July 11



USA//CALIFORNIA:

California Holocaust Survivors Seek Class Action Status of Lawsuit
Charging Unfair Handling of Insurance Claims by International Commission

Roman Rakover, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, believes he is the sole
beneficiary of two life insurance policies taken out by his father around
1930 in the amount of $20,000 each. He has a vivid memory of his father
sending him every three months to hand deliver premium payments to
Generali Life Insurance Company, a large European insurance company.
Rakover testified that he saw "with his own eyes" the insurance policies
in August of 1939 at a family meeting. After he filed a claim through the
International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), he
was asked for copies of the policies or the policy numbers.

"We were not allowed to carry papers to concentration camps. We didn't
have a pair of trousers with pockets, we only had old rags," Rakover
testified. Despite this compelling testimony to an ICHEIC appeals panel
his claim was rejected because Generali could not find records of the
insurance policies.

Today Rakover joins other Holocaust survivors in seeking class action
status of a lawsuit against ICHEIC claiming the International Commission
is bias in favor of Generali by allowing claims to be denied on grounds
that are totally unfair and bias in favor of Generali.

"This is a perfect example of how the system is skewed against survivors,"
said lead counsel William Shernoff, senior partner at the Claremont
offices of Shernoff Bidart & Darras. "It's not surprising since Generali
gives money to ICHEIC for its operations and seems to be operating more as
Generali's claims department than an independent commission."

According to Shernoff, the International Commission has come under heavy
fire by Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. In a recent letter to
ICHEIC, Garamendi said that changes must happen immediately to insure that
justice is done. Garamendi has previously called for ICHEIC's Chairman,
former Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger to step down.
Eagleburger's salary of approximately $300,000 per year is paid by
Generali and other European insurance carriers.

(source: Business Wire)





SWITZERLAND:

A Swiss court allows Gypsies' Holocaust lawsuit to proceed
Case questions role of corporate giant IBM in World War II


In late June, a Swiss appeals court decided that a group of five Gypsies
could sue IBM in Switzerland. Previously, a lower court had dismissed the
case on the ground that it lacked jurisdiction -- deeming IBM's Geneva
office only an "antenna," and not its European headquarters. But the
appeals court held that jurisdiction was proper.

The Gypsies allege that IBM had a role in facilitating the Holocaust.
Specifically, they allege that IBM helped the Nazis commit mass murder, by
providing them with punch card machines and computer technology that
resulted in the coding, tracking and killing of Gypsies.

To find that jurisdiction was proper, the Swiss court had to find a
connection to Switzerland. It did so -- pointing out that "IBM's
complicity through material or intellectual assistance to the criminal
acts of the Nazis during World War II via its Geneva office cannot be
ruled out," and "a significant body of evidence indicat[es] that the
Geneva office could have been aware that it was assisting these acts."

While the case has yet to be proven, the court's decision is an important
step in extending human rights litigation beyond the borders of the United
States. This is one of the few times (if not the first) that an action
relating to alleged human rights violations by a private corporation
during the World War II is being brought outside of the United States.

The Geneva case is the first Holocaust-related action against IBM in
Europe. The case is significant for this reason, and also because it is
one of the few efforts in recent memory to provide reparations directly to
the Gypsy community -- in specific recognition of its suffering due to the
Holocaust.

A Gypsy organization and an American best seller

In December 2000, the Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation
Action association (GIRCA) was founded in Switzerland. GIRCA's mission is
to seek reparations for the Gypsy community for the death of hundreds of
thousands of Gypsies by the Nazis during the World War II.

In 2001, U.S. author Edwin Black published his best selling book, IBM and
the Holocaust. In the book, Black claimed that IBM punch-card machines
enabled the Nazis to make their killing operations more efficient. For
example, Black said the punch-card machines were used to codify
information about people sent to concentration camps. The number 12
designated a Gypsy inmate, while Jews were indicated by the number 8. The
code D4 meant a prisoner had been killed.

In 2002, inspired by Black's book, GIRCA filed a lawsuit in Geneva's Court
of First Instance against IBM. GIRCA selected Switzerland for its lawsuit
because IBM's wartime European headquarters were located there. .

