Oct. 10



CALIFORNIA:

Court Examines Case Against Vatican on Nazi Gold

U.S. courts should reconsider a dismissed lawsuit alleging the Vatican
Bank laundered assets stolen from victims of Croatia's pro-Nazi World War
II regime, the plaintiffs' lawyer said on Thursday.

The lawyer, representing elderly war survivors, presented her arguments
before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is deciding whether a lower
federal court erred in ruling the issue should be handled by diplomacy
rather than the courts.

"The case is complex, complicated and difficult," said Stephen Trott, one
of three judges hearing the case. "Are the courts the proper authority to
deal with issues like this?"

The war survivors filed the lawsuit in U.S. federal court in 1999 against
the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order, alleging they laundered stolen
gold and other assets during the Second World War. The case was dismissed
in 2003.

Arguing for the plaintiffs, Lee Boyd, an associate professor of law at
Pepperdine University, said the lower court ignored a history of courts
resolving related political claims. She also said class-action lawsuits
had helped spur settlements relating to German slave labor and Swiss banks
during the war.

The class action lawsuit accuses the Vatican Bank of receiving hundreds of
millions of dollars of gold and other assets looted from victims of
Croatia's brutal Ustasha regime from 1941-1945. As many as 700,000 people,
most of them Serbs, were killed at death camps run by the Nazi-allied
government.

Vatican Bank attorney Jeffrey Lena argued foreign policy, not lawsuits,
should address such historical claims.

"Losses that occur in the chaos of war need to be handled by the state
which suffers the loss," he said. "It is well beyond the provenance of the
district court to manage."

"Getting to the merits of this case...would require the gathering of
evidence from multiple countries, evidence that is more than 50 years
old."

The lawsuit does not seek any specific monetary amount but, at least
initially, a review of how much money is involved.

The plaintiffs say the illicit funds may have been funneled to groups
working to smuggle Nazis out of Europe after the war, including Adolf
Eichmann.

A court ruling is expected in several months.

Listening in the courtroom audience were the president of China's supreme
court and other Chinese justices, who are visiting the United States. Some
Chinese survivors of World War II have filed lawsuits against Japan for
wartime atrocities.

(source: Reuters)




PENNSYLVANIA:

Man Says He Was Made to Guard Nazi Camps


A man facing deportation because he served as a guard at two Nazi
concentration camps said he was forced to join the unit that
guarded the camps or face death.

The U.S. Department of Justice wants to revoke the citizenship of Anton
Geiser, 79, a retired Pennsylvania steelworker who was born in Croatia.
The department said Geiser hid his service in the Waffen SS from U.S.
officials when he immigrated in 1956.

The department said Geiser was an armed guard at the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp near Berlin from January to November 1943 before being
transferred to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Tens of thousands of
people were executed or died from starvation, disease and medical
experiments at the camps.

But Geiser, who does not deny he was a guard at the camps, said the U.S.
visa application did not ask him to reveal his service and that the law
did not require him to volunteer information.

In papers filed Friday in federal court in Pittsburgh, Geiser also said he
was drafted as a 17-year-old in German-occupied Yugoslavia in 1942 and
that his service in the SS ``was entirely involuntary and ... performed on
pain of death.''

Geiser said in the filing he ``does not dispute the fact that rampant and
outrageous atrocities were committed at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald
concentration camps,'' but that he ``has no culpability for those
crimes.''

Geiser, who emigrated to the United States from Austria and became a U.S.
citizen in 1962, has not been charged with a war crime.

If deported, Geiser would lose his citizenship and Social Security
benefits and would be deported to either his native Croatia or Austria.

(source: Associated Press)




GERMANY:

Nazis Planned to Rebuild Auschwitz


Nazi officials planned to move the Auschwitz gas chambers to a
concentration camp in Austria as the Germans retreated westward from the
Soviet army near the end of World War II, a magazine reported Sunday.

While SS chief Heinrich Himmler gave orders to raze the gas chambers and
crematoriums at Auschwitz in the fall of 1944 to erase evidence of the
Nazis' crimes, new historical research shows that officials sent at least
some of the equipment to the Mauthausen camp for reuse, the Der Spiegel
weekly said.

Austrian historians Bertrand Perz and Florian Freund drew their
conclusions in part from correspondence and accounts by survivors of both
camps, the report said.

They also discovered a Feb. 10, 1945, letter to Mauthausen officials from
J.A. Topf and Sons, an Erfurt, Germany-based company that made many of the
incinerators for Nazi camps, that talked about sharply expanding the
Austrian camp's gas chamber on the assumption that "all the parts from the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp will be used again."

Though accounts by camp survivors have indicated that some equipment from
Auschwitz, located in present-day Poland, arrived, the war's turn against
Germany prevented the Nazis from building the large-scale gas chambers
they apparently envisioned for Mauthausen, Der Spiegel said.

Six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners most of them Jews perished
in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Advancing
Soviet troops liberated the camp Jan. 27, 1945.

Mauthausen was liberated by U.S. troops in May 1945 when the Nazis
surrendered. An estimated 100,000 inmates died at the camp near the
Austrian city of Linz.

(source: Associated Press)