April 30



OHIO:

Demjanjuk was Nazi guard, court rules -- Panel recommends stripping U.S.
citizenship from autoworker


In Cincinnati, retired autoworker John Demjanjuk should be stripped of
his citizenship because he served as a guard in Nazi concentration camps,
a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against
Demjanjuk in the government's 27-year effort to prove he served as a Nazi
camp guard and tried to hide that history.

The court upheld a 2002 decision by a Cleveland federal judge who revoked
Demjanjuk's citizenship. The Ukranian-born Demjanjuk, 84, who lives in
Seven Hills, insists he was a prisoner during the war, not a guard.

"We find that the plaintiff, the United States of America, sustained its
burden of proving through clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence that
defendant, in fact, served as a guard at several Nazi training and
concentration camps during World War II," Judge Eric Clay wrote. "We
concur with the district court that he was not legally eligible to obtain
citizenship under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948."

His family vowed to challenge Friday's ruling.

Demjanjuk's age and deteriorating health would make it difficult for him
to withstand a process to deport him, said Ed Nishnic, his son-in-law and
family spokesman.

"He's slipping. He's not well," Nishnic said. "There are avenues that can
be taken to prevent that. That would be the last thing we would like."

The options include asking the full appeals court to reconsider its ruling
or asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Nishnic said.

"We will carefully review the court's decision and take the appropriate
actions in Mr. Demjanjuk's behalf," Nishnic said by phone from his
suburban Cleveland office.

Demjanjuk, a refugee from Ukraine who came to the United States in 1952,
was originally accused in 1977 by the Justice Department of being "Ivan
the Terrible," a particularly sadistic Nazi guard who ran the gas chambers
at the Treblinka death camp in occupied Poland.

Between 1942 and 1943, more than 850,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka.
Ivan the Terrible was a guard who herded the victims along the path to the
gas chamber, hacking at his victims to speed them along.

Demjanjuk insisted he was the victim of mistaken identity.

He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced
to be hanged in Israel. Demjanjuk eventually persuaded the Israeli Supreme
Court to overturn his conviction based on new evidence that someone else
was Ivan the Terrible.

He returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993 and avoided publicity.
His U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in
1998.

But the Justice Department renewed its case, arguing that Demjanjuk was a
guard at death camps other than Treblinka. The government no longer tried
to link him to Ivan the Terrible.

Keys to the new case were documents kept by the Germans and archived by
the Soviet Union that prosecutors said showed Demjanjuk was guard number
1393 and assigned to several Nazi death or forced labor camps after he was
trained at Trawniki in Poland.

His citizenship was revoked again in February 2002.

After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp, where he
worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. In 1950, he sought U.S.
citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the
war.

Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being
sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. But he continued to
insist he was not a camp guard.

He said he had been captured during combat in the Crimea and sent to
German prisoner of war camps in Ukraine and Poland. He said he was forced
into the Russian National Army, formed to assist the Germans in repelling
the Allies.

Tens of thousands of Israelis watched Demjanjuk's televised trial, which
began in 1987 before three judges in a converted movie theater. Hundreds
lined up daily to attend.

During the trial, one Holocaust survivor approached Demjanjuk and cried,
"I saw his eyes, those murderous eyes!" At times Demjanjuk blew kisses to
the crowd or mugged for the television cameras, saying, "Hello,
Cleveland."

He was convicted in April 1988 and ordered hanged, but after a five-year
legal battle, the conviction was thrown out. The Israeli Supreme Court
said in 1993 that defense lawyers had raised reasonable doubt that
Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible.

(source: Associated Press)





NEW YORK:

U.S. judge likely to pressure Swiss banks on Holocaust accounts


Senior Jewish figures in New York estimate that Judge Edward Korman will
pressure Swiss banks to release more names of dormant account holders
before deciding on how to divide Holocaust reparation money from the
banks.

The sources said that they do not expect a ruling on the issue in the near
future.

Holocaust survivors and representatives of Jewish organizations confronted
one another Thursday at an emotional hearing in a federal court in
Brooklyn on how to divide reparation money from Swiss banks.

Representatives of some 80 organizations and institutions, as well as
individual survivors from Israel, America and other countries, attended
the hearing in front of Judge Korman, who is responsible for allocating
any funds left over after all individual claims by the heirs of dormant
account holders have been paid out.

