July 12



SWITZERLAND:

Outsider artist obsessed with Hitler---Works by an artist whose obsession
with Adolf Hitler led him to portray the Nazi leader dozens of times are
being shown in a former Carthusian monastery.

The exhibition also tells the remarkable story of how Theo Wagemanns
pictures came to be shown in a place where monks lived in silence for
nearly 400 years.

Born near Aachen in Germany in 1918, Wagemann was himself reduced to a
life of virtual silence after suffering a traumatic shock at the age of
13.

He hardly ever spoke again, and his mental condition brought the risk of
euthanasia in the political climate of the Third Reich during the 1930s.

But protected by his family, he survived and after being admitted to an
institution in 1977, began his prolific output of coloured drawings
including the Hitler portraits.

With no formal art education and lacking rudimentary materials, Wagemann
made do with scraps of paper and abandoned pencils. Most of the drawings
disappeared, taken away by staff who failed to recognise their quality.

Typical outsider artist
All the pictures would have been lost had it not been for a young trainee,
Robert Kppers, who worked at the institution for a brief period in the
early 1980s.

Kppers immediately saw that Wagemann had talent, provided him with
materials and made sure that over 200 of his drawings were preserved.

The result is now on view in the former monastery in the small Swiss
village of Warth in Canton Thurgau.

Theo was a typical outsider artist, says Markus Landert, curator of the
cantonal art museums which share the monastery with a history museum,
concert facilities, a baroque church and a hotel and seminar complex in
the tranquil setting of Warth.

Outsider artists tend to be self-taught loners, marginal characters who
are patients in psychiatric clinics, prisoners, or simply eccentric and
obsessive.

Landert told swissinfo nobody could explain Wagemanns obsession with
Hitler. It may be a mixture of fear and fascination, but we simply dont
know, he said.

Disturbing portraits
The museum had thought long and hard about whether the portraits should be
included in the exhibition.

But although they can be regarded as disturbing because of the subject
matter it could also be said that no Wagemann exhibition would be
complete without them.

Besides, there are many others on display, including portraits of 20th
century German politicians, and the artists interests were by no means
confined to Hitler.

Wagemann was a devout Catholic whose subject matter also included scenes
from the Life of Jesus, as well as coloured drawings of such childrens
classics as Hansel and Gretel.

The exhibition ends on August 17.

(source: Swissinfo / Neue Zrcher Zeitung AG)





SYRIA:

A Syrian Haven for War Criminals
by Dr. Rafael Medoff


The June 21 report in the New York Times that Saddam Hussein and his sons
were sheltered in Syria after the recent war is not entirely surprising
because Damascus likewise sheltered many Nazi war criminals after the
Holocaust.

At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi war criminals found refuge
in South America and in Arab countries, including Syria. Damascus welcomed
Nazis partly out of ideological sympathy for the Hitler regime, and partly
because the German fugitives were useful allies in Syrias war to prevent
the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Israeli military intelligence
reports during that first Arab-Israeli war were filled with references to
the presence of Nazis, especially as commanding officers, among the Syrian
forces attacking northern Israel. Indeed, there were so many Germans in
the Syrian ranks that when the Haganah (the Labor Zionist militia that
became the Israeli army) defeated the Arab forces in Haifa in April 1948,
its official terms for a truce included a provision that European Nazis
will be delivered to [the British] Military [authorities].

During the 1950s and 1960s, the names of prominent Nazis living in Syria
began to surface. One was SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, who had helped
Adolf Eichmann implement Hitlers genocide policy in France, Bulgaria, and
Hungary. When the legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen took up residence in
Damascus in 1962, his Syrian acquaintances introduced him to Franz
Rademacher, a senior Eichmann aide who had been involved in the mass
murder of Jews from Belgium, Holland, Croatia, and elsewhere. After the
war, Rademacher had fled to Syria and became an official in the Syrian
Secret Service.

The most notorious of the Nazis granted asylum in Syria was another top
Eichmann aide, SS Lieutenant Alois Brunner. After being convicted in
France in 1954 of responsibility for the murders of more than 100,000
Jews, Brunner disappeared. Two decades later, the famed French
Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld tracked down Brunner in Damascus,
where he was making a comfortable living as an adviser to the Syrian
intelligence services.

U.S. government policy regarding Nazi war criminals was, from its earliest
days, marked by a certain ambivalence. In 1942, President Roosevelt
publicly pledged that Nazi war criminals would be punished, and the
following year, the Allies established the United Nations War Crimes
Commission. But the State Department wanted to limit postwar trials to
those war crimes that had been committed against Allied forces, arguing
that there was no legal basis to prosecute war criminals whose victims
were citizens of Axis-occupied countries chiefly, the Jews.

