Sept. 9



GERMANY:

65 years after WWII, German parliament overturns all Nazi-era treason
convictions



Germany's parliament unanimously passed a blanket measure Tuesday
overturning Nazi-era verdicts convicting people of treason, nearly
65 years after the end of World War II.

Treason convictions carried the death penalty and were handed down in Nazi
Germany for any act deemed harmful to the nation or helpful to the enemy.
Under that umbrella, people were convicted of treason for political
resistance, aiding Jews, helping prisoners of war, selling products on the
black market and scores of other acts.

"By rehabilitating all so-called war traitors, we restore the honor and
dignity of a long forgotten group of victims of the Nazi justice system,"
Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said. "This is also an important signal
for the relatives."

Since the end of the war in 1945, challenges to treason convictions had to
be handled on an individual basis with a prosecutor weighing whether each
one should be overturned.

"The people who were convicted of treason are dead, that is true, but it
is important that they will be rehabilitated and remembered," said
Christine Lambrecht, a lawmaker from the Social Democratic Party who
supported the measure.

Some members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian
Democrats and the Bavarian-only sister Christian Social Union had
initially been against a blanket measure overturning the convictions,
arguing some of those sentenced may have harmed comrades in arms.

But after a study concluded it was impossible to determine whether the
acts for which people were sentenced "harmed a third party," they
supported the legislation.

Recent research by the military historians Wolfram Wette and Detlef Vogel
has shown that ordinary soldiers were often sentenced to death for
treason.

"Even if not all of those who were sentenced to death as war traitors were
political resistance fighters, they definitely all were victims of a
criminal justice system that killed in order to maintain the Nazi regime,"
Zypries said.

It is not clear exactly how many people were convicted of treason during
World War II, but tens of thousands Germans were sentenced to death for
desertion, troop demoralization or treason.

Even though most of the convictions are today considered wrongful, those
who survived them were often ostracized after the war.

"When we began to fight (for rehabilitation), the overwhelming majority of
Germans were against us," Ludwig Baumann, the head of the group lobbying
for the blanket rehabilitation, told reporters last month. "We were called
cowards and criminals."

Baumann, who was convicted of desertion, not treason, was exonerated by a
2002 measure that rehabilitated deserters and homosexuals criminalized by
the Nazis.

"I have been so humiliated," Baumann said. "For me this is a late
fulfillment."

(source: Associated Press)





UKRAINE:

Last Witnesses of the Holocaust----A Priest's Search for Mass Graves in
Ukraine


A French priest and his team are searching in Ukraine for the last
witnesses of the Holocaust. They have already found hundreds of mass
graves of Jews murdered by the Nazis. But time is running out.

Patrick Desbois has developed a keen eye for Ukrainian pensioners. The
French priest -- a diminutive man dressed in black -- is standing on a
village street and looking at two women walking by. They are the right
age. "Go over there, quickly, and ask them," Desbois says to his colleague
Andrej Umansky, a law student from Cologne. Both men have just arrived in
Yaktorov by minibus.

"Did you live here during the war?" Umansky asks the women. That's always
the first question.

One of the women nods.

"Did you see how the Jews were shot?" asks Umansky. When someone has
answered the first question with "yes," this is always the second one.

The woman nods again.

She is another contemporary witness of the Holocaust in Ukraine who
Desbois and Umansky have found. This has taken them one step further in
their work: documenting the mass murder of Jews in this region.

For the past six years, the priest, the student and the others in their
small team have been traveling through Ukraine and looking for old people,
men and women over the age of 70.

An estimated 1.5 million Jews were murdered by German occupying forces in
the area that constitutes today's Ukraine. Some of these people were
deported to extermination camps in what is today Poland. However, most of
the victims were shot by the occupiers in mass executions throughout the
country.

Retracing the Steps of the Perpetrators

One of the largest massacres was in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. On two
days in September 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were shot dead. This
massacre has been investigated; there are books and films about it, and
there is also a memorial there. Before the priest and his team arrived,
not much was known about the many other killings. There were hardly any
memorials; hundreds of thousands of dead had been forgotten.