The leftover funds, which are expected to total between $300 million and
$600 million out of an original total of $1.2 billion, are slated to be
used to help needy Holocaust survivors.

According to recommendations submitted last week by attorney Judah Gribetz
whom Korman appointed to study the issue, some 70 percent of the leftover
funds would go to survivors in the former Soviet bloc countries, and 20
percent to Israeli survivors, with the rest divided among survivors in
other countries.

Israel has sent two representatives to the court to protest this
arrangement, arguing that it is unjust as more than 50 percent of
survivors live in Israel. In addition, Minister for Diaspora Affairs Natan
Sharansky will address the court by satellite to request an additional
hearing at which Israeli survivors' organizations can present their
claims.

Gribetz based his recommendation on his findings showing that the neediest
survivors were those living in the former Soviet bloc. But Noah Flug, who
chairs an umbrella organization for Israeli survivors' associations,
charged that the data on which Gribetz based his conclusion are about 12
years out of date, before the mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel and
other countries.

"Many of the emigrants were Holocaust survivors, whereas the vast majority
of the 400,000 Jews who remain in the former Soviet Union never lived
under Nazi occupation," he said.

Flug also charged that much of Gribetz's data came from the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish welfare organization active
in the former Soviet countries that "is an interested party, not an
objective one."

Amir Shaviv, JDC's assistant executive vice president, said that "all the
statistical data presented by the Joint are accurate and up to date, and
are constantly examined by independent experts."

(source: Ha'aretz Daily)





GLOBAL:
Nazi war criminal investigations up 20%


The number of investigations opened against Nazi war criminals
internationally increased by 20 percent this year, according to a report
released this week by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

This achievement, which brings the number of active investigations in nine
countries to 166, is offset by the abject failure of Romania, Norway,
Sweden, Venezuela, and Colombia to investigate such criminals despite
scores of leads and the efforts of 28 other countries.

Romania, which refused to revoke the pardons granted two mass murderers
years ago and unearthed this January, and Norway and Sweden, which in
principle decline to investigate Nazi war crimes due to existing statutes
of limitations, received an "F" according to the score card of report
author Dr. Efraim Zuroff.

Great Britain, France, Holland, and Australia were among the states to
receive a "D" for making an minimal effort and neglecting to achieve
easily attainable results, while Canada and Germany received "B"s for
their limited successes and for conducting the highest numbers of ongoing
investigations (194 and 35 respectively) after the Unites States' 285. The
US once again earned the report's only "A." It was the sole country to
record any convictions this year, revoking the citizenship of and
deporting six former Nazis.

In the past year, the number of indictments rose to 12 in comparison to
last year's 11. In addition to American, Canadian, and German indictments,
Italy and Lithuania each charged one suspect. Poland will be adding its
findings Monday.

Zuroff, who directs the center's Israel office, attributed the significant
increase in investigations to Operation Last Chance, which for the past 20
months has offered cash rewards of $10,000 or 10,000 to individuals in
Europe who provide information that helps bring about the arrest and
conviction of Nazi war criminals. This year, Austria led the international
community by opening 60 new investigations; Latvia opened 19 cases and
Lithuania opened 18.

Zuroff also pointed to the growing attention given the issue by
sympathetic countries such as the US "to do whatever can be done while it
can be done. There's a very strong sense that we're running out of time."

He said the world has three to five years before the age of witnesses and
defendants becomes prohibitive.

For now, he praised the results achieved as "surprisingly good. Despite
the passage of time and the technical obstacles of old age and infirmity,
quite a bit has been done in the past year."

Still, he said, more can be done, especially since opened cases don't
necessarily lead to convictions. He noted that "not one Baltic Nazi war
criminal has spent one minute in jail," which he connected to those
countries' citizens being "in deep denial" of their own complicity in the
murder of thousands of Jews. Even countries which didn't have
concentration camps often prefer to "let these people die and be done with
it," he added.

That's why, he explained, "in many cases it is the lack of political will,
more than anything else, that has hindered the efforts to bring Holocaust
perpetrators to justice."