State Department officials repeatedly undermined the work of Herbert Pell,
the U.S. representative to the war crimes commission, because Pell was
urging the White House to prosecute the murderers of European Jews as war
criminals. In early 1945, the State Department informed Pell that his
service had been terminated, because it could no longer find $30,000 in
its budget to fund his position. Pell then offered to work for free; State
replied that it would be illegal for him to work without being paid.

Pell turned to a Jewish activist group, the Emergency Committee to Save
the Jewish People of Europe (better known as the Bergson group), to help
him publicize the scandal. The ensuing controversy embarrassed the State
Department into reversing its position and agreeing to prosecute Nazi
murderers of Jews.

But after the war ended, many U.S. officials regarded the prosecution of
Nazi war criminals as less of a priority than building relations with
postwar West Germany. As a result, many of the less-prominent war
criminals were let off with minor penalties or not prosecuted at all. In
addition, some U.S. government agencies considered former Nazis to be
potentially useful allies in the Cold War. Many of them, including some
known war criminals, were hired for U.S. military and intelligence
purposes in Europe or even brought to the United States.

In this postwar atmosphere of setting aside the pursuit of justice for the
sake of other considerations, the U.S. declined to take any serious steps
such as economic or diplomatic pressure to secure Syrias surrender of
Nazi war criminals for prosecution. Improving American relations with the
Arab world was considered a higher priority than bringing Alois Brunner
and other murderers to justice.

A similar dilemma may now arise as the U.S. government ponders how to
respond to Syrias sheltering of Iraqi war criminals. Once again, politics
and justice are on a collision course: Will the United States take serious
steps against the Syrian regime, or will it quietly drop the issue of
Syria protecting war criminals, as it did in the 1950s?

(source: Opinion, Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman
Institute for Holocaust Studies, which focuses on issues related to
America's response to the Holocaust; June 24, in Arutz Sheva)





NORWAY:

Children of the hated: Norway's Lebensborn children


"The Norwegian people feel very strongly that we're living in a democratic
society, human rights, aid for the poor, and we're negotiating around the
world for peace - but I know, I know the reality, I know the back side, I
know that democracy is not a static situation, one has to fight every day
for it." Gerd Fleischer doesn't sound bitter as she says these words. But
she has every right to feel bitter.



Her life hasn't been an easy one, but it has turned her into a remarkably
strong woman. Abused and taunted in school, tormented by an abusive
stepfather, she left her tiny northern Norwegian village when she was 13
and moved to the next village where she got herself through school and
college by working any job she could get. The authorities, the school
staff, the students all knew she was a child living on her own, but "no
one lifted a finger to help," she says. The first bad words she remembers
came from other school children when she was seven years old. They were:
"German whore."

"I had to go to my mother and ask her what it meant," says Gerd, trying to
compose herself enough to finish the sentence, "and she told me." This is
the only moment she allows herself a few tears, although her story, which
unfolds over the course of the next few hours, is enough to break the
staunchest heart.

Soft occupation'

Gerd Fleischer's father was a German soldier. From 1940 till the end of
the war, almost half a million German troops occupied Norway. According to
some, it was a relatively "soft occupation". The Nazis, obsessed with
their own ideas of racial purity, saw Norway as a pureblood Aryan land and
so an edict from Heinrich Himmler himself, proclaimed that Norwegian women
were to be treated "like goddesses". They were encouraged to fraternize
with German soldiers, and if some of these unions bore fruit, so much the
better. A series of Lebensborn homes were created throughout the country.
Lebensborn literally means "the fountain of life". They were essentially
refuges for single mothers and their babies. The children of German
soldiers and Norwegian women were considered to be the perfect Aryans for
the mighty Third Reich, and so they were very well taken care of in these
homes - at least for the duration of the war. After their first months in
these homes, some of these babies remained with their mothers, but many
were adopted out to German or Norwegian families or sent to their German
grandparents.

After the German defeat however, the lives of these Norwegian women and
their children went through a drastic change. The estimated 50,000 or so
Norwegian women who had participated in "horizontal collaboration" were
treated very badly. Some were shipped to detention center, others went
into hiding and kept their pasts hidden for the rest of their lives. And
many of the 10,000 or so children born of these unions, were destined for
lives of cruelty and despair.