The researchers retrace the steps of the perpetrators. Traveling from
village to village, they conduct interviews with eye witnesses, find
locals who will show them the sites of atrocities, search fields for spent
cartridges, shoot films, take pictures and note down everything. They are
usually on the road for a number of weeks in a row, traveling in teams of
10.

Over the past six years, they have questioned over 800 people in 330 towns
and villages, and discovered hundreds of mass graves. This autumn their
organization, Yahad-In Unum, will open a documentation center in Paris in
collaboration with the Sorbonne University. The German Foreign Ministry
has just made 500,000 ($717,000) available to allow them to continue their
search.

The old woman in Yaktorov is prepared to answer additional questions. Her
name is Anna; she is 82 years old. In the afternoon she is sitting at her
living room table -- a tiny woman wearing a headscarf and a knit jacket,
despite the heat.

Over the years, Father Desbois has developed a system that they now use to
conduct all interviews. They inquire about a large number of details to
refresh the witnesses' memories. What was the weather like on that day?

The weather was beautiful, says Anna, a sunny day.

It is important to ask the questions calmly. No interrogative tones, no
judgments, no emotions.

"I was walking with my cows on the meadow in front of the village," says
Anna. She was a young girl back then, 16, the daughter of simple farmers.
Her answers are brief, and she glances mutely at the priest after each
response.

It Was Much Worse for the Others

She had heard shots in the forest behind the meadow, and when it was quiet
again, she went to have a look. She saw three pits with corpses lying in
them. The pits were nearly filled with dead people, says Anna. She only
remembers male corpses, and she can't say whether they were naked or
clothed. A boy from the village was also there and they both stared into
the pits. She only glanced for a moment, and then she ran away.

Patrick Desbois became a Holocaust researcher because of his grandfather,
who was a prisoner of war held by the Germans in a camp in Galicia, in a
small town called Rava-Ruska. When he later told his grandson about his
internment in the camp, he said: It was much worse for the others. The old
man never said who the others were, and his grandson didn't dare ask. When
he later found a book with photos of Jews in a concentration camp, he
realized what his grandfather had been talking about.

Desbois lived in Africa and India before joining the Catholic priesthood
and becoming the secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for
Relations with Judaism. He started to study the Holocaust, and visited Yad
Vashem and Auschwitz. Nine years ago, he visited Ukraine for the first
time and saw the town where his grandfather had been held.

During a second visit to Rava-Ruska, he asked about the other places.
Thousands of Jews had been murdered in the town. But where? No one could
tell him. Desbois refused to believe it at first, and then he simply could
not accept it. He decided to look for the graves of the dead himself -- in
a country that he hardly knew, and whose language he didn't speak. It
would take two, perhaps three trips, he thought. He was furious,
determined and far too optimistic.

Many eyewitnesses were children, younger than Anna, when the Jews were
murdered in their towns and villages. The youngsters were curious and went
to where the people had been shot. Others were enlisted by the Nazis to do
manual labor. They had to fill in the pits or collect the clothing of the
victims. These children were often plagued by guilt later on. Now many are
recounting what they experienced for the first time.

Bones Lie Beneath the Meadows

Most of the mass graves are in western Ukraine, in the Galicia region.
Galicia is also home to the village of Yaktorov, near the city of Lviv,
where the Germans administered the region after they invaded the Soviet
Union in 1941. The occupiers confined the Jews to a labor camp near
Yaktorov. In the summer of 1943 the camp was closed and all prisoners were
shot.

On the spot where the camp was located, Father Desbois is standing next to
another witness and waiting for the old man to return to the present.

The priest rubs his eyes; he is exhausted. Desbois is 54 years old and
constantly traveling to conduct research, attend conferences, or present
the book that he has written about the project.

The old man yells disjointed words in German -- "Schweine, weg, weg" (or
"get out of here you pigs") -- and holds an imaginary rifle in the air.
Then he throws himself down in the grass, seemingly oblivious to the fact
that he is wearing a light-colored, carefully ironed shirt. Flowers are
blooming on the meadow, yellow and purple, and under the meadow lie the
bones of the dead.

'Where Did the Marksmen Stand?'

