July 14



BULGARIA:

Bulgarian Nazi camp inmates to receive restitution


Jews who were forced to work in Bulgarian labor camps during the Holocaust
are eligible - for the first time since the war ended - to apply for
restitution from Germany, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany announced this week.

"We're pleased that those Holocaust survivors who are alive today are able
to get a measure of justice, even if it is at a late date," said the
president of the Claims Conference, Israel Singer.

While Bulgarian officials have been honored for their nation's benign
treatment of its Jewish citizens during the war, the Claims Conference
noted in a release that Jews in fact toiled at 112 forced labor camps in
Bulgaria, where they "faced frequent beatings by superiors, subsisted on
inadequate diet, and lacked the clothing or boots needed for working in
the cold, rugged terrain."

Bulgaria's collaborationist regime didn't deport Bulgarian citizens to
Nazi death camps; however, victims of forced labor are eligible for
compensation from the Article 2 and Central and Eastern European Funds,
the Claims Conference.

"The recognition of their suffering in Bulgaria, where people thought
there was none, is a very important psychological aspect," Singer said.

(source: Jewish World)




GERMANY/USA----television program

HBO shows how Hitler used deceit in Olympics


A Jewish athlete was spotlighted by Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany to
show the world that it was not discriminating in its selection of the 1936
Olympic team. It was just a ploy, mainly to ensure that the United States
would participate in the Games.

Gretel Bergmannwas informed by letter that she had not made the team -
although she was one of the best high jumpers in the country - a day after
the United States had set sail for Germany.

Over the years, HBO has consistently delivered quality documentaries, and
Hitler's Pawn, which airs at 10 tonight, is one of its top efforts. It
examines the deception and fraud that targeted Bergmann, who today at the
age of 90 lives in New York and vividly recalls the biggest disappointment
of her athletic career more than six decades ago.

Bergmann, who changed her first name to Margaret and married fellow
athlete Bruno Lambert, has a keen recall of those times. Her problems
began when Jewish athletes were barred from sports clubs.

"That was a time when everything stopped," she said. "All of a sudden, you
were an outcast. We couldn't go anyplace, we couldn't go to the stadium,
we couldn't go to a movie. You were just dirt. You were absolute dirt as
far as the Nazis were concerned."

For Bergmann, her long odyssey reached its conclusion when she was
reunited in Germany with a former teammate who was led to believe that
Bergmann was kept out of the Games because of injuries.

Former German athlete Walter Meyer said of the approval by the
International Olympic Committee to keep the Games in Berlin: "The
admiration of the world toward Germany increased enormously. And they
allowed Germany to get away with murder, so to speak."

(source: Arizona Republic)





GERMANY:

Nazi Fortress Becomes Tourist Attraction


Long considered an ugly Nazi relic, a half-destroyed concrete fortress in
Berlin has become an unlikely addition to the German capital's tourist
map.

Since April regular guided tours have taken curious visitors into the vast
World War II structure to see the turret interiors and the effect of two
failed attempts to blow it up after the war.

It is a part of a growing trend in Germany to show a broader view of the
war and include German suffering after years of sole attention to the
evils of the Nazis.

Tours pass thick walls that resisted bombs and Russian artillery, bare
halls and staircases where civilians sheltered and deep shafts which
carried anti-aircraft shells from the basement to the rooftop guns seven
floors above.

Visitors can also marvel at technology well advanced for its time. The gun
steering, for example, was fully automated. A radar tower 300 yards away
tracked enemy aircraft and fed signals along cables still visible clinging
to the walls.

The fortress is one of six that Adolf Hitler ordered to be built in the
German capital to defend it from air attack. His command in September 1940
came just days after Berlin came under a three-hour barrage from Allied
planes.

Hitler himself sketched the form the defenses should take with
120-foot-high turrets and guns at each corner.

Financial constraints eventually limited the number to three fortresses,
completed by April 1942, although two further structures were built in
Hamburg and Vienna.

Each complex could hold around 15,000 civilians and their 8 foot-6-inch
walls were deemed impenetrable.

TWO TOWERS

The post-war Allied occupiers in Berlin decided to destroy most military
structures. The British and Russians managed to bring down two of the
complexes after several failed attempts.

However, the French were unable to destroy the fortress in their northern
Berlin sector, leaving two towers and 1.6 million cubic yards of debris.
The latter was partly landscaped, but the remaining structure has been
largely untouched for 50 years.