Abandoned

Paul Hansen and Tove Laila Strand are two such examples. Paul's mother
abandoned him in the Lebensborn home where he was born, and he grew up in
a series of children's homes until he was four, when he was separated from
the other children and placed in an adult mental institution. He would
remain there until he was officially an adult. He talks of being
frightened of the screaming adults and teenagers around him, of the
excrement on the walls, of the total absence of touch throughout his
childhood. "The staff did not abuse me, but they were just doing their
jobs - I was never hugged or given any special attention," he says, his
eyes never making direct contact, but always looking out into a middle
distance, seeing who knows what. There was also no schooling or
constructive play. At 21, he was booted out of there to make his own way
in the world, with very little to equip him for it. Almost illiterate, he
has worked as a cleaner for most of his adult life.

Tove Laila Strand, also born in a Lebensborn home, was a toddler when she
was sent to grandparents in Germany. She remembers the love she got from
them, and their collective horror when they were informed after the war
that she was going to be forced back to Norway to rejoin her mother who
had abused her when she was a baby. She was only six when she came back to
Norway, but vividly remembers climbing out of the bus to meet her mother,
her new stepfather and baby half sister. "I remember the terrible look in
my mother's eyes when she saw me," says Tove Laila with difficulty, "and
the man she'd married - they were both looking at me in a terrible way.
That was the day hell started." Tove Laila, torn from grandparents who had
loved and wanted her, arrived in a household where she was treated as a
servant, with total responsibility for her baby sister. And she remembers
the daily beatings. Who beat her - her mother or stepfather? "One held me
down and the other beat."

She was sexually molested by her stepfather, and her mother's favourite
name for her eldest daughter was "German pig". Tove Laila finally escaped
when she was 16 and was so frightened of the stigma of her childhood that
she never talked about it to family and friends.

Brutality

Stories are now surfacing about the brutality of Norway's children's
institutions during the 40's and 50's - many of which seem to have been
run by sadists who routinely tortured, abused and raped the small charges
in their care. I heard stories of children growing up in such places where
their carers poured diesel on them, set them on fire and then urinated on
them to put the fire out; children who were woken up in the middle of the
night and forced to march in the cold; children who were given out to
anyone who came to the institution looking for a child to take home, and
then, after being sexually and physically assaulted, sent back to the home
with the report that they had been bad, and then punished for it in the
institution. I heard stories until I couldn't bear to hear anymore.

For most of Norway's war children, the past was a locked door for most of
their adult lives. Elna Johnson was born in a Lebensborn home, and when
she was two, her mother advertised in a local paper for adoptive families.
The first couple who answered were given the beautiful blond girl. But
when they found out that her father was a German, they sent her back to
her mother with a swastika on her luggage. The next family to answer the
ad was told the truth from the start and raised her with love, but they
never told Elna that she was adopted. "When I was 43, I got a phone call
from a woman who told me she was my mother," says Elna with a wry smile.
"She told me that this little girl with the blond curls and the swastika
on her rucksack had followed her through the years."

Taboo subject

For most of the war children, finding out the truth about their
backgrounds, perhaps even meeting their parents, has been one of the
biggest issues. Another one is to finally be able to talk about what for
most of their lives was a taboo subject. "We've been harassed into
silence," says Gerd Fleischer, "and its hard to understand why they hated
us so much after the war that it took us 50 years for us to be able to
even speak about it."

Some of the Lebensborn children have joined one of the two or three
organisations that now exist where people can come together to share
experiences and unburden themselves of the heavy load they've been
carrying alone all these years. Some of the war children are suing the
Norwegian government for compensation, saying that the government
neglected to take responsibility for them after the war. The compensation
issue is currently under discussion - the courts rejected original cases
asking for compensation, saying the matter was too old. The Parliament has
agreed, however, that war children must be compensated, but the details
must still be worked out - how much money should be allocated, how should
it be divided, who are the most deserving and so on. Some believe
cynically that the government is dragging its heels on the matter, waiting
for some of the war children to die out so the end compensation package
will be smaller.

Ruined lives

Elna Johnson and Gerd Fleischer are two success stories, but many of the
Lebensborn children are not. Some say that the war children have a higher
ratio of suicides, alcoholism, drug addiction and unemployment than other
Norwegians. "It's easy for me to say that I am stronger because of what
happened to me in my childhood, but every child reacts to abuse in a
different way," says Gerd Fleischer. "And some people have just never been
able to live with what happened to them. Yes" she tails off pensively,
"yes, you will meet many ruined lives among these war children."

(source: Radio Netherlands, June 18)