The plaintiffs in the case are four Gypsies from Germany and France, and
one Polish-born Swedish Gypsy. All five plaintiffs were orphaned in the
Holocaust after losing family members in death camps.

There are only five plaintiffs because in Switzerland, class actions are
not permitted. But if the plaintiffs win, their lawyers claim that would
pave the way for Gypsy organizations to demand approximately $12 billion
in damages.

At least 600,000 Gypsies perished in the Holocaust. And the Gypsies
themselves put the figure higher than that -- at over one million. In
addition, GIRCA estimates that the number of Gypsies whose parents died in
the death camps, or during forced labor, is around 300,000.

Although there have been many recent efforts to provide compensation to
Holocaust victims, the Gypsy community is often reported to have received
much less in the way of restitution and reparations than others. GIRCA's
lawyer, Henri-Philippe Sambuc, says the various recent Holocaust
compensation funds -- such as those organized by the Swiss banks and
German industry -- have often given Gypsies a much smaller percentage than
that to which they were entitled.

Is IBM responsible for the use of its machines?

The suit alleges that IBM aided and abetted the mass slaughter of gypsies
by knowingly allowing the Nazis to use its punch-card Hollerith tabulating
machines to code, track and identify Gypsy victims.

The Gypsies' suit will turn on whether IBM was responsible for the way its
machines were used during the Holocaust. IBM has consistently denied that
it was.

During World War II, IBM's German subsidiary was Deutsche Hollerith
Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag). (In 1945, Dehomag became IBM Germany.) Dehomag
was centrally involved in helping to automate Hitler's Holocaust through
its punch card system.

IBM says that by this time this occurred, the Nazis had already taken over
Dehomag -- so that IBM had no control over operations there, or over how
Nazis used IBM machines.

But the GIRCA plaintiffs maintain that IBM's Geneva office continued to
coordinate European trade with the Nazis, based on orders from the
company's global headquarters in New York.

Legal claims, and requests for moral reparations

The case bridges the territory between law and morality -- as the
complaint shows. The GIRCA plaintiffs are suing IBM for "moral reparation"
and $20,000 in damages. And the complaint accuses IBM of "moral
wrongdoing" resulting in the death of Gypsies.

Plaintiffs allege that IBM was an accomplice to the Nazi's actions. As I
discussed in a prior column, similar theories of corporate responsibility
have been advanced in Alien Tort Claims Act suits in U.S. federal courts.
But it is interesting to see this argument raised, now, in a court outside
the U.S.

The Swiss appeals court found the accomplice claim to be actionable. It
wrote:

"It does not appear inconsistent to conclude that the respondent (IBM)
facilitated the task of the Nazis in their committing of crimes against
humanity -- acts which were counted and codified by IBM machines."

The U.S. class action against IBM was dropped

Interestingly, there has already been a U.S. class-action suit relating to
the allegations about IBM and the Holocaust. In February 2001, an ATCA
claim was filed in U.S. federal court against IBM for allegedly providing
the punch card technology that facilitated the Holocaust, and for covering
up Dehomag's activities. But in April 2001, that same lawsuit was dropped.

Lawyers said they feared proceeding with the suit would slow down payments
from a special German Holocaust fund created to compensate forced laborers
and others who had suffered due to the Nazi persecution. German companies
had asked for a release from further legal actions before contributing to
the fund.

In the end, IBM's German division paid $3 million into the fund, but made
clear it was not admitting liability with its contribution.

The U.S. should not be the only forum for such cases

The Swiss court's decision to allow a case to proceed is a heartening sign
to the human rights community. The United States should not be the only
forum available to plaintiffs. It is often geographically remote from the
place where the harm occurred.

Moreover, other countries, too, have a strong interest in remedying human
violations. And now, the Swiss court's ruling has signaled that a European
court is also willing to hear claims relating to serious human rights
violations.

In the United States, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) has been an
important tool in the fight to provide Holocaust victims and their heirs
with reparations. But it is also important that other courts provide for a
forum for redress as well -- both for World War II and other past wrongs,
and also for more contemporary human rights violations.