A memorial stone to the murdered Jews has stood for a number of years on
one edge of the former camp compound. That is inconclusive proof, as far
as Desbois is concerned. The stones often stand at the wrong location.

The old man jumps up and straightens his white hair. The witnesses often
slip back into the past when they return to the sites of the atrocities,
says Desbois.

The man's name is Bogdan and he was eight years old when he observed a
number of shootings from a distance. When they brought the Jews to the
pits, a German played on his harmonica, and afterwards the earth was
drenched in blood, he says.

"Where did the marksmen stand?" the priest asks him.

The old man points to the right-hand side, where the meadow gently slopes
upward. It is not the side with the memorial stone.

Andrej Umansky, the student from Cologne, runs to get the team's
ballistics expert -- a large, taciturn Ukrainian with a crew cut who
everyone calls Misha -- and walks with him up the small hill. Misha moves
a metal detector back and forth over the ground. After 30 seconds, they
make their first discovery, a cartridge case. "German" Misha yells. It is
possible to recognize the ammunition based on stamped numbers and letters.
They find a second and a third German-made cartridge. The killers have not
eliminated their traces. Then the metal detector emits another sound,
indicating a lighter metal. This leads them to a clump of earth, and
Umansky and Misha begin to scrape around it. In the soil they find a Star
of David made of silver. It is a pendant as large as a one-euro coin.

Umansky fetches plastic bags from the bus to pack up the cartridges and
pendant. Later on, he will take notes on the location of the evidence.

Andrej Umansky was born in Ukraine and came to Germany as a child with his
family. He was spending a voluntary year performing social services in
France when he heard that a priest was looking for interpreters for a trip
to Ukraine. Umansky volunteered. His father comes from a Jewish family in
Kiev that was evacuated to the non-occupied zone of the Soviet Union
before the massacres.

'We Could Stop Anywhere and Find a Mass Grave'

Umansky, 26, still has a somewhat boyish appearance. He always first flips
to the sports section in the newspaper. But when he talks about his work,
he sounds like a veteran historian. Following his first trip, he began to
research the occupation in German archives. Meanwhile his travels to
Ukraine have been eclipsed in number by his trips to Ludwigsburg, Germany
-- to the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist
Crimes, where he pours over the postwar investigation reports. At student
parties back in Cologne he tries to avoid the issue.

Evening has fallen and the men are sitting in the bus back to Lviv.
Umansky opens his backpack and pulls out his laptop where he has saved
databases, records, historical maps and satellite images of Galicia.

Father Desbois gazes out the window at the flat, expansive land in the
twilight, and the horse carts that the minibus passes. "It's beautiful
here, isn't it?" he says. "We could stop anywhere here and find a mass
grave."

Umansky looks up from his laptop and says: "Durchgangsstrasse IV." That's
what the occupying Germans called the road that they are driving on. It
extends from Krakow south into Ukraine. It was along this road that the
Germans established camps for the Jewish forced laborers. They drove along
this road to the villages to shoot the Jews. "We are taking the same trips
as the perpetrators," says Desbois.

The longer he does this work, the more it weighs on him. When he returns
to Paris after a trip, he often spends time alone in his apartment to
gather his thoughts.

A Posthumous Victory by the Perpetrators

By now they have located hundreds of mass graves. It is difficult to give
an exact figure because they have found numerous execution sites with
several death pits in most of the villages. In some of them they suspect
that there are hundreds of bodies, in others the remains of perhaps one
family. What should happen to these sites? This question preoccupies the
priest. He also reflects on the well-kept cemetery for Wehrmacht soldiers
near Rava-Ruska, with its large tombstones engraved with thousands of
German names. It seems to him like a posthumous victory by the
perpetrators.

The bones of the Jews may not be disturbed. The Jewish faith forbids it.
Only once have the researchers opened a mass grave under the supervision
of a rabbi. Some graves, however, have already been plundered by robbers
looking for dental gold. The Jewish mass graves must be covered with
concrete and marked by memorial plaques, says Desbois. It would be a new,
enormous task, "but first we have to make headway with this one."

