltic state had spent
the 20 years since it regained its independence from the Soviet Union
trying to correct 'historical errors' that saw Jews dispossessed of their
property and other assets when their community was almost entirely
liquidated during World War II.

'This autumn the government and parliament will consider a Restoration of
Property Act. I am very glad that a historical injustice which was not
[perpetrated] in today's Lithuania will be corrected, and you'll get
justice,' she told delegates at the Third World Litvak Congress.

Under a draft law prepared by the Lithuanian government, restitution
payments totalling 113 million litas (47 million dollars) would be paid in
instalments between 2112-2023. In addition, the remaining Jewish community
would be provided with a museum and library.

Michael Schneider, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, said
restitution would be welcome and was badly needed.

'The reason that we are pressing for restitution is certainly not to
revenge what happened in the past ... The money needs to be used in order
to rebuild the Lithuanian Jewish society and also to help those people who
survived the Holocaust,' he told a press conference.

Yuli Edelstein, Israel's minister of information and diaspora, told the
conference restitution issues needed to be brought to a swift conclusion.

'The population of needy Holocaust survivors is old and rapidly passing
away. Therefore, whatever can be done to help them and future Jewish
generations must be done now,' he said.

From the 13th century onwards, Litvaks played a central role in the life
of Vilnius, eventually accounting for nearly half of the population and
earning Vilnius a reputation as the 'Jerusalem of Lithuania' and a centre
of Jewish scholarship, with more than a hundred synagogues.

During some of the most brutal scenes of the Holocaust following the Nazi
invasion of 1941, German troops and local collaborators virtually wiped
out the Jewish population.

At Paneriai, just outside Vilnius, around 70,000 Jews were killed with the
liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. Other mass murders were committed at
200 different sites around Lithuania. Only 4,000 Jews survived the
holocaust from a pre-war population of around 150,000.

Lithuania's attempts to reconcile the Jewish past remain problematic
partly because the question of restitution remains unresolved.

Jewish organizations have objected to plans to build apartment blocks on
top of part of the former Snipiskes Jewish cemetery in Vilnius and have
warned of a revival of anti-Semitism in all three Baltic states.

(source: Middle East News)




CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czechs commemorate Romani Holocaust victims


Some 50 people attended a meeting and mass in memory of the victims of
Romani Holocaust on the site of former wartime internment camp for Czech
Romanies in Hodonin u Kunstatu Sunday.

Almost 1400 Romanies went through the Hodonin internment camp during World
War Two (in operation from August 1942 to December 1943). Over 200 died
there and more than 800 were sent to the extermination camp in Oswiecim
(Auschwitz) where most of them perished, said historians from the Museum
of Romani Culture that annually organises the commemorative event.

This year it was for the first time held in the complex of the former
internment camp that now serves as a recreational facility.

The Czech state is negotiating with the private owner of the complex about
its purchase.

The Museum of Roma Culture would like to establish the Romany Holocaust
educational centre and a memorial on the premises.

However, museum director Jana Horvathova said the Culture Ministry
abandoned the talks over the lack of finances, so the museum was looking
for a new form of the planned centre's operation.

The meeting is annually staged in Hodonin u Kunstatu to commemorate the
second transport from the camp to Auschwitz on August 21, 1943.

Another Nazi interment wartime camp for Romanies in the Czech Lands was
built in Lety, south Bohemia.

At present a pig farm is on the site, which has been repeatedly criticised
by Romanies and human rights activists. The European Parliament has also
called on the Czech Republic to remove the pig farm.

The Czech state plans to purchase the surrounding plots from the
municipalities and establish a place of commemoration in Lety.

The Culture Ministry will submit an updated plan of adjustments of the
commemorative place to the government next week, ministry spokeswoman
Viktorie Plivova told CTK Sunday.

The government in May decided to increase the budget of the Culture
Ministry for 2009 by some 21.5 million crowns to cover the costs of the
building of access roads, a parking lot and pubic conveniences for
visitors and adjustments of the whole Lety memorial. The reconstruction
works should be completed by 2010.