(source: CNN)




GERMANY:

Munich says no to plaques of Nazi victims


Munich, regarded as the cradle and heartland of Nazi Germany, has rejected
a proposal to put small brass memorial stones commemorating Jewish victims
of the regime on its pavements.

More than 40 municipalities have funded 3,500 brass plaques that bear the
names of deported, murdered or missing victims of the Third Reich, most of
them Jewish, although some carry the names of Roma, Jehovahs Witnesses and
homosexuals.

The so-called "stumbling stones" are the brainchild of artist Gunter
Demnig. Several years ago he began collecting the names of victims of
Nazism and then created small 4in x 4in brass-topped plaques with names
and dates, which were then embedded into pavements at the address where
that person used to live.

"I called them stumbling stones because it would make people who came
across them pause from their everyday lives and remember that an
individual killed by the Nazis once lived at that address," he said.

The idea has found resonance in Germany, but not in Munich, which rejected
them last week. City council members from the Green Party and the Party of
Democratic Socialism voted to allow the project to go ahead while
conservatives and social democrats voted no.

Opponents of the project said they based their opposition on the opinion
of the Jewish Cultural Centre of Munich and Upper Bavaria, whose board had
strongly disapproved. For them, the fact that people would be walking over
the names of those killed was "unacceptable".

"Should neo-Nazis be able to wipe their dirt from their combat boots on
the stones?" asked Marian Offman, member of the conservative Christian
Social Union and the board of the Jewish group, during a sometimes fierce
debate.

Munichs mayor, Christian Ude, said he feared a "surfeit of memorials" and
pointed to the planned Jewish Museum and the annual memorials for the
victims of the 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom called the "Night of Broken Glass"
or at the former Dachau concentration camp just 12 miles from the city
centre.

Demnig was saddened by Munichs rejection. "My idea was to bring the names
of people who were deported back to their homes, the houses where they had
lived," he said. "Its personal. Big monuments are abstract."

The plaques have only a few words: the name of the person, a birth date
and location followed by a date and place of death, if known. Many of the
plaques end with the word Auschwitz, the main Nazi extermination camp in
Poland where more than one million Jews were murdered.

(source: Scotland on Sunday)


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

German medicine 'is still haunted by Nazis'


Germany's reluctance to confront its Nazi past is holding back advances in
human reproduction, it was claimed yesterday.

The shadow of the eugenics experiments of the 1930s and 1940s, in which
hundreds of thousands were killed and many forcibly sterilised, has led to
the strictest embryo research laws in Europe.

Dr Rolf Winau, professor of the history of medicine at the Charit medical
faculty in Berlin, says too many doctors are unwilling to be "disturbed"
by the dark times of German medicine.

"We have to study the history of medicine in the Nazi era so we understand
the roots and mechanisms of an inhuman medicine and why over 45 per cent
of all German physicians were Nazis and why some of them worked as
researchers in concentration camps," he said.

"We need to study the 'Rassenhygiene', the German version of eugenics, to
show how far eugenic and racial thinking can go so that we can have it in
mind when we discuss ethical questions on reproduction and fertility.

"If we do not, we face uncertainty, lack of information and confusion when
considering ethical questions."

Germany has some of the strictest laws on human reproduction in Europe and
many techniques allowed elsewhere are banned.

These include pre-implantation genetic diagnosis which can detect genetic
disease in an embryo before it is transferred to a woman, and the use of
surplus embryos from IVF treatment for research.

Because German doctors do not freeze spare embryos, Germany has one of the
highest rates of multiple birth in Europe. Around 40 per cent of all
assisted reproductive births are twins or triplets, increasing the risks
for mothers and babies.

Therapeutic cloning, the cloning of embryos for medical purposes,
surrogacy and egg donation, is illegal too.

Dr Winau, who will address the European Society for Human Reproduction and
Embryology meeting in Berlin today, said: "I think no other country in
Europe has such strong embryo laws. I think it is the consequence of the
Nazi past.