When the political will exists, as in the case of the United States,
strong results can be seen.
Zuroff praised the US Office of Special Investigations. "They deserve
tremendous credit for what they're doing and they should serve as a model
for other countries."

He added, "They prove every day of the year that it's possible to find and
bring these people to justice, and I think they deserve the gratitude of
people in Israel and the Jewish world."

(source: Jewish World)


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

IOM has paid 9,196 Holocaust victims


The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Friday it has
reviewed almost half of all compensation claims received under the
Holocaust Victim Assets Program and altogether 9,196 victims have
received full payment for their claims.

In the latest round of payments, the IOM has just paid another 6,770
victims their full compensation ranging from 1,000 to 4,350 US dollars,
the UN agency said in a press release.

Most of the beneficiaries were persecuted by the Nazi regime for being
Roma, Jehovah's Witness, handicapped or homosexual, and the remaining were
forced to work for certain Swiss companies, it said.

The IOM is one of the implementing organizations of the Swiss Banks
Settlement, an agreement reached between Holocaust survivors and Swiss
banks in 1999.

The 1.25 billion US dollar Settlement Fund serves to compensate for
deposits in Swiss banks owned by Holocaust victims that were never
returned to them or their heirs, and to pay compensation for former slave
labors and certain other victims of the Nazi regime.

According to the IOM, as of the expiration of the filing deadline on
Dec. 31, 2001, the IOM had received a total of 45,334 claims for
compensation.

(source: Xinhuanet)


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


166 new Nazi investigations last year


An annual report issued by the Israeli Simon Wiesenthal Center indicates
last year saw 166 new investigations of Nazi war criminals and six
convictions.

The report praised the success of the United States in investigating and
prosecuting former Nazis and singled out Romania as the country that has
done the least to bring former Nazis to justice.

The Wiesenthal Center report, which tracks war crimes statistics from
April 1, 2003, to March 31, 2004, shows Austria in leading the new
investigations with 60, followed by the United States with 40, Latvia with
19, Italy and Lithuania each with 18 and Germany with nine.

The United States convicted the most Nazi war criminals, six, followed by
Germany, which convicted one.

Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff said of the report's results:
"Despite the somewhat prevalent assumption that it is too late to bring
Nazi murderers to justice, the figures clearly prove otherwise, and it is
clear that numerous cases of such criminals will continue to come to trial
during the coming years."

(source: United Press International)






AUSTRIA:

Wiesenthal Center Announces Submission of List of 121 Nazi War Crimes
Suspects to Austrian Government


The Simon Wiesenthal Center announced today that it had recently submitted
a list of one hundred and twenty-one Austrians who served in Waffen-SS
units which actively participated in Nazi war crimes during World War II
to the Austrian government with the request that these cases be promptly
investigated.

In a statement issued in Jerusalem by the Centers chief Nazi-hunter Israel
director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center noted that the individuals in
question had served in Waffen-SS units, which carried out heinous crimes
of persecution and mass murder, such as: "Das Reich" (participated in
crimes in Belarus in 1941 and in France in 1944); "Der Fuhrer" (France
1944); "Totenkopf" (Soviet Union 1941- 1942); "Viking" (Soviet Union
1941); "Prinz Eugen" (Yugoslavia 1942-1943) and many others. Zuroff said
that during the past year, the Center had decided to maximize its
research on Austrian suspects due to the total lack of effort by the
Austrian authorities until very recently to investigate, let alone
prosecute, Austrian Nazi war criminals. In fact, in its previous Annual
Status Report on the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi war
criminals, the Center had singled out Austria for special criticism and
seven months ago it launched its "Operation: Last Chance" in Austria to
assist in identifying local Holocaust perpetrators.

This research effort has led to the submission by the Center to the
Austrian government during the past year of three lists of suspected Nazi
war criminals with a total of one hundred and eighty suspects.

According to Zuroff, "The manner in which the Austrian authorities will
handle these investigations will be one of the ultimate tests as to
whether official Austria has finally truly internalized the fact that in
essence, in virtually every respect, their country was a full partner of
the Nazis, rather than their victim."

(source: Die Judische, April 22)



ROMANIA:

Jewish group: Romania failing to pursue war criminals


A Jewish rights group criticized wartime Nazi ally Romania on Wednesday
for failing to investigate and prosecute suspected local war criminals.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a report that Romania had failed to
take practical steps to investigate war crimes and refused to cancel
pardons granted to two former colonels convicted of involvement soon after
the war.