So many villages have yet to be investigated in Ukraine. In addition, they
have started to look for eyewitnesses in Belarus, where over 700,000 Jews
were shot. They have just returned from their fourth visit there, and they
have been to Russia once. Things will have to move quickly now.

"We have at the most five or six years before the witnesses disappear."

(source: Spiegel Online)




USA----MASSACHUSETTS:

Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident

Student newspaper spokesman says ad "fell through the cracks"

Ad was rejected by newspaper over the summer

Historians say between 11 million and 17 million people were killed by the
Nazis



Harvard University, one of America's premiere academic institutions, is
coming under fire for running an advertisement in its campus newspaper
questioning the reality of the Holocaust.

The former Birkenau death camp in Germany. It is widely accepted that
about 5.7 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Recently named for the second straight year as the No. 1 school in U.S.
News & World Report rankings of American colleges, Harvard is known for
its rigorous scholarly standards and prestigious reputation.

On Tuesday, however, The Harvard Crimson, in what it said was an error,
ran the Holocaust-questioning advertisement, which had been rejected by
the paper over the summer.

In response to the commotion created by the ad, Crimson President Maxwell
L. Child released a statement Wednesday citing three weeks of summer
vacation between the submission of the advertisement and the publication
of the paper as the explanation for why the ad "fell through the cracks."

"We want to stress that we do not endorse the views put forth in any
advertisement that runs in The Crimson, and this case was no different,"
Child said in a letter to Crimson readers. "We will work hard to avoid
such lapses in communication in the future, and hope our readers will
accept that yesterday's error was a logistical failure and not a
philosophical one."

The ad, paid for by Holocaust denier Bradley R. Smith and his Committee
for Open Debate on the Holocaust, primarily raises questions about
then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's account of World War II and the existence of
Nazi gas chambers.

It is widely accepted that approximately 5.7 million of Europe's 7.3
million Jews perished during the war. In total, historians say, between 11
million and 17 million people were killed by the Nazi regime, including
religious and political opponents, ethnic Poles, Romani, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, homosexuals and people
with disabilities.

Smith said he is not surprised by the reaction because "it's taboo, and
has been taboo from the beginning. When you break a culture-wide taboo,
supported in theory and practice by the state, the university and the
press, you create a fuss."

Smith said that he made the deal with the Crimson in July, but was never
made aware of any plan by the newspaper to cancel his ad. While he has not
yet received a refund for his pulled notice, he said he expects the paper
to "do the right thing about the money."

Bernie Steinberg, president and director of Harvard Hillel, a Jewish
campus organization, said on Wednesday that the advertisement was
"obviously a shock to see."

But the group's students reacted appropriately, he said, and the incident
should be seen as an example of "extraordinary mature student leadership
in response to an unfortunate situation."

The Crimson was very responsive after many people in the Harvard
community, including numerous members of Harvard Hillel, contacted the
paper expressing their concerns, he said.

Harvard Hillel's student president, Rebecca Gillette, circulated a letter
saying she thought the situation was being appropriately addressed. "The
fact that organizations and individuals like that publicized in this
advertisement still exist today is frightening and disturbing, but
unfortunately it seems that Holocaust denial will persist for years to
come," she said.

Robert Trestan, civil rights counsel for the Anti-Defamation League of New
England, said Smith and his organization have placed ads in approximately
15 college papers around the country so far this year. He said he finds it
shocking that such an advertisement would fall through the cracks, as
Child said.

"Would an ad that questions whether the world was flat or that slavery
never happened in America have fallen through the cracks?" he asked.

He said his organization will continue to work with college newspaper
editors to educate schools that they don't have an obligation to publish
questionable advertising.

Al Tompkins, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, billed on its Web
site as "a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of
journalism," said he hopes this will become a "teachable moment."

"It seems to be a big mistake and obviously nothing meant to offend
anyone," he said. Because student publications are meant to be teaching
tools, "the key is not to not make mistakes, the key is how they respond
to mistakes in a forthcoming and transparent manner," he said.

He recommended that the Crimson return any money associated with the
advertisement.

Child's statement in the Crimson said that was being done.

(source: CNN)