"We could have a more liberal approach but we have to hold in our minds
our past."

Between 1952 to 1980, there was no research at all into medicine during
the Nazi era, he said.

After seizing power in 1933, the Nazis set up "hereditary health courts" -
panels of doctors and judges with the power to order the sterilisation of
people with genetic defects. They targeted "feeblemindedness",
manic-depression, schizophrenia, genetic epilepsy, Huntingdon's disease,
genetic blindness and deafness and severe physical deformity. An estimated
400,000 were sterilised.

The programme was followed by the forced "euthanasia" of mentally and
physically disabled children and adults. During the Second World War, at
least 5,000 babies with severe deformities were killed in special
children's wards while another 200,000 adults were taken out of hospitals
and killed.

According to Prof Winau, there was little opposition to the enforced
sterilisation.

Walter Stoeckel, of Berlin University and president of the German Society
of Gynaecology in 1933-34, co-operated with the Nazis, he said.

"Stoeckel made it clear that he and other German gynaecologists placed
great hopes in Hitler, sending him their 'enthusiastic admiration' in a
telegram," Prof Winau said.

(source: The London Telegraph)


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


'Why my friends felt they had to kill Hitler'


Sixty years after the bungled attempt by the German resistance to kill the
Fhrer, a survivor, Inga Haag tells David Smith and Walter Harris of her
role in the plot

nga Haag vividly remembers shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler - and
spending the next five years plotting to kill him. Men close to her were
executed after the failed plan to assassinate the Fhrer 60 years ago next
week. But Inga survived and, now nearing 86 and a grande dame of London
embassy gatherings, is virtually alone in having memories of the botched
attempt to decapitate the Third Reich.
On 20 July, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a German count,
planted a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table during a meeting
at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. It exploded, wounding many, but
Hitler escaped with damaged ear drums, burns to his left side and a
missing trouser leg. Stauffenberg was executed without trial. Other 'July
plotters', including Inga's cousin, Adam von Trott, and her former boss,
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, were killed.

Sipping cava in her discreetly furnished apartment in Marylebone, central
London, Inga last week gave a rare interview recalling her days in the
German resistance and her meeting with the man it wanted dead.

'I remember Hitler had very bad skin,' she said. 'He had bad manners and
no charm. He was not good-looking: he had a chicken-skin neck with large
pores. He was almost revolting.

'I was at a social occasion for diplomats, just at the outbreak of war,
and Hitler went around. I was standing next to the Belgian ambassador and
his wife, and she was stretching out her hand, but he didn't want it and
turned to my hand. I was a very unprominent woman there, but he wanted to
make the point he was not shaking the hand of the wife of the Belgian
ambassador.'

She continued: 'I've tried to think, now what makes this man so
attractive to the masses? You could understand little Goebbels: although
he was rather an unprepossessing person and physically not much, he was
quite brilliant and had more attraction that Hitler. Gring was fat, but he
had a certain personality and presence and one could understand a certain
amount of attraction. As a child I'd seen Mussolini two or three times,
and you could understand in a way why people were impressed.

'Hitler had none of that about him. I am still absolutely puzzled how he
could get where he was. I've talked to many people who've seen Hitler
quite often, and talked to him and so on, and hardly any ever saw in him
the attraction. I couldn't ask Eva Braun. It must have been people got
fascinated by power.'

Inga, who still describes herself as Prussian, was raised to be fiercely
anti-Nazi by her parents, Otto, a lawyer and banker, and Bertha, and sent
to school in London. 'My father said: "German teachers all tend to be Nazi
and I don't want my daughter being exposed to that indoctrination".'

But just before the outbreak of war she returned to Germany and became a
secretary to Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence
service. His nickname for the beautiful 21-year-old was 'The Painted
Doll'.

After the invasion of France, she followed him to Paris and delivered
passports to Jews and other persecuted minorities whom Canaris wanted to
protect. 'He said, you look like a French school-leaver so you can go
without alerting the French police, who were rather in favour of the
Nazis. I took passports to various people and most survived.'