The Berlin Underworlds Association already runs tours of nearby wartime
and Cold War shelters, but preparing the half-demolished air defense
fortress for visitors was a task of a different order. It took thousands
of hours of volunteer labor to ready the building for show.

The bunkers may not be so well visited as the glass dome on the Reichstag,
Germany's parliament building, but interest is growing. Last year 25,000
visited the site compared to 8,000 in 2001.

SUFFERING

But the new tourist venture has not been welcomed in some quarters.
Dietmar Arnold, chairman of the Underworlds Association, says Berlin
council rejected the group's application to join other museums in a
cross-city cultural event in 2001.

"Maybe it's not politically correct. They think it's all Nazi stuff here
and that we're a group of Nazis in disguise," he said.

The group's tours of defenses and shelters touch on a growing debate over
whether it is justifiable to speak of German victims of World War II,
although the tours are largely factual and the group does not contest
Germany's role as the aggressor.

"We're not trying to deny Auschwitz happened. But there's little
information about these things and we're just trying to shed some light,"
Arnold said.

A number of Germans now insist the Allied bombing campaign was a war
crime, once a view deemed dangerously nationalistic.

The taboo was shattered last year with a book, "The Fire - Germany and the
Bombardment 1940-1945," by historian Joerg Friedrich, which condemns the
attacks, although British historians have said the account is one-sided.

Opposition politicians have also called for a national memorial day for
the 635,000 civilians killed in bombing raids.

Arnold believes the British in particular would have been more effective
had they targeted Berlin's three main power stations, which were
relatively unscathed, instead of civilians.

"It was very inefficient. The aim was to destroy the morale by burning the
city, but it actually reinforced support for the Nazis," Arnold said.

(source: Reuters)

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


Museum digs into Nazi past


As Berlin prepares to unveil one of the world's biggest private art
collections for the first time, curators said today they had recruited
historians to shed light on the controversial Nazi-linked past of its
founder.

The collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, comprising some 2500 works,
is due to go on show from late September, after Berlin beat out other
world capitals who had vied to host its first-ever public exhibition.
But the event has faced fierce criticism already, especially from Jewish
community leaders in Germany, who rail against showcasing a collection
begun by Mr Flick's grandfather, a notorious collaborator of the Third
Reich.

Friedrich Flick was one of Adolf Hitler's biggest arms manufacturers and
tied to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and was convicted to seven years in
prison for crimes including using Nazi slave labour. He was released after
three years and pardoned in 1951.

The younger Mr Flick has also been criticised for refusing to contribute
to a slave labour fund set up by German industry and the government,
although he has set up his own fund to fight racism and xenophobia.

An earlier effort to display the collection in Zurich, Switzerland, near
where Mr Flick lives, at a museum to be specially built by Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas never got off the ground. It, too, met with complaints from
Jewish groups and Swiss cultural organisations.

One Jewish leader in Germany, vice president of the German Jewish central
council Salomon Korn, has accused the German billionaire of seeking to
"whitewash" his family name with the art show.

The Berlin curators have opted to address the issue head-on.

Research and debate about the family's World War II past are planned in
conjunction with the show, which opens September 22 at the Hamburger
Bahnhof museum of contemporary art.

The Institute of Contemporary History in the southern Germany city of
Munich has been named to lead the research into the World War II-era
history of the Flick family, said Klaus Dieter Lehmann, head of the
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation which acquired the rights to display
the collection.

Its researchers will have "access to all the necessary archives" and their
work will be made public, said Mr Lehmann.

A series of conferences and debates are also scheduled in tandem with the
exhibition on the role and responsibilities of art patrons, as well as on
the current polemic at the Berlin museum.

Friedrich Christian Flick inherited part of the collection, then worked to
build it into one of the world's foremost modern art ensembles, with work
from Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerhard Richter,
Sigmar Polke, Richard Serra, Bruce Naumann and Cindy Sherman, among
others.

It is based around three trends represented by Duchamps and his search for
a new definition of art, Picabia and conceptual art and Alberto Giacometti
and his take on anonymity in the 20th century.

It assembles valuable photographs, from historic work by Walker Evans to
the very trendy Jeff Wall. Video artists including Nam June Paik and
installation work by the like of Jeff Koons are also included.

Mr Flick paid for the Hamburger Bahnhof's enlargement to prepare for the
collection, which will be shown gradually with yearly rotations for seven
years.

(source: Herald Sun)