The Lety memorial would be administered by the Memorial of Lidice, central
Bohemia, a village razed to the ground by the Nazis in 1942.

Nevertheless, the government decision does nor solve the problem of a
private pig farm on the site of the Lety camp.

Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities Kocab said previously the removal of
the pig farm from Lety would be one of his priorities. But later he said
it would not be suitable if the state bought out the pig farm as in the
times of the economic crisis the pig farm secures jobs.

Over 1300 Romanies were interned in Lety during the German Nazi
occupation, 327 of whom perished in the camp and over 500 were sent to
Auschwitz.

(source: Czech News Agency)






GLOBAL---new book


Hunting Evil----A fascinating history traces the mundane lives of Nazi war
criminals


If there's anything people love more than a mystery, it's a conspiracy.
Blend them together and spice with top Nazi war criminals, and you have a
shelf of sensational paperbacks, many of them selling in the hundreds of
thousands. Guy Walters's book about the hunt to bring the war criminals to
justice is different. While not sparing us details of their atrocities, it
is not sensationalist. It is very thoroughly researched. And rarer still
of all, it is true.

More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, there are still
Nazi mass murderers and concentration camp guards among us who have
escaped real justice. Over a bottle of red wine, Walters interviewed Erich
Priebke, a sprightly nonagenarian living in a comfortable Rome flat, who
in 1944 helped gather together 335 Italians for a reprisal killing, after
33 German policemen had been killed by a bomb the day before. Priebke
collected the men and checked them into a cave where SS men shot them in
the back of the head. As the bodies mounted, victims were forced to climb
the bleeding pile to be added to it. Erna Wallisch, formerly a guard at
the death camps of Ravensbrck and Majdanek, was the seventh most wanted
Nazi war criminal on the Wiesenthal Centre's list: she had beaten women
and children towards the gas chambers. She lived peacefully in Vienna
where she was protected by a statute of limitations. Protected by her
neighbours too, since Austria, which in 1986 elected as its president a
former Nazi officer complicit in genocide, has taken a more liberal view
of these matters. Walters could only take her picture before she slammed
her door.

But this is predominantly a book about the ones who got away and the
people who helped them. It reveals how strong was the feeling of revenge,
or at least of thwarted justice, that Hitler's closest henchman Martin
Bormann and the Auschwitz doctor of death, Josef Mengele, were widely
thought to be living in South America long after their actual deaths.
Bormann was reported dead by the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, who
escaped with him from Hitler's bunker and saw Bormann dead, probably shot
in the back. Yet nobody believed it. The Americans claimed he was in the
hands of the Russians; the Russians accused Britain and the US of holding
him. The corpse of the Gestapo chief Heinrich Mller, a bullet in his back,
was found with his identity papers near the Reich Chancellery and buried
in a mass grave in Berlin, yet my Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich
(2002) still claims that "the mystery of his disappearance remains." It
took Bormann's skeleton and teeth, and Mengele's reconstituted skull, to
bury the conviction that they were still alive.

Mystery and conspiracy. One of the lasting services done by Walters is to
thoroughly scotch the belief that any vast and powerful organisation such
as Odessa existed outside the imagination of novelists and the tall
stories of Simon Wiesenthal. A virtually one-man escape operation run by
the charismatic Otto Skorzeny enjoyed a brief existence, but nobody seems
to have heard of it, and it had fizzled out by the early Fifties. The
closest equivalent was the highly efficient and effective Spanish network
run from Madrid by a spinster in her late forties, who from 1944 onwards
helped thousands of war criminals to escape.

Thousands more war criminals escaped because their records no longer
existed or they simply couldn't be found in the chaos of Germany Year
Zero. From today's perspective it might sound almost like connivance, but
in 1944 the Allies were simply shattered; there was no great lust for
revenge except, understandably, among the Jews. The overriding priority
was to curb anarchy; besides, Churchill was not alone in fearing that the
pursuit of evil might draw attention to evils committed by the pursuers
themselves. Britains War Crimes Investigation Unit was hopelessly
undermanned and underfunded. Thousands of war crimes suspects were simply
let go, on the grounds that their jailers were now needed to confront
Stalin.