The admiral was among German military and civilians involved in a number
of major plots against Hitler, who seemed to have an animal instinct for
danger and always escaped.

Inga recalled: 'Canaris said Germany will never be forgiven unless some
action is taken against these criminals. The plots were in the minds of
most of my friends most of the time. I knew almost everybody in the July
1944 plot and also happened to be good friends with them. My husband,
Werner Haag - we married in 1942 - was among them.

'But it was a case of trying to get someone close to Hitler who could do
it. General Halder, who was the Chief of General Staff at one point,
always said: "Whenever I go and see the Fhrer, I've got a loaded pistol in
my pocket." I wish he had used it at that point, but the organisation had
not yet developed. You lived in fear you were going to be arrested, so I
took my father's advice to try to know as little as possible, because what
you didn't know you couldn't talk about and betray under torture.'

On 20 July, 1944, Stauffenberg left a briefcase in the conference room at
Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, whispering something
indistinctly as he left the room as if making an excuse. According to
historian Joachim Fest's Plotting Hitler's Death, just after 12.40pm there
was a deafening explosion, throwing all 24 people to the ground, some with
their hair in flames. Hitler had just leaned far over a table to examine a
map and his chair was torn from under him. His trousers hung in ribbons
from his legs and as he stumbled to his feet one general took him in his
arms and cried: 'My Fhrer, you're alive, you're alive!'

But Stauffenberg, climbing into a getaway car, had seen a body covered by
Hitler's cloak carried from the barracks on a stretcher and concluded his
mission was accomplished. All day rumours spread that Hitler was dead. But
that night, with the dictator back in control, the conspirators were
executed by firing squad. When the squad took aim, writes Fest,
Stauffenberg shouted: 'Long live sacred Germany!' Canaris, implicated in
the plot, was sent to a concentration camp and put to death.

Historians agree a great opportunity had been wasted because Stauffenberg
had actually had two bombs. But he did not know that he should have placed
the second one alongside the one whose timer had already been activated.
According to experts, the detonation of one would have set off the other
and magnified the blast many times, wiping out everyone in the room. A
coup was supposed to follow the assassination, but the plotters did not
even cut the communications from Wolf's Lair.

'It wasn't a masterpiece of organisation,' Inga said candidly. 'This was
one of the plots discussed for quite some time, but it was obviously
rather confused. Lots of people wanted to do it and much was improvised.
People said they couldn't talk about it too much. You had to be careful
what you said over the phone. In operas on the stage plots are better
planned.

Of Stauffenberg, whom she met two or three times, she observed: 'Anybody
could have done a better job.'

She added ruefully: 'If the plot had really been a success, and Hitler and
two or three of the others were dead, I think that would have been the end
of the regime, because then all those who loathed the regime but couldn't
come forward would have done it. Thousands of lives could have been
saved.'

By 20 July, Inga and her husband were in Romania. He was away that day,
leaving her alone to await the result of what she and the rest of the
fragmentary resistance prayed would prove the decisive plot. To divert
suspicion, she invited two Gestapo officers to lunch at the chteau where
the Haags were stationed. 'In order not to alert everybody, you had to see
them socially. It also meant you found how much they knew.

'A phone call came through. You prayed all the time the Gestapo man would
say: "The Fhrer is dead." But the Fhrer was alive and I had to feign a
sigh of relief. I thought maybe there will be a next time.'

Inga and her husband were soon recalled to Berlin and at the end of the
war he was taken prisoner by the Americans before being released. Inga was
one of the first Germans to get top security clearance for political work
in Nato. The couple lived in France and Britain, where they adopted a son.
Inga eventually earned a living by giving children horse-riding lessons. A
year ago she was awarded the German Cross of the Order of Merit.

She is now frail, but her eyes still burn intensely with intelligence and
resolve. She mused: 'The 20th of July was a manifestation of a spirit when
intelligent and well-educated people in Germany took the risk of their
lives.

'It had to happen - what had gone before was too terrible. The date should
be remembered first for the great people who endangered their lives, and
second as a warning to humanity that this must never happen again. It is a
symbol of the best of our convictions against evil.'

(source: The Observer)