"Ever since democracy in Romania, there has not been a single initiative
to investigate, let alone prosecute, any of the numerous unprosecuted
Romanians who actively participated in the crimes of the Holocaust,"
Efraim Zuroff, the center's chief Nazi hunter, said in a statement.

Last year the center launched a hunt for Romanian war criminals by
bringing to the country "Operation Last Chance", which has already exposed
several war criminals in the Baltics.

The operation invites citizens to identify suspects and then hands them to
local courts. Zuroff said the center would send Romanian officials a list
of suspects in six to eight weeks.

He said he was especially concerned at the lack of a response from
Romania's general prosecutor, Ilie Botos, to a request to scrap pardons
granted to two convicted war criminals.

Zuroff said ex-colonels Radu Dinulescu and Gheorghe Petrescu were
convicted by postwar Romanian communist courts of playing instrumental
roles in the deportation and persecution of Jews in the summer and autumn
of 1941.

Dinulescu imposed an order forcing Jews to wear yellow stars and Petrescu
ordered the seizure of Jewish property, but they were pardoned in 1997 and
1998, Zuroff said. The Romanian Supreme Court granted their appeals,
accepting their arguments that they were not direct participants in
killings.

Zuroff said prosecutor had not replied to the center's January 5 request
to have those pardons overturned.

"They have to cancel these rehabilitations, it's absolutely outrageous,"
Zuroff told Reuters by telephone from Jerusalem.

A spokeswoman for Botos had no immediate comment.

"Romania is silent and this is the best way to make sure nothing ever
happens," Zuroff said.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust some 420,000 people from
Romania's pre-war Jewish community of 750,000 perished, including more
than 100,000 Jews from Transylvania - then under Hungarian rule - who were
deported to Auschwitz.

In an effort to polish its image ahead of joining NATO this year and the
European Union in 2007, Romania banned fascist symbols, but the
ex-communist country has done little to investigate possible war crimes.

(source: Reuters)






FRANCE:

Jewish graves vandalised


French President Jacques Chirac today vowed to punish vandals who scrawled
swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on 127 graves in a Jewish cemetery near
the eastern French town of Colmar.

"Anti-Semitism is contrary to all of our values, all of our principles and
to all of the ideals of the republic," Chirac said after the defaced
headstones were discovered by a city worker.
The grave stones were marked with swastikas and sayings glorifying Nazi
dictator Adolf Hitler.

On a stone near the cemetery entrance inscribed with a prayer in Hebrew,
vandals wrote "Juden raus" (Jews out).

Elsewhere in the graveyard, stones and monuments were marked with the
words "Adolf" and "Hitler", along with the dates "April 30, 1945" and
"April 30, 2004".

April 30, 1945, is believed to be the day that Hitler committed suicide.

Police were combing the cemetery for clues but did not offer any
information about who could have been behind the acts of vandalism.

President Chirac vowed to punish those responsible for what he called the
"abominable and intolerable acts" committed in the isolated cemetery, near
the villages of Hattstatt and Herrlisheim and located in the middle of a
vineyard.

"This desecration, which comes in the wake of a series of attacks against
the Jewish and Muslim communities, must be firmly condemned and will be
fought with unwavering determination," the office of center-right prime
minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said.

The PM phoned France's chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk to tell him of his
"emotion and indignation".

"He (the Rabbi) told me that the (Jewish) community was very worried," he
said.

"It is important that all these desecrations, all these profanations do
not become trivialised, whether they be of mosques or Jewish cemeteries."

Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin and junior victims' rights
minister Nicole Guedj were quickly dispatched to the scene.

The incident came one month after the European Union's racism watchdog
named France as one of five countries in the bloc where anti-Semitic
attacks were cause for particular concern.

In a report released on March 31, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism
and Xenophobia said the number of anti-Semitic attacks in France had
increased sixfold in 2002.

Chirac's government has vowed to stamp out anti-Semitic acts through stiff
punishment in the courts and awareness programs in schools.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe on Thursday
pledged to monitor hate crimes, include the Holocaust in school lesson
plans and improve legal ways to fight anti-Semitic harassment and
violence.