Many more were protected by the Allies because their knowledge might be
usefully turned against Russia. Horst Kopkow, who was responsible for the
deaths of some 300 Allied spies, brutally torturing agents such as
Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan before sending them to death camps,
was kept in Germany for interrogation. When pressure to bring him to trial
intensified, MI6 announced his death from pneumonia, and kept him employed
covertly as an agent until the late Fifties. The fiendishly brutal Gestapo
officer in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, was protected by the Americans for years,
despite high-level requests from Paris. The most murderous criminal in
these pages - more even than Adolf Eichmann because he not only created
the framework for Hitler's genocide operations but was active in the death
camps and the extermination commandos - was the monstrous Dr Friedrich
Buchardt. Instead of hanging from a noose, he was employed by the British
and later by the Americans, and died in his bed in 1982.

Walters reels in his big fish - Stangl, Eichmann, Mengele and Barbie -
turn by turn. Franz Stangl, a career policeman who was responsible for
800,000 dead at Treblinka, walked out of his open prison after the war
and took the same route as countless others: south to Rome, where he was
welcomed at the Santa Maria dellAnima by Bishop Hudal and given a Red
Cross passport and an exit visa.

Eichmann eluded the authorities for four years and then took a similar
escape route via Genoa, also helped with documents from a Roman Catholic
priest. He arrived in Argentina, where the dictator Juan Pern actively
sympathised with the Nazi cause.

Mengele, whose name had already become synonymous with the evils of
Auschwitz, also went via Austria and Genoa, courtesy of the same churchmen
whose desire to help their fellow Roman Catholics outweighed their
knowledge of the world. Walters scrupulously documents their humdrum lives
and their menial jobs - all but Barbie whose skills at interrogation won
him money and power under the Bolivian dictator Barrientos, until he too
met belated justice, dying in a French prison in 1991.

Walters's most personal hunt is not about crimes but about lies.
Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, was instrumental in helping to get the
Holocaust properly recorded. He also brought a few Nazis to justice,
though no famous ones. But as Walters devastatingly exposes, Wiesenthal's
life was built on lies and fabrications. Briefly he was a stand-up
comedian when he was young, he could not help but put himself in the
middle of every successful Nazi hunt, taking credit when it was mostly
undeserved. That could not be said of Hunting Evil. It is gripping and
well documented, and deserves a lasting place among histories of the war.

Hunting Evil: the Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Hunt to Bring
Them to Justice

by Guy Walters 528pp, Bantam, 18.99

(source: The Telegraph)


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

As prey die, what next for Nazi hunters?


Earlier this summer, 650 kilometres from downtown Washington, a
Gulfstream IV jet carrying one of the country's most infamous accused war
criminals prepared to take flight as U.S. Justice Department prosecutors
watched a live television feed.

The target of their rapt attention: One-time Nazi concentration-camp guard
John Demjanjuk, 89, who had outlasted a generation of American lawyers
vying to deport him from the U.S. for allegedly lying about his role in
the Holocaust.

One department attorney in the elite Office of Special Investigations died
from cancer, another perished in an airplane crash and still more had
retired from public service in the nearly three decades since the
investigation began.

"Even as the plane took off, I thought, `Something's going to happen,'"
recalled OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum.

"Because that was the case for so many years where if something could go
wrong, it did go wrong."

On that day in mid-May, Rosenbaum tracked the plane's ascent from a
Cleveland airport on a journey that would deliver Demjanjuk to Germany to
face charges. But as employees in the Justice Department office basked in
the afterglow of one of their largest victories, their anxieties turned to
a question: What next?

The subjects of their life's work people with ties to the Nazis who lied
on citizenship forms to enter the United States after World War II are
dead or dying. Current and former employees of the OSI say the unit is
racing against the clock to extradite the few elderly Nazis still residing
on American soil. Jonathan Drimmer, the lead trial lawyer in the
government's case against Demjanjuk, said Demjanjuk's expulsion is "a coda
on a generation of work to bring major Nazi war criminals to justice."

Since the OSI began operations in 1979, it has won deportation orders
against 107 people and prevented 180 more from entering the United States
through its watchlist program. Yet it remains to be seen how the
close-knit group of lawyers and historians, accustomed to combing
document-rich archives in Europe's former Eastern Bloc for clues, will
recast its mission from capturing Nazis to catching criminals who fled
murderous conflicts in such diverse places as Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia.

The OSI focuses on revoking the citizenship of Americans who entered the
country on false pretenses by lying about their involvement in war crimes,
rather than targeting criminals based overseas.

The office continues to rack up international accolades for its work on
the defining battles of the 20th century. "It's been the most important
instrument in trying to bring Nazi war criminals to justice," said Abraham
Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust
survivor who was hidden as a youth by a Catholic nun.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center gave the OSI an "A" for its efforts and
concluded in a report last winter that it had "conducted the most
successful program of its kind in the world."

But its staff levels have settled around 28 employees after peaking in the
1980s at nearly double that. And many of the tools that served the unit so
well are no longer available to its history detectives. Scrupulous
recordkeeping practices, characteristic of the Nazis, largely do not exist
in the modern conflicts.

Nonetheless, OSI leaders say they are aggressively shifting their focus to
fresh cases, which now make up the bulk of the workload.

So far, the unit has filed court charges in a half-dozen new war crimes
cases, led by an effort this year to revoke the citizenship of Lazare
Kabaya Kobagaya, 82, of Topeka, Kan., who allegedly took part in the 1994
Rwandan genocide.

Nearly 80 similar episodes involving modern war crimes remain under the
office's investigation.

Rosenbaum, who joined the unit as an intern three decades ago, asserted
that "unless mankind stops perpetrating these crimes, we will exist for
the foreseeable future."

(source: The Toronto Star)






USA:

Original German Rocket Team member Walter Jacobi dies at 91


Walter Jacobi, an original member of Dr. Wernher von Braun's rocket team
that came to America at the end of World War II, died today.

Jacobi played an invaluable role in designing the structure and components
of America's Cold War rockets that were developed by the Army on Redstone
Arsenal and later NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center, close friends told
The Times.

"Walter was one of those extremely friendly guys and very low key, and I
never heard a cross word uttered by him," said Brooks Moore a retired
Marshall Space Flight Center engineer who knew Jacobi. "He was really
involved in our retired engineers events over the past decade, and,
frankly, I'm shocked to hear of his death."

Today, Hans Fichtner, Dieter Grau, Rudolph H. Schlidt, Oscar Holderer are
among the last of the original 118 scientists who came to America as part
of Operation Paperclip - the American intelligence program that salvaged
as much of Germany's V-2 rocket research and engineers as possible.

(source: The Huntsville Times)





ISRAEL/NORWAY:

Israel chides Norway for celebrating Nazi sympathiser


Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has reproached Norway for
commemorating its Nobel Prize winning novelist Knut Hamsun who
sympathised with the Nazis, a newspaper reported on Monday.

"I was shocked to discover that the Norwegian government had decided to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Hamsun, who was an admirer
of the Nazis," the ultra-nationalist minister said.

Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, sent the medal to
Hitler's propaganda chief Josef Goebbels in 1943 and "even wrote a eulogy
to Hitler saying he was fighting for humanity," Lieberman said.

Norway issued a stamp and inaugurated a museum in honour of Hamsun to mark
the anniversary of his birth on August 4, 1859, even though he was
disgraced for his Nazi sympathies.

In July, Norway's foreign ministry issued a statement making it clear that
they had not forgotten the writer's controversial political beliefs.

"Hamsun's Nazi sympathies are a sordid part of his life. He received
massive condemnation for them after the war, and they have been debated in
Norway for many years.

Lieberman also charged that Norway was one of the few countries which did
not walk out of a UN racism conference in Geneva in April during a speech
by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Israel considers Iran its greatest foe after Ahmadinejad's repeated
diatribes calling for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map and
questioning the Holocaust.

(source: Agence France-Presse)