France's outspoken finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, sparked controversy
this week when he claimed the country's former Socialist government had
"managed to make people in the United States think that France was an
anti-Semitic country".

The opposition Socialists demanded an apology after his remarks in
parliament, but he refused to give one.

French authorities have put the number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2003
at 125, a drop of nearly 40 per cent, but Israel has said the figure
nearly doubled last year from 77 to 141 incidents.

(source: Herald Sun)





GERMANY:

Joachim Fest: One man's war for truth


Joachim Fest, once a teenage PoW, became Germany's first and finest
analyst of the Third Reich. Henning Hoff talks to him about history,
literature and Hitler
30 April 2004

When Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945,
the news took some time to travel. Eight confused days followed, until the
German Wehrmacht finally capitulated. Joachim Fest, then 18 years old,
heard about it in a PoW camp in Laon, France, after having been taken
prisoner by the US Army at the famous Remagen bridge.

He still pictures the scene vividly. "There was a large crowd in front of
the camp notice board, and some jostling was going on. Someone said, with
a sigh: 'Thank God, he's dead, and the war's over.' Others disagreed: 'How
can you say that? It's the Fhrer!' Ear-boxing was in the air." Then, Fest
remembers, an older soldier came along, hands in his pockets, and quite
lax in his manner: "'Stop quarrelling,' he told the young PoWs. 'It was
madness, not just the end. It was madness right from the start.'" This set
the tone, and the crowd dissolved.

For Joachim Fest, distinguished German historian, writer and journalist,
it came as a relief. However, he was "not typical". For the majority of
Germans, or the country in general, it was an end in many ways: the
spectacular, violent demise of an empire. Its crimes, against European
Jewry, against Slavs, political opponents and many others, set records
beyond imagination. The unparalleled destruction Hitler unleashed turned
more and more against Germany in the final days. The Battle of Berlin, in
April and May 1945, was an orgy of death, just as the Nazi leadership had
hoped.

The final days of the Third Reich are the topic of Fest's latest book,
Inside Hitler's Bunker (Macmillan, 16.99; translated by Margot Bettauer
Dembo). After his Hitler biography in 1973, a historical as well as a
literary masterpiece, Fest has returned to the dictator, whose end in his
bunker, commanding armies that no longer existed, proves a focal point. As
Hitler's failed assassin, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, put it: "Hitler
in the bunker - that's the real Hitler."

Fest not only manages to provide an authoritative version of events, in
some ways updating Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1947 classic, The Last Days of
Hitler. He also reflects on the origins of Hitler's rule. The decline of
Germany, he says, started even before the Nazis came to power: "The
betrayal of the principles of not only democracy, but also of
civilisation, started during the Weimar Republic."

Fest's refusal to be "typical" is an underlying theme of his impressive
career. He is often called Germany's great conservative thinker, but is
not easily pigeonholed. Take German reunification. Fest talked about
German unity when it was quite unfashionable, but what has happened since
1990 he describes as "a string of mistakes". He is critical of former
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, of the conservative Christian Democrats,
commenting dryly: "Simply to extend West Germany's system to the East,
well, that was just too unimaginative." Kohl's successor, the social
democrat Gerhard Schrder, does not get better marks.

Fest was born in Berlin in 1926 into an anti-Nazi family. His father, a
teacher, was a member of the Zentrum party, the political organisation of
German Catholicism, and a leader of the paramilitary Reichsbanner, which
tried to defend the Weimar Republic as a counter-force to the Nazi
Sturmabteilung (SA) and the German Communist formations. Immediately after
Hitler came to power, Fest's father was forced into early retirement with
a reduced pension. While he struggled to care for a family of seven, he
fended off all overtures by the new regime. "I wasn't allowed to join the
Hitler Youth," Fest says. "My father threw emissaries out when they came
asking us to join."

Fest grew up something of an outcast. Today he thinks it one of his
father's greatest achievements that "he taught us not to run with the
crowd, let alone when they marched in columns". This, he says, has helped
him all his life. Over the years, he has been attacked from many quarters.
His great work on Hitler came at a time when West German historians were
in the grip of sociological thinking. The biographical form was considered
old-fashioned. Yet Fest couldn't be further away from "chaps and maps"
history.

Fest's uneasy relationship with university historians goes back a long
way, and undoubtedly, there is an element of envy in it. "You go on
writing bestsellers, and we go on doing the serious work," a professor
told him. Fest played a controversial role in the Historikerstreit, the
"historians' debate" of 1986 about the interpretation of the Nazi past and
the Holocaust. He was accused of relativist views, which, judging by his
work, is baseless. He even has been called a Nazi. "You have to know how
to deal with this," he says. "You cannot make your life dependent on what
someone writes about you."

While writing a thesis at the new Free University, he started contributing
to Berlin newspapers, and composed radio scripts. The RIAS offered him a
permanent position, which he accepted, leaving his thesis unfinished. One
of his editors, an American, put to him the idea of drawing up a series of
programmes retelling German history to the defeat of 1945. Fest was
initially dead against it: "At first, I considered this a cruel stroke of
fate," he remembers. It proved the point of departure in his remarkable
career.

The series was a great success. In 1963, as its offspring, Fest published
his first book, The Face of the Third Reich. It was one of the first
substantial works about the Nazi era, and is still in print in Germany,
selling 4,000 copies a year.

Meanwhile, Fest had moved to Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) in Hamburg. He
became editor-in-chief of television, and anchored its investigative
Panorama programme - a role that did not endear him to people in high
places. Fest left after a dispute over a programme to mark the death of
West Germany's first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Fest wanted two
dissenting voices, one the novelist Gnter Grass. He was not allowed to go
ahead, and resigned.

Earlier, he had declined an offer by an American publisher to become the
first German after 1945 to write a biography of Hitler. The only serious
work had been Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; Fest initially
thought that there wasn't much to add. Only later, with more sources
available, did he undertake what turned out to be his masterwork.

During that time, he met the only surviving member of the Nazi elite,
Albert Speer, "Hitler's architect" and later ruthless organiser of the
German war effort. Speer, by admitting guilt at Nuremberg, had escaped the
death penalty and served 20 years in Spandau. Fest acted as an "inquiring
editor" for his memoirs, and had many conversations that he used for his
Hitler biography. When the book was published in 1973, it was an immediate
and immense success, both at home and internationally.

Fest then joined the editorial board of Germany's leading, conservative
newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For 20 years, he was
responsible for the influential arts section, and retired in 1993. Since
then he has returned to writing bestselling books. Plotting Hitler's Death
(1994), about the resistance, was followed by his biography of Speer
(1999). He is full of new plans. Inside Hitler's Bunker has been made into
a film, to be released in cinemas this autumn.

While Inside Hitler's Bunker offers a great number of reflections and
insights, he writes at one point that the "question of which threads lead
from Germany's past to Hitler... remains unanswered". On the other hand,
he laments the inflation of Hitler and the Nazi era as a topic for books
and TV programmes. Most of this is a thoughtless repetition of the same
platitudes, he says. At this point, his calm, friendly manner gives way to
anger. "All this gabbing about the Third Reich, it makes me sick," he
says, when he knows from his own experience "how difficult it is to get
behind the glittering surface and gain some insights that might help us
today". When he thinks of the future of historical writing, he is rather
pessimistic.

"Human beings have been driven out of history, and it is unclear how they
can be brought back," he says. His view of history is different, and his
own credo sums him up quite well: "History is literature, or it is
nothing."

Biography: Joachim Fest

Joachim Fest was born in Berlin in 1926. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht
and experienced the end of the war in a PoW camp in France. Back in
Germany, he finished school and studied law, literature and history in
Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main. He went to Berlin to write a doctoral
thesis, and started working for RIAS radio station as editor with
responsibility for contemporary history (1954-61). At the NDR broadcasting
service, he was editor-in-chief of television from 1963 to 1968. Resigning
after a quarrel, he researched and wrote his famous biography of Adolf
Hitler (1973), an instant international bestseller. Fest joined the
editorial board of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and was, until 1993,
responsible for the culture section. Among Fest's books available in
English are The Face of the Third Reich, Plotting Hitler's Death, Speer:
The Final Verdict, and his latest work, Inside Hitler's Bunker
(Macmillan). Joachim Fest is married with two sons and a daughter, who all
work in publishing or the media.

(source: The Independent)